It’s been ten years since I’ve written creatively. I used to happily write for my college newspaper and in many a travel journal, but in each instance it was easy and relatively stress-free because I knew who my audience was. Students and myself.
Fast forward to a decade in law firms and the daily pressures of corporate America, and the thought of creative writing is like putting on a pair of ill-fitting, itchy tights — the type my mother used to make me wear as a child in the ’80s to go to the opera. By evening and the weekend, tight deadlines, coworkers, and grueling commutes bring me home feeling like a charred, non-eco friendly turnip.
It’s hard to think there’s a receptive audience out there eager to listen and relate to any willing writer’s idiosyncrasies. A lawyer is always looking for the flaw or loophole in writing that will either lead to or prevent disaster — not very conducive to creative flow, but very conducive to an endless stream of critiquing and competing voices in one’s mind that abort creativity before it can even breathe.
Desperate for some spiritual guidance and relief from this ferris wheel of non-creativity, I turned to Elizabeth Gilbert of Eat Pray Love-fame. Where she jumps, I doubt and where I over-analyze, she happily scampers into the fray. Either due to age and experience or her conviction since childhood that she wanted to be a writer, I designated her my wise, spiritual guru to guide my key to screen.
Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear is a meandering stroll around and past every doubt and scream of panic that runs through a writer’s mind when the task of materializing an idea is too daunting. Like an unafraid fortune-teller, Gilbert conjures up each fear and tells you why it’s just plain dumb. Most importantly, she reiterates that things we create do not have to be earth-shattering, earth-helping, or other-worldly, they just have to start somewhere. Pointing to the example of Harper Lee’s self-doubt and reticence to create another work after her smash-hit To Kill a Mockingbird, Gilbert writes:
“I wish that Harper Lee had kept writing. I wish that right after Mockingbird and her Pulitzer Prize, she 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 approach. I wish somebody had told [Ellison and Fitzgerald] to go fill up a bunch of pages with blah-blah-blah and just publish it, for heaven’s sake, and ignore the outcome. Does it seem
sacrilegious even to suggest this? Good.”
Also helpful is Gilbert’s vehement advice that we do not have to wait to be designated “creatively legitimate” by a third party or institution to write. Surviving life — even from one day to the next — is the doctorate that gives everyone legitimacy and authenticity to write no matter his or her profession, age, or experience. And that authenticity from a fellow Earth-dweller, she argues, is helpful in itself.
“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 in order to become creatively legitimate. Because I’m telling you that you are already creatively legitimate, by
nature of your mere existence here among us.”
Gilbert gives a liberating battle cry, and an explicit permission slip to those readers who still need it, to simply start creating. “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…Begin anywhere, preferably right now.”
So to anyone else looking to express your authentic, hard-earned, blah blah blah, turn to Gilbert and get yourself some Big Magic inspiration — ready, set, now.
Leave a Reply