Look, I’m not the first one to comment on this. Not even close.

You have an idea– a bright, beautiful, perfect idea– and then you start to write it down, and it dies on the page. It becomes imperfect. It gets messy.

Ann Patchett said her ideas are like beautiful butterflies that soar around in her mind, and then when she starts to write, she takes them and pins them to a board. Death.

Chuck Wendig blogged about it recently, saying, “Writing and storytelling is this… nasty task of taking the perfect idea that exists in your head and shellacking it all up by dragging it through some grease-slick fontanelle in order to make it real. You’re just shitting it all to hell, this idea. You have it in your mind: golden and unbreakable. And then in reality, ugh. You’ve created a herky-jerky simulacrum, a crude facsimile of your…