More Writing Advice from the Kitchen

Hey everyone,

Thanks for your response to Tuesday’s post! It was fun to point out the parallels between cooking and writing and how getting better at one helped me get better at the other.

Of course, I was only scratching the surface on both subjects. Today I thought I’d dive a little deeper into the toasted nuts and bolts of cooking and writing and how the two reflect each other, in terms of both craft and artistry.

1. Get your mise en place. In both cooking and writing, it pays to have your ingredients ready to go. For many years, I attempted to write novels and plays without any prep; I was going off the George Saunders theory (laid out in A Swim in the Pond in the Rain, which I highly recommend) that writing should be like driving a car with the headlights on: you only have to write what’s directly in front of you.