10 Lessons Learned from Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert (Review)

I lost touch with my creativity this year. Then Elizabeth Gilbert’s Big Magic helped me get it back. 

I’m not the Eat Pray Love type. But I’ll give any of Gilbert’s fiction a go now. That’s how impressed I was with Big Magic, how profoundly it moved me, and the impact it had on relighting a dying creative flame. 

10 Lessons Learned from Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert (Review)

The lessons may not be new. But the passion and perspective from which Gilbert presents them is so genuine that you will experience them as though they are being born for the first time.

My review can’t do justice to reading the book itself, but let’s give it a go anyway.

1 – WHATS GOOD FOR YOU IS GOOD FOR YOUR ART

I never understood why so many of my creative heroes suffered so desperately in pursuit of their art.

I’ve always known that when I’m unhappy, I can’t create anything.

So it felt like I found a kindred spirit in Gilbert when she said the exact same thing. She needs to be happy and satisfied in the other areas of her life in order to write. Especially fiction.

In contemporary Western civilization, the most common creative contract still seems to be one of suffering. This is the contract that says, I shall destroy myself and everyone around me in an effort to bring forth my inspiration, and my martyrdom shall be the badge of my creative legitimacy.

The contract of the Tormented Artist includes:

• expressing constant dissatisfaction with your work
• arrogance when successful, self-pitying in failure
• competing jealously against your peers
• begrudging anyone else’s victories
• considering your talents a curse
• drinking as much as possible
• sabotaging all relationships
• dying young

But there’s a different way.

It doesn’t have to be like that.

You can lay off the booze a bit in order to have a keener mind. You can nourish healthier relationships in order to keep yourself undistracted by selfinvented emotional catastrophes. You can dare to be pleased sometimes with what you have created.  […] You can support other people in their creative efforts, acknowledging the truth that there’s plenty of room for everyone. You can measure your worth by your dedication to your path, not by your successes or failures. […] You can live a long life, making and doing really cool things the entire time. You might earn a living with your pursuits or you might not, but you can recognize that this is not really the point. And at the end of your days, you can thank creativity for having blessed you with a charmed, interesting, passionate existence.

You can be a trickster instead of a martyr.

• Related reading: 11 Ways Writers Can Keep Fit

2 – YOU ARE NOT A GENIUS

Gilbert points out that around the Renaissance time, people stopped saying they “had genius” and started saying they “were genius”. 

This was a complete disservice to the artist.

When burdened with the label of “genius”, artists can no longer approach their work with the lightness required to create.

Consider Harper Lee, for instance, who wrote nothing for decades after the phenomenonal success of To Kill a Mockingbird. In 1962, when Lee was asked how she felt about the possibility of ever writing another book, she replied, “I’m scared.” She also said, “When you’re at the top, there’s only one way to go.”

But is reaching a “top” really the only motive to create?

What do ideas of winning and losing, reputation, and commerce have to do with creativity?

What does any of that have to do with the pursuit of love? What does any of that have to do with the strange communion between the human and the magical? What does any of that have to do with faith? What does any of that have to do with the quiet glory of merely making things, and then sharing those things with an open heart and no expectations?

Gilbert talks about how she wishes Harper Lee had kept writing after winning the Pulitzer for To Kill a Mockingbird. She wishes Lee “had churned out five cheap and easy books in a row—a light romance, a police procedural, a children’s story, a cookbook, some kind of pulpy action-adventure story, anything.”

Imagine what she might have created, even accidentally, with such an approach. At the very least, she could have tricked everyone into forgetting that she’d once been Harper Lee. She could have tricked herself into forgetting that she’d once been Harper Lee, which might have been artistically liberating.

3 – YOU DON’T NEED PERMISSION TO BE CREATIVE

This is advice you hear a lot in creative self-help circles.

I always thought it was kinda stupid advice because it’s obvious.

Who really thinks they need permission to be creative?

But then I realised I did…

My need for permission to be creative takes the form of guilt whenever I sit down to write fiction.

I always feel guilty about doing something that isn’t worthwhile.

But who says it’s not worthwhile? Where does this feeling come from? 

This is a self-imposed shackle.

Society reveres creatives and has done for as long as society has existed.

Human beings have been creative beings for a really long time—long enough and consistently enough that it appears to be a totally natural impulse. To put the story in perspective, consider this fact: The earliest evidence of recognizable human art is forty thousand years old. The earliest evidence of human agriculture, by contrast, is only ten thousand years old. Which means that somewhere in our collective evolutionary story, we decided it was way more important to make attractive, superfluous items than it was to learn how to regularly feed ourselves.

When you lock into your creativity, you are communing with a part of your humanity that is universal and timeless.

So why do you need permission to do that?

You don’t need permission to breathe, eat, or fuck.

You want to write a book? Make a song? Direct a movie? Decorate pottery? Learn a dance? Explore a new land? You want to draw a penis on your wall? Do it. Who cares? It’s your birthright as a human being, so do it with a cheerful heart. (I mean, take it seriously, sure—but don’t take it seriously.) Let inspiration lead you wherever it wants to lead you. Keep in mind that for most of history people just made things, and they didn’t make such a big freaking deal out of it.

4 – YOUR ART DOESNT NEED A MORAL PURPOSE

Here’s another trap I’ve fallen into time and again with my fiction.

Even though I hate fiction with a moral purpose 99% of the time…

Even though I love reading pulpy fast-paced escapism…

I find myself needing to “have something to say” whenever I write fiction.

Do you know how exhausting that is?

You are not required to save the world with your creativity. Your art not only doesn’t have to be original, in other words; it also doesn’t have to be important. For example: Whenever anybody tells me they want to write a book in order to help other people, I always think, Oh, please don’t. Please don’t try to help me.