There’s a file on my laptop called “Draft 7 Scene 4 Unusable Maybe” — and inside it, a single line of dialogue that still makes my chest tighten. Not because it’s good. Not because it’s clever or raw or award-worthy. But because it took me three weeks to write. Three weeks to land on a sentence that felt true, and when I finally did, I couldn’t look at it for days.

The line is nothing special.
It’s just: “I didn’t leave you. You just didn’t notice I’d already gone.”

When I first wrote the scene, it was bigger. Louder. A dramatic fight with pacing and swearing and a lamp getting knocked off a table. The kind of breakup we’re taught to expect in fiction — loud enough to feel real. But none of it worked. It felt like writing someone else’s pain. The kind that reads like a script and not a memory.

So I did what I always do when a scene refuses to obey: I left the house.

I went to a small bench near the botanical gardens. It was January, grey and mean, and I had forgotten gloves. I sat there anyway. And I remembered the conversation I once had that inspired the scene. It wasn’t a fight. It was an absence. Someone didn’t say goodbye. They just stopped returning to the version of us that had already stopped working. I didn’t yell. I didn’t beg. I just slowly stopped waiting.

And that’s when the line came. In the silence, not the noise.

Writing emotional scenes — the ones that actually hurt — isn’t about recreating pain theatrically. It’s about locating the exact angle at which your characters break quietly. Not the sob. The inhale they take just before.

When I look at my favourite emotional scenes from other writers — Taylor Jenkins Reid is queen of these — I notice they’re never embellished. It’s the restraint that ruins me. One line. One realization. One character suddenly unsure of the person they’ve become.

In Daisy Jones & The Six, it’s not the on-stage drama that stuck with me. It was the quiet confessions. The ones that felt like half-letters never sent. The weight of things unsaid.

I try to bring that into my own work now. When I write a tough scene, I ask:

• What isn’t she saying here?
• What’s the sentence she’s afraid to finish?
• What would he write in a note he knows she’ll never read?

I still struggle with these scenes. I overdo them. I delete too much. I push too hard and then flatten everything with a single clumsy metaphor. But I’ve learned that when I stop performing the pain — and start listening for the shape it actually takes — the scene begins to breathe.

That file, the one called “Unusable Maybe,” still sits on my desktop. I never deleted it.

Because even if I cut that line from the book…
It got me through the scene.

And sometimes, as writers, that’s what matters most.