Do You Ever Feel Like Your Brain Writes Better Than Your Hands Can?

Literature & Writing Writer's Block
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I don’t know if this is exactly writer’s block, perfectionism, or just frustration, but lately I’ve been struggling with the gap between what I imagine and what actually ends up on the page.

In my head, scenes feel cinematic. Characters feel alive. Dialogue has rhythm. Emotions hit exactly the way they should. Sometimes I can spend hours imagining a single scene and it feels vivid enough to already exist somewhere.

But the moment I try to write it down, something changes.

The sentences suddenly feel flat. The pacing feels awkward. The emotion weakens. What felt powerful in my imagination starts looking almost artificial once it becomes actual text. It’s like my brain can create stories faster and better than my hands can translate them.

What makes it worse is that I know what the scene is supposed to feel like, so every imperfect sentence becomes painfully obvious to me.

Sometimes I wonder if this gap ever truly disappears for writers, or if learning to write is really just learning how to tolerate the difference between the imagined version and the written version long enough to finish something.

Does anyone else experience this?

And if you do, how do you deal with it without constantly rewriting everything into oblivion?

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I don’t know if the gap disappears, but it does get smaller.

This is the single best piece of advice on the subject that I’ve ever seen:

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At a practical level, I’d say just don’t. Write something else. Maybe even do something else. Put it in a drawer and revisit the draft later. It stays in the back of your head anyways and sorts itself out over time. And then a different person (“future you”) looks at it with fresh eyes.

Probably something everyone can relate do, beyond writing: I get stuck with a tricky problem. Something that should work simply refuses to. I hit this wall frequently. I made peace with that. Now, since I’m also stubborn and stupid, of course I keep making it worse. Until exhaustion takes over. I’m not mad at this point, just tired. Somehow my brain keeps working on it while I sleep. I don’t even dream about it or anything. Almost always, the next morning the solution is so obvious that it makes me laugh.

Then there’s the “you have to produce a lot of crap” part @kewms is alluding to. That’s how it works. You produce crap and over time it becomes better crap and eventually pretty good. If you find this idea frustrating, imagine Olympic athletes as toddlers, starting their first rebellion against gravity. It didn’t look good.

Something else you wrote struck a bell:

This perfect scene may not be perfect to begin with. You’re literally too close to it to see it clearly and for what it really is.

Many years ago I had a customer trying to explain a design idea to me. It worked perfectly in his head. He just needed someone to build it. Easy. But the more he explained it, the less sense it made. He became increasingly frustrated because it was so simple and brilliant, but I just didn’t get it. I made a rough sketch according to his instructions and it looked nothing like his idea.

At some point I handed him the pencil: “I know this isn’t your job, but please draw what you see in your head. Doesn’t have to look good, it’s just to give me a better understanding.” The end result was…

“Hmmm,” he said.
“Yup,” I said.

M. C. Escher would have been proud. The client’s brain tricked him into accepting an absurd construction as completely plausible (elements being long and short or round and angular at the same time, connecting in impossible ways, stuff like that.)

Getting it out helps.

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FWIW: I’m not a creative writer, so I hesitated before even responding. I don’t know if this is helpful or not - I really like the video from @kewms which I’m certain is much more helpful and inspirational. I have a different but perhaps analogous problem in trying to encode my thoughts into language. I think too quickly and don’t get things written down before forgetting or feeling I’ve lost some of the richness and detail. This is compounded by the way my mind chooses to work. I constantly see connections and can’t resist jumping from one thing to another related thing in a rapid fashion. It is very helpful to me in some areas and detrimental in others. This leads to many interesting paths which I’ve been able to capitalize on in my work, but a lot of “dirt-roads” and meandering (and that sometimes feel unending) conversations. One thing that’s sometimes helpful is to just narrate a recording as I think. I like to go on walks and narrate as I think about something of interest. I may not be able to express something as well as I’d like, but I’m “in the moment” and I focus a bit on that one thing (before jumping to the next) and just try to get out the right words to express the unique thing about what I’m thinking in a fashion I can later convert to text and edit. Perhaps recording a narration of what you are thinking about the scene in your mind – as you are thinking about a particular aspect (the vividness, the emotion, etc. you mention) – might capture some of those awestruck moments that you can later use in creating your composition.

Anyway, keep at it! You’ll get there.

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Only every day of my life. Welcome to ADHD-land!

Seriously, I can type fast enough to keep up with my brain most of the time. I cannot use a pen/pencil/chalk/marker/crayon/cuneiform-stylus fast enough and that’s another layer of frustration.

Just remember that the story lives in your head and the goal is to get enough of the story out of your head so that the reader can enjoy following along. The thing that helps me here (and why my drafts are consistently about 65%of optimal word count) is that YOUR STORY does not need YOUR IMAGINATION!

That feels weird to say, so allow me a little redundancy.

YOUR STORY DOES NOT NEED YOUR IMAGINATION…. to be read and enjoyed by others.

Your story NEEDS THE READER’S imagination is what I’m trying to say here. Allow the reader to find their own special details to hold onto even if they don’t really exist in the text. Readers are good at using their own imagination to fill in details. They will maintain consistency that way. If they don’t understand or cannot imagine the tenants of the story, they will move on to ones they can. (Stares daggers at James Joyce’s Ulysses). I bring up James Joyce as it seems a similar theme, he was cursed by his publisher (repeatedly) for not just correcting typos on the gallery sheets, but actually writing complete new sections on them. You can keep imagining more and more and more, but if you don’t stop to record what you have done, it risks becoming lost. Stephen King’s The Stand is another example of almost losing all of the story for the author getting lost in their creation.

Its true that you need to imagine the world, the characters, the things, and the plot. Your imagination is absolutely required for this (and why generative AI is anathema to creative minds). Once you have done all that work, your job changes from dreamer to secretary. Once developed you need to record for others as much of the detail as you can capture, and as little as you can bear to spare. Maybe you have trouble turning the imagination off and you have different versions of the story in your head that conflict with what you read later. Frankly, some of my earliest works go wild in places that I cannot remember why I did that, and since I didn’t finish those pieces I don’t really know what the outcome was supposed to be anymore.

There will always be pieces on the mental cutting room floor. It’s part of the process and is referenced by the axiom that writers must kill their darlings. It may be why your reading reflects less than your memory of writing.

TL,DR: No, you are not alone.

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Thanks @kewms, I’ll make sure to watch it!

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That Escher example is honestly perfect. I think that’s exactly what happens with a lot of ideas, they feel complete in your head because your brain fills in all the gaps automatically. The moment you try to put them into words, the impossible parts suddenly become visible.

And yeah, “getting it out helps” is probably the hardest but most important part.

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Honestly this is helpful. The “losing richness while translating thoughts into language” part is exactly what I was trying to describe. Recording thoughts in the moment sounds like a really good idea actually, less pressure to make it perfect, more about capturing the feeling before it disappears.

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It is honestly such a good way to put it. I think I keep trying to transfer the entire thing exactly as it exists in my head, which is probably impossible anyway. The “dreamer to secretary” line also hit harder than I expected lol.

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Glad to hear, hope it helps. I have turned to dictation directly into apps as a way that helps, if I’m in an environment where it’s appropriate. Give it a shot if you haven’t.

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I have the same issue very often. I have started to use voice to text dictation to capture the thoughts and it may be babble for 95% of it, but there will be a nugget or two worth using.

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Agreed! I’ve written a custom prompt and use an LLM/AI to clean up my dictation which helps with my babble and the environmental noise automatically. I sometimes use a lot of technical jargon as well, so I can use it to fix transcription errors too. It’s fine for my purposes which is to get the salient points down (and coherent). I can make any corrections or additions that occur to me when I review them.

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I’m glad that it he

To me, that is exactly what it seems you are doing. This is another case of “allowing perfection to be the enemy of good”.

You have gotten a fair bit of good advice from the others too. Hopefully there is a solution in this maelstrom of management that can assist your methods.

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Yeah, I think the “less pressure to make it perfect” part is what makes it appealing to me. Feels easier to capture the actual emotion/thought before overthinking kicks in. I’m definitely going to try the dictation approach more.

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Yeah, I think that’s exactly what I’ve been doing honestly. Trying to preserve every detail perfectly instead of trusting the reader to meet me halfway. The perfectionism part is probably a bigger obstacle than the actual writing at this point lol. I really appreciate all the advice though, it’s given me a lot to think about.

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Honestly that seems to be a recurring theme from a lot of people here, and I can see why. Capturing the thought before it fades probably matters more than making it coherent immediately. Even if most of it is rambling, the useful parts are still there somewhere.

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You don’t say whether you’re writing short stories, novels, or something in between. Especially for longer forms, remember that it’s not enough to have One Great Idea. You need to string together hundreds of them, some large and some small. And as you do that, they’ll necessarily change and evolve in order to fit together.

A friend of mine who is a visual artist says that the very first brush stroke already starts to constrain what the finished painting will be. Same with writing: every choice, from the point of view to the protagonist’s clothing shapes the end result.

Some of the difference between what you see in your head and what’s on the page reflects that evolution, sometimes without conscious thought. “This is what I imagined, but it doesn’t actually work because I need to accommodate this other thing…”

It’s okay. Keep writing.

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That painting analogy really clicked for me. I think part of my frustration comes from expecting the written version to preserve the imagined one perfectly, when the act of writing itself naturally changes it. The idea of the story evolving to accommodate itself actually makes the gap feel a lot less “wrong.”

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My guess is it’s because “writing” is not one skill; it’s a portfolio of skills that need to all reach a certain level of maturity and competence for success. At its most simple, “story telling” and “story crafting” are two different skills, although even that is too much of a simplification:

Story crafting includes elements like world-building, characterisation and plotting, and needs qualities like imagination, visualisation, empathy, innovation and creativity.

Story telling includes elements like structure, narrative, description and pacing, and needs qualities like observation, clarity, voice, coherence, humour, grammar and vocabulary.

This is, of course, a non-exhaustive list just off the top of my head… but they’re all independent skills that can be honed with practice[1], and just one of these being off in a piece can make the whole thing feel, well, off.

Have an honest read of your material. If you think the crafting element was amazeballs but the telling was just balls, drill down a little more. Maybe each individual sentence / section was great writing, but the pacing was off. Again, drill down. Length, speed, cadence, rhythm, detail, etc. Then set yourself some practice exercises relevant to what you’ve observed.[2]

In other words, go to the gym between sporting events and work on the muscles you need to build, no matter how much you like exercising the ones that are already strong.

  1. of not, if ignored ↩︎

  2. For example… Read 3 extracts from books you think are well paced.
    Pick a section of something you’ve already written and re-write it twice… once with much faster pacing, once with much slower. Think about which works best as a standalone piece. Which works best in the original context. ↩︎

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That’s actually a really helpful way to frame it. I think I’ve been treating “writing” like one thing instead of a bunch of separate muscles developing at different speeds. The gym analogy especially clicked, easier to see weak spots as skills to train instead of proof I’m “bad” at writing.