Elizabeth Gilbert inspired readers around the world with her blockbuster novel Eat Pray Love. She joined Jim Braude and Margery Eagan on Boston Public Radio to discuss her her latest book, Big Magic: Creative Living Without Fear. The message? Let your curiosity—not your fear—lead you in the direction of a creative life.
Highlights from the interview include:
On the ‘Big Magic’ Theory.
I’ve spent years traveling around and talking to people, and meeting a lot of people who are doing and making really interesting things with their lives, but mostly meeting a lot of people who want to be doing and making really interesting things with their lives, but they’re not. They have ideas and inspiration, but they’re not doing it. When I start to talk to people…they always have really rational reasons and lists of material facts about why they can’t do it, but when you strip it down, it tends to really be about fear. Especially with women, I think there’s a lot of hesitation about putting yourself out there, and taking the risk and being vulnerable, and wondering if you even have the entitlement or the permission to participate in the cultural conversation at that level.
What’s your advice on how to deal with fear?
First of all, you don’t deny it. The conversation about fear these days is this very sort of extreme sports language about fear, like ‘punch it out! Knock it down!’—This very hardcore language. Anything I’ve ever tried to fight fights me back harder. I think for me, it’s more about accepting that this is a completely natural human function, and it’s always going to be associated with creativity. Creativity demands of us that we enter into realms of uncertain outcome, and fear hates uncertain outcome. If you want to live a creative life, you’re going to have to learn to walk hand in hand with your fear.
Tell us about your theory that ideas are flying around in our heads and may suddenly pop into our consciousness.
I don’t know if I can convince you—it’s not real, it’s magic. I did put the word magic in the title as sort of a warning to people: I’m kind of serious about this. My experience of creativity is that the world is full of these ideas that want to be made, and they’re constantly swirling around the universe looking for human collaborators to bring them into manifestation, and that’s what it feels like when an idea comes to you. Even really pragmatic, rational people will say, ‘this idea came to me.’ And you know that, you’ve had that feeling… I know the difference between something that comes from me and something that comes to me.
But ideas will come to you if you’re already working?
Picasso had a great line: ‘when the muse finds you, let her find you working.’ I think a lot of people have this very sort of romantic idea about creativity, that you just have to sort of wait for lightning to strike, and this thing’s just going to appear magically. Instead of waiting for the muse to come to me, I do my work like a mule, like a farmer, and oftentimes I’ll be rewarded, but it doesn’t happen unless my butt’s on the seat already, and probably has been for months.
What do you mean when you say “magic?”
I believe this is the one place in your life, in the realm of creativity, where it is absolutely okay and also kind of requisite to hold on to some kind of idea of enchantment and magical thinking, or else it’s just not going to work at all. There has always been a link between human creativity and mysticism, and between mysticism and religion. All of this stems from the same notion, which is the sense that maybe there’s something going on than what we can empirically see.
Are schools beating the creativity gene out of us? Is the average person ready to accept creative ideas?
I think creativity is pretty stubborn, I think it takes a lot of beating to get rid of it completely. I think by our nature, we are creative beings. If you’re a human being, you’re a creative being. I do have sympathy for schools, it’s a hard job to take a bunch of kids who are very different, and institutionally educate them all to be productive members of society, and it’s hard. Anybody who is a teacher knows how difficult that is. There is this weird thing that happens around the age of eight or nine, there tends to be a couple of kids who are singled out as the creative ones, the talented ones, the gifted ones, and they seem to get shunted out away from the rest of the herd, and the rest of the herd gets this message really early, that ‘this isn’t for you, this is for the elite, the special, the tormented… and you’re just here to pay bills and die.’ I think the quicker that we can recover the sense that human creativity is our shared inheritance, your ancestors, my ancestors, all of us, come from long lines of people who took nothing and made something out of it, for no reason other than that it delighted them, or they wanted to improve on it, or mess around… this is what we do, we’re the making ape.
Lots of people believe they have a talent for writing, and some people don’t. At what point should they accept rejection?
One of the things I lay out in the book is is this idea to separate the idea of pure creativity from the idea of monetizing, and becoming a professional creator. There’s a creative class of people who are lucky or fortunate or talented enough, or privileged enough to have been able to ascent to what we would call the “Creative Class.” That is not the only way to live a creative life. You can go to medical school and still write short stories and poems on the side. There’s a way that you can continue to access your creativity throughout your life. There are many reasons to create, aside from the material outcome of it. Creation is a gift to the creator, as much as it is anything else.
Elizabeth Gilbert’s latest book is Big Magic: Creative Living Without Fear. She will be at the Harvard Bookstore tonight at 7:00 at the First Parish Church on mass Ave in Cambridge. To hear more from her interview, click on the audio link above.
