Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear
For years—since its publication, in fact—people have told me that I must read Elizabeth Gilbert’s Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear (2015). I was unimpressed with her bestselling memoir Eat, Pray, Love (2006), so I put off finding my way to this more recent treatise on creative living for many years. Yet friends and acquaintances alike continued urging me to read it (many of whom shared my dislike of EPL). So, as fall merged into winter this year, in an effort to read books that might shake off the writer’s block I had suffered since May, I picked up a copy of Gilbert’s book; I must say, I am pleased I did. While Gilbert’s literary voice grates at me from time to time, I thoroughly enjoyed nearly all of her points and assertions in Big Magic and will encourage other creatives to give it a readthrough if they have not already. Big Magic provides readers with no-nonsense suggestions and best practices for shedding the fear of failure and endeavoring to create when called to do so.
I particularly appreciated Gilbert’s matter-of-fact approach to the ebb and flow of inspiration and the creative process. She reminds readers that no one is creative all the time, and that it is nonsensical to let this natural state of things wear at one’s self-worth (particularly during uninspired times). As a writer struggling with the beast that is writers block, this assertion sat upon me like a soothing balm. Thus, I found this the perfect book for creatives to read when trudging through uninspired moments in life and seeking to rekindle the creative spark.
The very construction of the book—split into six parts under the titles of “Courage,” “Enchantment,” “Permission,” “Persistence,” “Trust,” and “Divinity” — builds the reader’s confidence in her own creative abilities and urges both creative risk-taking and everyday prudence. Gilbert’s advice in Big Magic is both practical and sensible; she urges aspiring writers to keep their day jobs and avoid crippling debt of renowned MFAs. It is also inspiring, even mystical. There is, as the title suggests, a transcendent spiritualism or magic to the creative process in Gilbert’s estimation. And, I must admit, I whole-heartedly agree. In fact, it is precisely the magic of creativity that beckons so many of us. There is an awe to human creation, be it written, visual, musical, etc. that keeps many of us courting our muses, endeavoring to create, and finding joy in the process.
Big Magic is a book in which any creative person will find inspiring truths and helpful suggestions. Whether you are a dancer on the stage or behind drawn window curtains in the privacy of your own home, a writer seeking publication or a dedicated journaler, a gardener, a quilter, a wood worker (I think you get the picture), you will find nuggets of wisdom and inspiration in this book. You will laugh out loud. You may cry, as Gilbert’s honesty shines a light into your own shame and fear and self-discouragement. You will leave the pages of Big Magic with a resolution and pride to create what you are called to create and set aside the worry over prestige, fame, worldly success we so often let paralyze us.
Bibliography:
Gilbert, Elizabeth. Big Magic: Creative Living Without Fear. Riverhead Books: New York, 2015.
A Few Great Passages:
“If you are older, trust that the world has been educating you all along. You already know so much more than you think you know. You are not finished; you are merely ready. After a certain age, no matter how you’ve been spending your time, you have very likely earned a doctorate in living. If you’re still here—if you have survived this long—it is because you know things. We need you to reveal to us what you know, what you have learned, what you have seen and felt. If you are older, chances are strong that you may already possess absolutely everything you need to possess in order to live a more creative life—except the confidence to actually do your work. But we need you to do your work.
Whether you are young or old, we need your work in order to enrich and inform our lives.
So take your insecurities and your fears and hold them upside down by their ankles and shake yourself free of all your cumbersome ideas about what you require (and how much you need to pay) in order to become creatively legitimate” (108).
“Pure creativity is magnificent expressly because it is the opposite of everything else in life that’s essential or inescapable (food, shelter, medicine, rule of law, social order, community and familial responsibility, sickness, loss, death, taxes, etc.). Pure creativity is something better than a necessity; it’s a gift. It’s the frosting. Our creativity is a wild and unexpected bonus from the universe. It’s as if all our gods and angels gathered together and said, ‘It’s tough down there as a human being, we know. Here—have some delights’” (128).
“But I remember thinking that learning how to endure your disappointment and frustration is part of the job of a creative person. If you want to be an artist of any sort, it seemed to me, then handling your frustration is a fundamental aspect of the work—perhaps the single most fundamental aspect of the work. Frustration is not an interruption of your process; frustration is the process. The fun part (the part where it doesn’t feel like work at all) is when you’re actually creating something wonderful, and everything’s going great, and everyone loves it, and you’re flying high. But such moments are rare. You don’t just get to leap from bright moment to bright moment. How you managed yourself between those bright moments, when things aren’t going so great, is a measure of how devoted you are to your vocation, and how equipped you are for the weird demands of creative living. Holding yourself together through all the phases of creation is where the real work lies” (149).
“Whether we make a profession out of it or not, we all need an activity that is beyond the mundane and that takes us out of our established and limiting roles in society (mother, employee, neighbor, brother, boss, etc.). We all need something that helps us to forget ourselves for a while—to momentarily forget our age, our gender, our socioeconomic background, our duties, our failures, and all that we have lost and screwed up. We need something that takes us so far out of ourselves that we forget to eat, forget to pee, forget to mow the lawn, forget to resent our enemies, forget to brood over our insecurities. Prayer can do that for us, community service can do it, sex can do it, exercise can do it, and substance abuse can most certainly do it (albeit with god-awful consequences)—but creative living can do it, too. Perhaps creativity’s greatest mercy is this: By completely absorbing our attention for a short and magical spell, it can relieve us temporarily from the dreadful burden of being who we are. Best of all, at the end of your creative adventure, you have a souvenir—something that you made, something to remind you forever of your brief but transformative encounter with inspiration” (172).
“My ultimate choice, then, is to always approach my work from a place of stubborn gladness. [. . .] I don’t ever choose to believe that I’ve been completely abandoned in the creative wilderness, or that there’s reason for me to panic about my writing. I choose to trust that inspiration is always nearby, the whole time I’m working, trying its damnedest to impart assistance. It’s just that inspiration comes from another world, you see, and it speaks a language entirely unlike my own, so so sometimes we have trouble understanding each other. But inspiration is still sitting there right beside me, and it is trying. Inspiration is trying to send me messages in every form it can – through dreams, through portents, through clues, through coincidences, through déjà vu, through kismet, through surprising waves of attraction and reaction, through the chills that run up my arms, through the hair that stands up on the back of my neck, through the pleasure of something new and surprising, through stubborn ideas that keep me away all night long . . . whatever works” (219-220).
“Whatever it is you are pursuing, whatever it is you are seeking, whatever it is you are creating, be careful not to quit too soon” (246).
“An unchecked ego is what the Buddhists call ‘a hungry ghost’—forever famished, eternally howling with need and greed.
Some version of that hunger dwells within all of us. We all have that lunatic presence, living deep within our guts, that refuses to ever be satisfied with anything. I have it, you have it, we all have it. My saving grace is this, though: I know that I am not only an ego; I am also a soul. And I know that my soul doesn’t care a white about reward of failure. My soul is not guided by dreams of praise or fears of criticism. My soul doesn’t even have language for such notions. My soul, when I tend to it, is a far more expansive and fascinating source of guidance than my ego will ever be, because my soul desires only on thing: wonder. And since creativity is my most efficient pathway to wonder, I take refuge there, and it feeds my soul, and it quiets the hungry ghost—thereby saving me from the most dangerous aspect of myself” (249-250).
“Whatever else happens, stay busy” (252).
“Find something to do –anything, even a different sort of creative work altogether—just to take your mind off your anxiety and pressure. [. . . ] Einstein called this tactic ‘combinatory play’—the act of opening up one mental channel by dabbling in another” (253). “In other words: If you can’t do what you long to do, go do something else” (254).
“Call attention to yourself with some sort of creative action, and –most of all—trust that if you make enough of a glorious commotion, eventually inspiration will find its way home to you again” (254).
