Originally Posted by
Thanqol
I'm not sure I agree. My example is Yours Truly - I carried that story around in my head from the early days of the pony community. Thought it through, imagined the shape and feel of it, kept pushing it back because I wasn't good enough to do it justice. When I was planning it I was convinced that it was a Rainbow Dash and Fluttershy story 100%; I visualized the shape of the letters, how the looked and felt, where tears had smudged the ink... it was years before I sat down and wrote it.
And the second I started writing it the story told me to go f*ck myself because it was really a Twilight/Applejack story and everything else was a sideshow.
And I think that's just how it is. Manifesting an idea changes it. And sometimes - often! - the physical laws of shape and gravity make perfect ideas collapse under their own weight. But in the wreckage invariably you find the shapes of ideas that do work.
As an interesting sideline, this has never happened to me in a PBP. I've had brilliant ideas planned for years, run a PBP of them and had them be just as brilliant as I imagined them. And I don't think anything's different except the built in acceptance that the story isn't entirely yours.