With Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert created her own kind of magic. A phenomenal bestseller, it won her fans for life; readers who began to look up to her for inspiration, strength and guidance. This aspect of Gilbert’s personality found greater expression in her highly popular Technology, Entertainment, Design (TED) talk in 2009, ‘Your Elusive Creative Genius’. In Big Magic (Bloomsbury), her new book, Gilbert once again looks at the magic of creativity and her understanding of it. Excerpts from an interview.
Big Magicis about your own creative process, so when did it begin? When did you first decide to document the process?
This was a very slow growing idea. Most of the things I write about in the book were notions I had been thinking about and engaging with almost my entire life. I started thinking seriously about writing this book almost 12 years ago, and then, well, I had trouble figuring out how to tell this story. I was sitting on it for years. And then I gave the TED talk in 2009 and people really loved it. From that point on, it seemed like I had a sign on my chest saying ‘please come to me with problems about creativity’. And when people came to me, the conversation expanded and the ideas grew. About two years ago, I thought it’s time to write this book. To put together my own experience and the accounts of people I had been talking to.
Twelve years is a long time, and even since 2009, your own voice, process and outlook must have changed?.
The trust I have in myself has deepened, and the trust in the process has deepened too. For years, I would think ‘I kind of feel this is what creativity is like’, but I didn’t know if I had the authority in my own mind to say, ‘okay this is how it is’. Maybe that’s the reason why it took me so long to write the book. Since 2009, I have written three more. It was perhaps after writing The Signature of All Things that I thought I may have earned that authority finally… In my own mind of course. You can’t get that legitimacy from the world; it has to come from yourself. It was like I had tested my process empirically in my laboratory, and I could say ‘this is how I work, this is what I have learned, and this is what I feel’.
Other than your own journey, what else went into the book, in terms of research, influences and other readings? I ask this because your last book,The Signature… of All Things, was a very meticulously researched book. Research seems like a part of your process.
All of my other books have been very research driven, whether they have been fiction or non-fiction. I assumed that when I would work on this book, it’d be the same process, because that’s how I make books. I spent years and years gathering information, hundreds of books on the creative process, the neuropsychology of creativity, its origin, the cultural significance, the links between creativity and depression, the stories of other artists... And then, one day I looked at that bookshelf, and thought, I will fall into such a depression if I have to read all these books. Because the answer isn’t in there. I know this because all the research I needed were the 25 years I had spent as a writer. I asked myself, ‘what if you trusted yourself enough to sit down and, instead of blurting everything out like a manifesto, wrote the book as though it were a letter to a young artist?’ And to say, ‘listen it might be different for you but Aunty Liz has somethings she wants to say’. It is the tone I have taken in this book, which is neither professorial, nor academic.
We live in an age of a free, never-ending supply of online judgement and criticism, and it is almost impossible to avoid negative, sometimes almost cruel, feedback. How does the artist to tackle this in a way that doesn’t dampen creativity?
The only thing I will disagree with is when you say the kind of judgement out there is almost impossible to avoid. The new mechanisms of the Internet and the tremendous means of communication we have today mean that anybody can reach anybody, and it is certainly easier to find that judgement. That is the tax that you pay for the benefits of this world that we live in, which is that it’s never been easier to share your ideas.
The Internet does come with the unpleasantness. That risk has always been the exchange which is a part of the equation of creativity. The action and reaction. If you are bold enough to put a little piece of yourself into the world, then you cannot be so naive as to expect that it may not summon comment. You took an action, you will get a reaction. And that reaction is completely out of your hands. I think that that’s how I handle that.
I do have to face this in my life as a writer. The only way I channel it is to remind myself that this is what I signed up for. I would rather have an unpleasant reaction and have a voice than be voiceless and safe.
Another worry that hampers creativity is the idea of originality. With a single search, a brand new idea you’ve had that feels unique becomes something someone else across the world has already done…
If you start looking around for things to get anxious about with regards to your creativity, you will find no end to them. And one of the things is the question of originality. You look at the world and think that everything has been done. The Internet helps you confirm that. But it’s the same feeling people who came before us would have had. I guarantee you that in the 1920s when a writer walked into a bookstore, she would have felt the same thing; she would have thought that there was no room on those bookshelves for her. But look how much has happened since then. The flipside of the desire for originality is that the more you panic and desire to be original, the harder a time you will have. So just tell your own story. I can guarantee you that a historian or a critic could look at the most original work of art that you’ve ever seen and tell you what it’s similar to; what it’s influenced by and what it is derived from. Everything is connected.
Whenever someone says to me, ‘I want to do this thing but it’s already been done’, my response is, ‘but it’s not yet been done by you’.
