So I just spent thirty minutes writing and rewriting a scene where a character's tie knot says everything about the power dynamic in the room.

Not the dialogue. Not the setting. The tie knot.

A full Windsor is symmetrical. Precise. It's the knot of a man following someone else's rules about how the boss is represented and how the world should be presented. A half Windsor is the casual knot of a man who dressed for himself this morning and didn't particularly care who was coming to the meeting.

These are the details that matter. Who sits down first. Who stands at the window. Whether the cufflinks are square or round, and what it means that they're square. The tiny hierarchies embedded in how people occupy a room together — who controls the silences, who breaks them, who lets something go because pressing it would reveal that they needed to press it.

Good fiction, I've come to believe, isn't built out of plot. It's built out of these moments. They tell something that neither character acknowledges. The detail the reader carries out of the scene without knowing why it matters, until seventy pages later, it does.

Thirty minutes on a tie knot. Completely worth it.