What Twenty Years in Professional Kitchens Taught Me About Drafting a Novel

The first thing you learn in a professional kitchen is that mise en place is not a technique.

It's a philosophy. Everything in its place before you begin. Not because someone told you to be organized. Because when the tickets start coming and the window is full and the guy on sauté just dropped a pan and the heat is sitting at about 115 degrees and someone needs a table's worth of food in eight minutes — you will not have time to find anything. You either have it already in position or you lose.

I spent twenty years in professional kitchens before I wrote my first novel. When people ask me if the transition was hard, I tell them the truth: the hardest part was realizing it was the same job.

I just didn't know that yet when I started.

Here's what a kitchen actually teaches you, if you let it.

It teaches you that preparation is the work.

The glamorous part — the fire, the plating, the service — that's maybe thirty percent of what happens. The other seventy is prep. Breaking down proteins at six in the morning. Reducing stocks. Building sauces that won't exist as finished things until hours later. You do the invisible work first, completely, without credit, because service will not wait for you to figure it out in the moment.

I did not understand this when I wrote my first book.

I finished the manuscript — actually finished it, which felt like the whole accomplishment — and then discovered that finishing the writing was approximately step two of about forty. There's formatting. I didn't know what Vellum was. I didn't know what a trim size was. I didn't know that the interior of a book is its own entire discipline with its own entire learning curve and that it would take me nearly as long to figure out as writing the thing had. That was a long ride. Longer than I'm going to describe here because some things you have to survive to have perspective on.

Then I thought the cover would be manageable. It was not manageable. The cover was hell. Not because I couldn't find an image — because covers are a craft, a specific and unforgiving craft, and nobody tells you that until you've already made three bad ones and learned to look at published covers differently forever.

All of that could have been easier. Not eliminated — nothing eliminates the learning — but easier, if I had done what a kitchen trained me to do: know what's coming before you need it. Research the pipeline before you finish the manuscript. Understand formatting before you're staring at a file that won't hold its margins. Know that the cover is its own project that needs its own time.

A first draft is prep. The scenes nobody will ever see, the chapters you cut, the character backstory you write and then never use a word of — that's stock reduction. That's the work that makes everything else possible. But the prep doesn't stop at the draft. The whole pipeline is prep. Nobody applauds it. You do it anyway, or you pay for it later.

I paid for it later. Now I do it first.

It teaches you that speed comes from not rushing.

Every cook who rushes makes mistakes. Cuts themselves. Burns the fond. Plates something sloppy. The cooks who are actually fast have internalized each step so completely that the movement is efficient rather than hurried. There's a difference. Hurried is anxiety wearing the costume of productivity. Efficient is the result of having done something enough times that your hands know what to do before your brain catches up.

I write fast now. Not because I rush. Because I've done it enough times that I know where I'm going before I get there. The speed is a byproduct of the practice, not a goal.

It teaches you to finish the plate.

In a kitchen, the rule is simple: if it leaves the pass, it's done. You don't send a dish and then run after it with a sauce spoon because you thought of something. You commit. The plate goes. If you weren't happy with it, you fix it on the next one.

Writers who can't finish things — and I know because I was one — are usually people who never learned that version of discipline. The constant revision before completion, the inability to call a draft done, the attachment to perpetual refinement — that's the opposite of what a kitchen requires. A kitchen requires you to know when to stop. Not because it's perfect. Because the table is waiting.

It teaches you that criticism is data.

A ticket comes back. Something's wrong. In a bad kitchen, people make excuses or blame the server or get defensive. In a good kitchen, you look at what came back and you figure out what happened and you fix it on the next ticket. The criticism isn't personal. It's information. Useful information. Information you need.

The first time an editor told me something wasn't working, my instinct was exactly the instinct of a young cook being told their dish came back — defensive, wounded, certain they were right. The instinct a kitchen eventually burns out of you. What came back is data. Use it.

There's one more thing kitchens teach that I didn't expect to carry into writing.

They teach you that what you make doesn't last.

A dish exists for maybe twenty minutes. Someone eats it and it's gone. All that prep, all that technique, all that heat and precision — consumed, finished, irretrievable. The thing you made is no longer a thing. And you make the next one.

I thought books would feel different because they persist. And they do, in one sense. But the writing of them — the actual drafting, the revision, the labor — that doesn't persist. That's gone the moment you move to the next chapter. You can't hold onto the version of the thing you were making while you were making it. It becomes something else and the earlier thing is just gone.

That used to bother me until I realized it was exactly the same as service. You don't mourn the plate. You learn from it and you cook the next one better.

Twenty years in professional kitchens didn't teach me how to write. But it taught me how to work — which turns out to be the same thing.

Leslie L. Stevens is the author of What October Woke and PAGE GRIMM: Modern Dark Folklore. Before she wrote novels, she spent nearly two decades as an Executive Chef. She lives and writes in Marfa, Texas.