A friend read something of mine recently and said one item was, maybe, “a little inside baseball.”
It’s an American expression, means you’re sharing detail that only a fellow obsessive would find interesting. The uninitiated just want to watch the game.
I have this habit. I know I do. My instinct, almost always, is to show the working.
Why do I do it? Not just as a habit but as a need. Is it generosity? Insecurity – wanting credit for the effort? Is it that process is sometimes more interesting to me than the finished thing?
Yes, to all of the above.
When is it good / not so good?
Depends who is reading, obvs, but there’s a difference between explanation and story.
Explanation says: here are the steps, here is how it works. It assumes you share my fascination with sheer mechanism. Story says: here is what happened, here is what it felt like, here is what it cost. It doesn’t require you to care about the craft – just to be human.
When process becomes story – the wrong turn, the unexpected discovery, the moment it finally clicked – that’s not inside baseball. That’s a story that (bonus!) has a workshop inside it.