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Listen … just discovered “Top Chef” (don’t judge) on account of Peacock.
I’ve always been inspired by chefs and how they go about the work. When I was watching “Chopped” several years ago, I remember one chef talking about how he was on onion duty in the kitchen. And instead of lamenting it, he vowed to be the best damn cutter of onions. It’s a great attitude, something we can all heed.
The parallels between high-level cooking and writing are similar. We started with Season 18, Top Chef: Portland. Why? Well, we live in Oregon so we jumped into that, spoilers of past winners be damned.
And in the first episode, Richard Blais, restaurateur and one of the judges told the chefs to have “authorship” of their dishes. Another, Melissa King, said you have to “edit” your plates and choose what to leave on the plate and what to leave off.
Sound familiar?
Let’s first unpack “authorship.” Something I always found mildly grating is when judges say, ‘I need to see more of you on the plate.’ Or ‘I don’t get a sense of who you are in this dish.’ When a chef nails it, they often say, ‘I see this dish I see Shota or I see Dawn or I see Gabe.
When I cook food, I’m putting together a mosh pit of tofu, rice and veggies. When I make my morning oatmeal, it doesn’t scream Brendan. So I was always confused by how a dish could be “authored.”
But the more I think about it, the more it makes sense. This gets at voice and style. Leah Flickinger, features editor for Runner’s World, Popular Mechanics, and Bicycling Magazine said Voice is a gift to the reader.
There are any number of writers we identify with or admire or both and we immediately know, sometimes without even looking at a byline that that was written by Rebecca Solnit, Brin-Jonathan Butler, David Foster Wallace, George Saunders, Mary Karr, Roxane Gay, or Chuck Klosterman. But that can be double-edge sword.
While watching “Great British Baking Show” for — at last count — the billionth time, Francis was one such baker where the judges kept saying you’re all style and no substance. Her work looked beautiful, but in the culinary arts, the food’s still gotta taste good.
So these writers, while they may wow us with how they compose their sentences and their thoughts, they still have to deliver a great story. Again, The food’s gotta taste good.
And the only way you get there is by cooking a ton of food, reading a bunch of recipes, and then adding that little flourish that is wholly your invention. Same goes for writing, as Katia Savchuk said in Ep. 313, she copies the work of David Grann, word for word, to warm up her fingers and get the rhythm of Grann’s words into her brain, like following a recipe.
If we read, read, read, read and imitate and my god play a little, we might serve up a dish that is identifiably “us.”
Melissa King’s note on editing was so great. I loved hearing her say you have to edit your plate. This gets at the heart of what matters to presentation: what to leave in, what to leave out. I’ll put sundried tomatoes on every pizza I make but maybe it’s best to kill my tomatoes. Are they in service of the pizza?
Sometimes jamming too much into a piece is overwhelming, it’s distracting, it takes away from the forward propulsion of the story. No matter how much effort and work you’ve put in to date, you might have to slash that shit and let it fall. From what I understand, the producers at This American Life kill so many decent stories and parts of stories that the floor likely has some golden nuggets beside all the dust bunnies. What’s in service of the story? The dish?
One more lesson we can take from cooks that help our writing: mis en place. This is all the prep that takes place so a chef can simply cook when the rush comes. All the veggies are chopped, the broths are made, the water is simmering, the ovens preheated, the food’s weighed out, the cutting board is clean, the knives are lined up, the sleeves are rolled up, and so on. Order. This is the practice, this is the non glorious stuff that frees you up to let it rip.
On a good day, I end my day by turning off my monitors, and stowing away my mouse and keyboard and putting out my analog toys for the morning, my regular journals, my bullet journal, my notebooks and it’s clean and ready to go. My pencils are sharpened, my beverage is hot, my water is there. If I eventually need to kick over to the computer, I know I can fire it up. The meez is there so when it’s time to rip, we’re ready to rip.
Also, being a cook is a lot of grunt work out of the spotlight. We see cooking shows and we see celebrity chefs and we think this must be a glamorous lifestyle. It’s not. It’s long, painful, draining, gutting work for very little pay. Sound familiar?
As writers, we look on Twitter at the person who is touting this and that and it’s so obviously a flex that I’m left wondering, oh, you’re basically boasting, why tweet that? Who, besides you, does that serve? Or the person whose work was just accepted by the New York Times, meanwhile, 95% of her work is content marketing for universities that thankfully has no byline but it sure as hell pays a lot more than that prestigious NYT essay. Or maybe you know someone who got a killer review or keep getting features written about them or they go on social media and say, Wow, I can’t believe how fast I got 2,000 email subscribers and you’re like, Fuck, can we stop it with the damn pissing contests veiled as humble brags?
We never see the entire picture and social media fans the flames of our insecurities so what can we do to come back from that? We bring our love and our hearts to the work that matters, just like chefs do, for nourishment and because it brings us joy. We seek out our ideal audiences in the hopes that we can bridge that connection.
All we can do is lean into the work and control what we can control, bring our authorship to our work and let IT speak loudest.
My sister always told me that when it came to sports, I shouldn’t have to tout how good I was, that my performance will speak for itself, and I think that’s mostly true.
So let’s face the work and find inspiration wherever it springs up. For me, that’s often chefs, for you it might be master gardeners.
Either way, I can’t wait to see what you come up with.
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