This seems like the right time...

...to pull out one of a bunch of quotes from an interview with Michael Cunningham in The Weekend Australian back in June, conducted by Murray Waldren:

'There's always a gap between aspiration and execution, he explains, and it's just a question of how wide it is. "You get to the point where the divergence is as small as you can make it, accepting that you will always have a bigger, brighter and darker novel in mind than what you were able to get down on paper."'

For the moment, though, I'm still trying for biggest, brightest, darkest.