You’re forgiven if you expected Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear by Elizabeth Gilbert to have the same whiny voice as Eat Pray Love. You’re also forgiven for taking the summary on the back, especially the sentence that states that through her “profound empathy and radiant generosity, she offers potent insights into the mysterious nature of inspiration,” as nonsense. Perhaps Gilbert knew this, and thus dispels any doubt of her sincerity by opening the book with a section entitled Courage.
The crux of Courage, indeed the crux of Big Magic, is found at the end of the first paragraph on page nine where she defines “creative living” as “living a life that is driven more strongly by curiosity than by fear.” She goes to great lengths to explain that this doesn’t mean giving up everything in pursuit of a creative passion. In fact, she explains throughout the section about Persistence that she held a day job because she “never wanted to burden my writing with the responsibility of paying for my life” (132). Such a statement is profound in this day and age where the advice often doled out is to pursue your passion. Gilbert makes clear that asking your creativity to pay for your life is a creativity killer. The pressure distracts, causing frustration, and the spiral continues downward. Yet many still adhere to the belief that anything other than the pursuit of passion is dishonourable. Gilbert believes that “there’s no dishonour in having a job. What is dishonourable is scaring away your creativity by demanding that it pay for your entire existence” (155). Wise words for those who trying to figure out how to balance creative pursuits with the continuous demands required of modern living: money for rent, utilities, health insurance, incidentals, and so on. What Gilbert does in Big Magic is show you how the practicalities of modern life can coexist with your creative pursuits. She is frank yet light-hearted in her advice, and offers insightful nuggets on being a writer that apply to any creative pursuit.
For me, what resonated most falls on page 94. She makes a request to respond to the “nasty dialogue” (93) telling you that you suck. Her request is simple: “I would like to see you engage in a more generative and interesting conversation with yourself than that. For heaven’s sake, at least defend yourself” (94). She goes on to explain that “defending yourself as a creative person begins by defining yourself” (94), and she lists some examples. I had to stop reading.
Define myself. Defend myself. I don’t know what that means.
I have defined others as part of my job. I have defined for other people as part of my job. Cloud computing applications versus server-based applications. Privacy and security settings. Twitter. High-Speed Internet versus Fiber-Optic or FiOS Internet. End-to-end encryption. Blockchain. I have defined and explained these things to others because my curiosity has driven me toward them. I find them fascinating,
However, I have not consistently turned that curiosity inward. I have not defined myself outside the expectations of others, and have only recently defended myself, becoming curious about my reactions to things and memories that unfurl themselves, embracing a “permission to suck” belief and to “trust the process, let go the outcome.” So for me, Big Magic presents a roadmap to viewing my curiosity as an asset rather than a detriment, finding ways to turn that curiosity inward while acknowledging the fear of doing so, and then applying my self discovery, as it were, it to my creative writing pursuits.