Getting stuck with mise en place

One of the many things I'm trying to figure out is how to "unstick" creative processes, and particularly how to move forward just a bit instead of completely losing faith or resorting to negative emotional ploys like "someone will be disappointed in me if I don't finish this".

I came across this excellent stream from music producer Ronny "rktic" Pries:

I couldn't figure out where I knew Ronny from – it turns out he wrote the music for the beautiful, haunting Farbrausch demo fr-041: Debris. It's nearly 20 years old now, but has always stuck with me.

Ronny's stream is almost 2 hours long, carefully thought out, and probably not for most people unless you care about electronic music production: the latter ⅔ of the video is quite specifically about how he produces, arranges, and masters a dub techno-esque track.

However, the first third or so discusses how to create a creative safety net, a toolkit for getting "stuck" so you avoid being completely blocked or broken, and what you can do to prepare yourself in a way that you can move forward.

It's mostly a set of ideas and mental tools, not specific to music production, and I think some of it applies to almost any moderately creative endeavour, whether writing words or code, making visual art, or (of course) music.

Mise en place

As Ronny explains, mise en place is a French term used in cooking, which boils down to (pun vaguely intended) making sure the important prep work is done before you hit the creative and/or time-sensitive stuff. Do you have the right ingredients? Have you chopped the vegetables? Are spices and herbs weighed out appropriately etc?

The idea is, if you do this earlier, when the proverbial shit hits the fan and you've got 3 pots on the go, and you just cannot find the damn tarragon that you know you have, instead of burning something while you look, not putting the tarragon in, or just abandoning the whole dish, you've already done enough prep work to go "oh, it's just there, in that container".

To emphasise the obvious, this is a very good idea. To learn what it means in terms of music production, and how it provides him a creative safety net, watch Ronny's video!

For me, however, it tends to be an excuse to not engage with the actual thing I want to do.

Premature yak shaver extraordinaire

I'm a natural pessimist and have to deal with anxiety on a periodic, ongoing basis, so I spend a lot of time considering what bad things could happen.

This tends to manifest in catastrophically over-planning.

It's largely been a benefit for my career: The same part of my brain that won't shut up about everything that could go wrong in my life also won't shut up about all the things that can go wrong in a software project, and there are a lot.

I'm the person that often says "have we considered x", where x might be a regulatory or accessibility issue, a performance edge case, something I've spotted that could impact reliability, or any number of other things. I've been doing this for 25 years now, and I have a long, long list of factors that make a software project work properly.

However, when starting something new that doesn't have such high risk (for example, like this blog), I tend to get extremely caught up in the details.

Not only do I need to check and re-check that I have the aforementioned tarragon, but I need to confirm that every single component is perfect, every pot and pan is in its place, every vaguely-related item put away or got out as needed, every surface perfectly clean.

If I haven't then run out of time to do whatever it is I planned to do, I start to invent things. Is the dining room wallpaper to my liking? Do I have matching cups and glasses for drinks? The list goes on and on, until I have so much to do that I can't actually start anything.

(OK, OK, I'll stop torturing the poor cooking analogy).

Permission to fail

The other thing that struck me in Ronny's stream was that while it's important to have a toolkit to handle failure, it's just as important, if not more so, to give yourself permission to fail regardless.

I am extremely bad at this, but if I actually want to have a creative life outside of doing work, I have to start getting better at it.

So this is me, publicly trying to give myself permission to fail at things, and try more things I think I'll fail at. That includes writing this post, which doesn't really have a conclusion as such.

I guess I'll have to let my natural tendencies figure out the safety net stuff.