I was sick last week, hence skipping a bunch of posts. I am now crosseyed from finishing up a draft of something, so this may be rambly and unfocused.
I do a lot of front-loaded work before approaching any piece of writing. If you want to use the traditional false dichotomy, I'm very much a plotter, not a pantser. (I struggle to imagine that anyone working a day job in games writing can really be a pantser in all contexts, given the common requirements of brief-driven narrative, but that's an idle thought.)
By the time I start drafting in earnest, I should -- in theory -- already have produced one or more detailed breakdowns of what I'll be writing. Specifically, breaking down plot, story, and scene information into the form-specific narrative units I'm working with. For the Fallen London content I've been working on today, for instance, I produced a spreadsheet containing the various storylets and branches, with details of the narrative function each, plus notes on what mechanically it would need to do.
I usually, at this point, feel like I have essentially written the story, but for the actual 'getting words down' bit. That's partly a false feeling -- I haven't, in fact, written any of the story yet in terms of visible final output. But it is also partly true, because the work of solving those narrative problems and proving that the whole thing can exist, theoretically, and occupy the shape it's meant to, is a big part of the intellectual work. I'm even able to pinpoint gaps or redundancies across the units and adjust accordingly, before having set down words in earnest.
The balance for me is in working out what work should be front-loaded like this, and what can't be. You could, in theory, map out everything, in perfect detail, without ever writing a word of final-output content. But at that point, you may as well just be writing the story, so get on with it.
The exact point of diminishing returns generally depends on the complexity and scale of the project. For instance, I don't need to spend several days breaking a spreadsheet if the final output is intended to be simple, short, and sweet -- I can probably just sketch some scrappy points out on paper and go. But even with the most complex projects -- where there are lots of moving parts and where you'd better know how those parts are going to move ahead of time, lest you decapitate someone important -- there's only so much you can accomplish in the planning stages. There are certain things that only become apparent through the actual writing -- things that you thought would work that don't; things that are way better than what you came up with that only became manifest when you're down in the weeds. The map is not the territory; it is an abstraction and simplification. If the map were detailed enough to fully describe the territory, it would just be the territory.
To put it another way: the planning stages are about sketching and designing the narrative, but there are always exigencies that present themselves in execution that no sketch can capture. At some point, you're better off just getting on with it and seeing what breaks rather than trying to design something that won't break to begin with (because: you can't).
This was all sparked by thinking about scene framing. I might go into more detail about that another time, but when I'm breaking stories now, I spend a lot of time thinking about scene framing: Where is it set? What's happening -- especially outside of the mainline story beats? Where do the audience and the characters enter the scene? What do we find when we arrive? These are all ways of having a scene do more work, focusing it, putting pressure on the characters to make things less boring, and generally sharpening the writing and storytelling. Understanding the high-level function and effect of the scene is one thing, but you can fix -- or improve -- a lot by reconsidering the framing. So I try to nail down that in the breaking stage.
BUT things are always different when I sit down to write a scene. There's the matter of 'drift' -- it might be days or weeks since I broke the scene originally, and I don't have the same imagination of it loaded so readily in-memory. It's important to recapitulate what it's meant to be doing. But it's one thing to have planned myself a good location setting for a scene when breaking the story. It's another to conjure a clear mental picture of a physical space to contain an action scene, for instance. I could do all that work with the rest of the breaking. But that's a level of vividness that's hard to record, and most useful when I'm ready to get the words down, so it would probably be wasted effort.