Kickstart a Creative 2023 with Mise en Place

It's not just for breakfast anymore.

Mise en place (MEEZ ahn plahs) is a concept that I have borrowed from the culinary world to support myself and other neurodivergent creatives over some of the stumbling blocks in our creative lives. In particular, mise en place has been very helpful moving past the difficulty we often have just getting started, even on creative projects we enjoy and want to do. As I conceive of mise en place for neurodivergent creatives (a concept which is complicated and evolving), it’s maybe a bit of an antidote to procrastination—which is its own complicated and vastly misunderstood phenomenon (but that’s another newsletter).

When I first came across the concept of mise en place from the culinary world, it struck me as a potentially useful tool for folks who have a hard time actually doing the thing: painting the canvas, writing the opening chapter, planting the garden. Translated literally, mise en place means “putting in place”—the practice in restaurant kitchens of prepping ingredients, gathering equipment, and laying everything out in a particular work station in the most efficient and organized way. It’s also more broadly speaking for many chefs a sort of philosophy of beginnings, a practice of getting started, which holds that the preparation and planning of anything worth doing should be taken as seriously as the doing of the thing itself.

And not just seriously as in important or necessary, but also: pleasurable, worthy, an end in itself, and not just a means to an end.

So for example: I love home renovation projects. Even with all the work and the mess, I love painting a room a brand new color. I’ve been painting interior rooms for a long time and I’m pretty good at it. But even so, sometimes the thought of getting everything all ready for painting a room can be so daunting—actually going to the store and buying the paint; finding all the rollers and the paint pans from wherever I stashed them in the basement; overcoming the shame that all my brushes are ruined because I never wash them 😬; taking down the light switch covers and the art and the curtains; moving furniture away from the walls and covering the floor; deciding whether or not I’m really going to sand the woodwork before accepting that I never do and I’m not going to start now….

When I originally schedule a Saturday for painting, say, my bedroom, I imagine getting up, a hot cup of coffee in hand, and I see myself getting right down to the fun part: a pan of rich, beautiful paint and clean rollers gliding a vibrant, fresh new color over the old and the dirty and the dreary.

But when in fact I am faced with all that prep work, it starts to feel clear that the fun stuff is a long way off, and I get easily overwhelmed. It’s very tempting instead to stretch out on the to the couch with my coffee and continue reading my mystery novel.

Then suddenly it’s almost noon—which I realize because my blood sugar is crashing and I must urgently make some lunch … and then of course, I’m full and sleepy and it just seems like this wasn’t such a good day to get the bedroom painted after all. I’ll definitely get to it tomorrow, I vow. Or maybe next Saturday.

The problem in this scenario is that I have treated all that prep work as 1) a necessary evil that 2) should only take a few minutes before I get to the “good part.”

Mise en place offers a new way of thinking about this prep and planning work that is both more honest but also genuinely enjoyable: when we get realistic about the fact that planning, gathering, and prepping for most projects worth doing require a substantial amount of time, we can start to view that stage of our creative practice as an end in itself. And when we slow down and allot an honest amount of time and resources to the planning and the prep, rather than rushing through it as simply an annoying means to an end, we might just find that we enjoy it! Sometimes as much as the work itself.

I don’t know about you, but I just love office supply stores, art supply stores, hardware stores. And it’s not primarily about consumerism or so-called “retail therapy” (though I’m hardly immune to those). More precisely it’s about abundance and possibility. About the lure of fresh starts and new beginnings.

I often walk through an art supply store, for example, holding the fat tubes of paint in the palm of my hand, feeling the heft of the really big stretched canvases, sorting through all the various types of brushes and brayers and pallet knives—and I often end up buying supplies that I don’t actually use for months. OK, I’ll admit it: sometimes years! I have a tube of phthalo blue that I bought with some birthday money last September and still have not yet touched.

But oh, how I love knowing it’s in my art supply cupboard, and that with some bright yellow and white I can mix the most gorgeous aqua blue—my favorite color! I used to feel a lot of shame about buying art supplies and then not using them right away. But now I know that eventually I will come around to mixing that particular, magical blue, and when I do, Oh! it will be glorious. Not just that, but simply knowing it’s there in the cupboard makes me so happy. As did holding the fat tube of new paint in my hand in the store and eventually deciding that yes! I will buy this!

My point here is not to convince you that phthalo blue is a miraculous color (though it is) or that you should always have some on hand (though if you are a painter who loves color, you probably should!).

Rather, my point is that I already know that planning and prep can be a pleasurable, creative, even sensuous experience, full of wonder and awe.

But somehow it stops being all those things when I am in a rush to get to the “real” creative project. Buying paintbrushes at the hardware store (especially when the reason I need them is that I destroyed the perfectly good ones from the last project by not washing them properly) is maybe not quite as sexy as tubes of phthalo blue, when I get over the shame and just chalk up the expense as part of the cost of my particular process, it’s still pretty fun! And pouring over paint chips and deciding on a color for the bedroom walls? One of my all-time favorite things.

And no, moving furniture and taking down artwork and curtains is not as fun as setting up a new canvas on your easel—except, maybe it is? Maybe making the room and the walls fresh and clean and ready to paint is, in its own way, preparing a canvas.

At least it can be, I’m convinced. When we embrace mise en place as a philosophy and a practice, we can cultivate a meditative, sensual, pleasurable phase of any creative project, a phase that is worthy of our attention and care in and of itself. When we make that phase part of the whole story of the project, rather than treating it as the tedious, boring part we try to fast forward through, we set ourselves up to savor and enjoy every stage. And if we set aside time for mise en place, and treat it as its own chapter, then we are so much more likely to actually keep going (even if, sometimes, it’s not for weeks or months… or even sometimes years).

I think the practice of mise en place—of patience, of planning, of abundance and pleasure—can actually carry through every stage of a creative project. I think it can be an overarching philosophy for how we work creatively, how we practice creativity in our lives. This is an idea I am still mulling over and trying to develop and articulate, an idea that is very much a work in progress. But I feel like I’m onto something. Right now I can only sort of see it if I look at it slant … it has something to do with the tension between design thinking and executive function, between dabbling and shipping, between process and productivity. These are all thoughts still forming in my mind, and which I will no doubt continue trying to work out here in the Divergent Design newsletter and over on the Spiral Lab YouTube channel. So stay tuned.

In the meantime, if you would like to explore some of my more preliminary thoughts on the possibilities of mise en place for play, practice, and pleasure, I am offering a workshop over at Divergent Design Studios. DDS is the online community for neurodivergent creatives I founded and help to run over on the Mighty Networks platform. I am offering two sessions of this workshop to accommodate as many time zones as possible (we have folks from North America to Europe to India to Australia), one on this Thursday, 12 January at 12:00 pm EST and the other on Friday, 13 January at 8:00 pm EST.

This workshop is free to DDS members, so why not consider joining now? We have very reasonable sliding scale options for monthly membership, and we even offer a two-week free trial. So essentially you can come to the workshop for free AND take a look around at everything else we have to offer. I’m pretty sure that once you experience the magic of peer support and the amazing, creative, engaged community that is DDS, you won’t want to leave—but if you do, you’ve lost nothing!

Here is the write-up of this week’s Mise en Place Workshop for the DDS community:

Our first monthly workshop of 2023 is still taking shape in my mind, but it has something to do with my clarity that there's just something wrong about New Year's Resolutions. Not just because they rarely work, and often lead to shame and stagnation, but I'm beginning to think that in principal, resolutions are not part of a design thinking paradigm. Resolutions are about ends, about productivity, about finishing shit. Resolutions take all of the gathering energy and excitement of new beginnings and turn them into opportunities to feel bad about ourselves. 

What if instead we just focused on the gathering energy? As worthy in and of itself? As part of a much more spirally, playful, anti-productivity-culture way of finding pleasure in our creative pursuits?

It seems to me that the concept of mise en place, which I have been thinking about and developing a philosophy around for some time now, is kind of like the anti-resolution. Mise en place, borrowed from the culinary world, means roughly "everything in its place." It's about preparation as its own pleasurable and meaningful part of the creative process; it's about gathering and dreaming and laying out the options and eventually making some plans and decisions. 

Or anyway, that's what I'm thinking about. I don't have it all figured out yet (or ever actually!), but what I'm thinking about is an interactive, working workshop where I will introduce a few ideas and then we will get into groups and actually do some mise en place! 

Maybe you have a specific project you know you want to work on, and you just need to gather the supplies and work out what order to do things in. Maybe you have a very vague idea of a project you'd like to undertake, but it's all fuzzy in the details and you could benefit from some brainstorming and visioning. Or maybe you feel so overwhelmed by all the possible creative projects that seem interesting, and you need some help just making a few decisions about what to do, and in what order. 

My hope is that you will leave this workshop with a plan (a very flexible plan) and a group of people who you can turn to for support as you begin to play your way through the beginning of a creative 2023.