Here are two scenarios.

First, you’re in the kitchen. You need to make dinner—food for tonight, and leftovers for several days. You’re working from a recipe that you haven’t read before. You haven’t done any prep. You’re sure you have most of the ingredients you’ll need, but you haven’t even pulled any of them out of the cupboard.

Second, you’re in the kitchen again. You still need to make dinner—food for tonight, and leftovers for several days. This time you’re cooking a familiar dish; you know the recipe, you know the flavor palette you want, you know what you’re doing. You’ve already prepped all your ingredients. Each one is on hand, in a bowl or dish or whatever, ready to add when the time comes.

In the first case, you are going to be stressed, and frustrated, and the whole thing is going to take way too long. Forget improvising; you might make changes to the recipe but they’ll be by accident and you’re probably going to burn something.

In the second case you’re relaxed, you’re having fun. You have enough free time and spare brainpower to play around with a few ingredients you thought of as you were cooking. You know what you’re doing well enough that you can track the results of your improvising and experimentation as you go.

If I had a choice, I’d pick the second option every time.

So why do I keep picking the first option with my writing?

When I was getting ready to write Bury’em Deep, I set aside several months beforehand for full-time prep work. I had already been working on my ideas for the setting for a long while before that, but I ramped up my efforts. I put my regular writing time into background and world building. I wrote down every question that I could come up with, and then answered them in a series of exploratory essays that became the building blocks for my setting.

Those answers weren’t final. I changed some of the details later. Setting things in stone wasn’t the point; answering those questions gave me the foundation of the story that I ended up telling, and gave me the ingredients I needed when my initial plans didn’t work. 

This prep work let me write like that second option up above. My time in the metaphorical kitchen could be relaxed, playful, and engaged… or at the very least well-resourced. Even when I didn’t know how things would turn out, I was working towards a goal that I understood and was working from material that I’d thought through extensively beforehand.

But if that was so great, that only makes my question more pressing. Why would I keep picking option one for my writing?

I think there are several components to this, but the first one is easy: I forget.

I forget about the prep work that I did before the semester in which I wrote (and re-wrote) the first three drafts of Bury’em Deep. I think I forget because that preparation was fun but not exciting.

My memories of writing Bury’em Deep are focused on the thrill of hammering out 2k or more words a day, not on the long process of mulling through my ideas. I still remember the pride I felt in handing in my first draft before the end of the first month of the semester. This wasn’t all for the good; I was so fixated on this project and this experience, I mostly-ignored my then-girlfriend until she asked me whether I was still interested in her (I’m still sorry about that, she deserved better).

The prep work, by comparison, wasn’t nearly so gripping and memorable.

Another component of this, along similar lines: when I get excited about an idea and feel inspired, I just want to chase that rush. I get excited and I don’t want to sit down and ask myself question after question about who is who, and who wants what, and why things work the way they do. I don’t want to write the histories of the different people and factions and everything else that makes the story world tick—I just want to write the story. I forget that ‘the story’ is built of all those other things, and that I really do need to think on the details if I want to write something longer and more complicated than a moody piece of flash fic.

The prep work, in not being so gripping, struggles to compete with the excitement of putting more story on the page.

A third piece of the puzzle: I feel pressured to make the most of my writing time, and the easiest way to tell that I’ve done something is by measuring how many words I’ve added to the story. This was true before I had a baby to take care of. It’s even more true now. For whatever self-defeating reason, my internal critic’s measuring stick doesn’t put much stock in the basic and necessary prep work and world building. It’s like the work involved in laying the foundation for my story simply doesn’t count—or it counts far less than adding more words to the story, even if those words aren’t helpful. My internal critic doesn’t care whether the whole story comes tumbling down because I didn’t do the groundwork, it just wants me to pile the words higher and deeper.

It’s stupid but true: putting more story on the page counts for my internal critic. Prep work doesn’t, or at best barely counts.

And there you have it. Those are all the ingredients I need for deprioritizing my prep work. That’s despite knowing how helpful it is to sit down and think through as many elements of the story as I can. The whole thing is a little embarrassing. Not as bad as neglecting my girlfriend, but still embarrassing.

The funny thing about this is that I’ve done more prep for my Worlds Without Number campaign than for the novel idea I’ve been working on. I started thinking about and running the campaign three months ago. I started thinking about and working on the novel idea a year ago.

It was this disparity—plus some helpful prodding from my critique group—that helped me recognize what I was doing (or failing to do). I’m lucky; I felt creative and invigorated while doing the world building and prep work for that campaign, and realized that I’d been missing that feeling with my other writing. I’ve already acted on that, and taken a first pass using some of the same exercises and tools I used for the WWN game to make progress on the novel idea. I want to try other approaches too.

There’s a lot more to do. With some luck and effort I can hold onto my curiosity and enjoy exploring this new story world, asking questions and finding answers that move my story forward. I’m likely to slip back into old unhelpful habits of self-critique and try to write more words just to satisfy my internal critic, but maybe I can make good progress and not stay stuck in that pattern this time. Here’s hoping.