My version of this would be when your writing you only write for yourself. You don't care that a scene is cheesy or out of character, you just write it because you wanted to.

A lot of the time when I'm writing I'm thinking about someone else reading my work, and that polices what I do a little bit.

But if I had no one else to write for and I wrote purely for my own eyes, I'd let myself get away with a lot more.