I spent a good chunk of my late-twenties, early-thirties learning to cook, which strikes me as a bit of an odd thing to say. Learn to cook? What’s there to learn? Find a recipe, buy ingredients, follow the directions. Simple.
But you do need to learn, of course. Cooking isn’t an exact science, and everything is to taste. I enjoyed the hours I spent in the kitchen and often looked at it as another creative outlet, albeit one with more practical applications. I also felt that I learned a lot that went beyond cooking. Patience is a real virtue in the kitchen. Often you’re faced with the choice of making a dish well or making it quickly, and I never regretted the decision to choose the former. Flexibility is also good. Finding you can substitute (or even go without) an ingredient you don’t have and still make a decent meal is a kind of revelation. But the best thing I took away from those early days of trial and error was the importance of mise-en-place.
Mise-en-place, for the uninitiated, is the French culinary term meaning “put in place,” and for some chefs the practice is a veritable way of life. A common mistake among home cooks (myself included, at the start) is to try and prep the ingredients while you’re cooking: chopping the onions while the oil is heating; slicing the tenderloin while the onions are browning, etc. It saves time, to be sure, but it also causes an enormous amount of undue stress as you try to keep all those balls in the air at once. It’s also a surefire way to find your attention being pulled in the wrong direction at a crucial time in the cooking process, often resulting in an unplanned test of your home’s smoke detectors. Murphy’s Law, baby. It’ll get ya every time.
So eventually you find it’s worth the extra time to prep all of your ingredients beforehand and set them up in the order you’ll need them throughout the process. And once you do it, you don’t ever want to back.
That urge to dive right into a project before I have everything in its place is one that has often extended to other areas of my life. Even coming to L.A. to try on the writing hat was a bit of a leap-before-I-look maneuver. But now that I’m here, I’m happy to say I’ve spent the past week applying the discipline of mise-en-place to my efforts.
What has that meant exactly? The first step was to be sure that the scripts I’ve written are as tight and polished as possible. Every “t” crossed, every “i” dotted, all the formatting up to spec, and most importantly, the stories themselves told as sharply, economically and effectively as possible.
The next step was the more difficult one (or, at least, the one I was less enthusiastic about). That had to do with building up some kind of online presence as a writer. A Google search of my name pulls up enough writer-y links to keep me from looking like a complete beginner, so that’s good. I also have profiles listed on Coverfly and FilmFreeway, the two main sites I use to submit my TV scripts to competitions. But more needed to be done.
The first task was to get a profile up on IMDbPro. Luckily I had already been listed for a couple of HGTV shows I’d written for, so I just had to claim those listings. Then it was supplying a bio, some pictures, links to interviews … anything that would beef up my page. These things aren’t intrinsically hard, mind you. I’m just lazy and petulant and didn’t want to do it. But I did it, so that’s good.
I also hosted a script of mine on The Blacklist, which I’m told is one of those screenwriter type things one needs to do. And, of course, that meant building another profile page and all the boring crap that goes into that. Again, not hard. Again, lazy and petulant.
The last piece of the online presence was this here website. I’ve had a lease on the site name for some time but haven’t done anything with it, mainly because I didn’t know what I wanted it to be. A place to promote myself and showcase what I have done/can do, sure. But … isn’t that what all those other online profiles of mine are for? Wouldn’t that make this site kind of … redundant?
So I settled on a blog. Yes, I know — I missed the blog craze by a good fifteen to twenty years. But you know what? I don’t care. I have thoughts that don’t fit within the character limits of Twitter or the agreed-upon length of a Facebook post. Instagram is for pictures, and the other social media sites and apps? I can’t be bothered. I really, really can’t be bothered.
Besides, I’m a writer. What better way is there to showcase myself than to, y’know, write?
So that was my mise-en-place. Is there more I could have done? Probably, but there’s a flip side to mise-en-place where you spend so much time worrying you don’t have EVERY POSSIBLE CONTINGENCY ACCOUNTED FOR that you end up never getting started. That’s a purgatory I was determined to avoid.
I’m at a good place. I can begin. I have begun. I’m prepped.
Geoffrey Scheer 