This is one of the hard things about writing.

The story in your head is shiny, dazzling, intoxicating.

But by the time you get it onto the page, it’s nothing like that. It’s dog-eared, torn, rumpled. It’s scarred and scribbled over with corrections and partly scratched out.

Even when it’s finished, the story on the page will never look like the one in your head.

It can’t. Because imagined things live in a world that is not our world. They don’t have to obey rules.

They can drift and glitter and soar.

As soon as we try to pin them down into words, something will always be lost.

A story or a poem can only ever be a pale reflection of your shiny ideas.

The trick is to learn to love your writing for what it is. And you will. Spend time with your awkward words, work on them, smoothe them out.

 

Keep recalling the original ideas. Get as much of them into the words as you can. Then massage, tweak, remodel, revise.

Eventually you will come up with something that is its own thing.

 

It will also drift and glitter and soar.

Just in a different way.