The truth is that there's always a gap between the story as
you imagined it—compelling, insightful, rich with subtle nuance—and what actually ends up in the manuscript. This is because stories must be written, and read, one word at a time, with information accumulating in the reader's mind to create the full picture. This slow, linear accretion of impressions can't ever quite equal that perfect flash of inspiration in which all the parts of the story—action, meaning, nuances, insights, all of it—burst into the brain all at once. Words, unlike movies, are not a multi-sensory event. Words are symbols, and symbols don't work directly on the human senses. They work secondhand, through suggestions to the reader's imagination, through words describing what you saw in your imagination.