The poet and musician Kae Tempest describes this gap with characteristic honesty in their book On Connection: ‘There is no success in writing. There are only better degrees of failure… An idea is a perfect thing. It comes to the writer in a breathless dream. The writer holds this idea in their mind, in their body; everything feeds it... But it will never be right. There is no way that a writer cannot injure that idea as they wrestle with it.’
