Book notes: Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert

“If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you don’t bring forth what is within you, what you don’t bring forth will destroy you.”—Gospel of Thomas.

A friend gave me the book when she was moving out of SF. She told me that it is a book I will enjoy. I took it with me to Kansas when I went in 2019 and I left it there, but then got it on my Kindle and read it. The title has all the clues for the book, it’s about a big magic or the big belief by Elizabeth Gilbert that creative living is magic. Magic in that works in ways we don’t completely understand but still embrace. 

I have had my own journey with creation, albeit not a long one. I have started and stopped websites of technical writing and my Twitter bio says I’m “sometimes” a poet. I set out to correct that because writing lines is not enough to call yourself a poet, but then I let it be so. I’m a developer, engineer, and sometimes poet. As it happens we can be more than one thing and we can be tomorrow more than we are today. But I digress. My creative journey stopped in high school after writing almost every day and participating in a literary workshop in my hometown with people way older than me and going to a national contest of stories and seeing my short, silly story in print pages for the first time. It felt like something. I can still see it in my head, and I regret not having a copy of it. The story itself was indeed silly but apparently well composed and interesting enough to pass the local and province level. I was told I should consider writing for children and young adults. I was a young adult myself and I thought they think I can not write grown up stories. And they were right, because I wasn’t a grown up at the time. Hell, there’s no proof I’m one now, 12 years later. What I remember from that time is that I could sit for long periods of time and write stuff, it will just come to my head. I could do it based on particular prompts: write a story about being trapped in the head of an eagle. And will sit with a pen in a notebook and write an imaginary journey in a bird’s head seeing from above. Do I have you bored by now? Bear with me. I stopped after I went to college the first few years, then I started running a website, which was a bureaucratic process hard to believe if you don’t live in a place where the internet is assigned in a quota of 100 MB per month. But that was more about the things I’d learn in my free time in college about computers and programming and the lack of support women freely get once they decide to go into computers. It was called VenusIT, you guess it, the name kind of gives it away. 

I wrote my first poem one morning on my way to the lab where I used to think about networking programming in a Linux distribution called Gentoo. You would say that should be enough inspiration for anyone to write something, but was a breakup, yeah the old heart matters. You see, I technically didn’t write it, I heard it on the street, the words came to me before I got to the computer and could actually write it down. From then on a bunch of self-pity poems came to me in similar ways. 

Big Magic reflects on the creative process in a way I never dared to do myself, why you write, how the ideas come to your head, how ideas travel. Is there an idea genie or white stork? 

“all my most outlandish beliefs about creativity might actually be true—that ideas are alive, that ideas do seek the most available human collaborator, that ideas do have a conscious will, that ideas do move from soul to soul, that ideas will always try to seek the swiftest and most efficient conduit to the earth (just as lightning does).”

See, this is the first quote I saved from the book, how ideas choose their destinations. The book also talks about a subject I find compelling and not related to dark arts at all: the arrogance of belonging. That you have to believe that you belong to this creative process, whatever it is and believe in the magic, the unknown of it. 

Another point Big Magic makes is that of the trade of creativity, particularly writing. The (creative) trade is as important as the craft, but failure in trade, that is in dealing with those standing in the birthing to the world of your creations, shouldn’t stop or discourage you from doing what you do, after all, you have little control over any of it. And most notably no one cares or notices:

Long ago, when I was in my insecure twenties, I met a clever, independent, creative, and powerful woman in her mid-seventies, who offered me a superb piece of life wisdom. She said: “We all spend our twenties and thirties trying so hard to be perfect, because we’re so worried about what people will think of us. Then we get into our forties and fifties, and we finally start to be free, because we decide that we don’t give a damn what anyone thinks of us. But you won’t be completely free until you reach your sixties and seventies, when you finally realize this liberating truth – nobody was ever thinking about you, anyhow.” They aren’t. They weren’t. They never were. People are mostly just thinking about themselves. People don’t have time to worry about what you’re doing, or how well you’re doing it, because they’re all caught up in their own dramas…Go be whomever you want to be, then…Create whatever you want to create – and let it be stupendously imperfect, because it’s exceedingly likely that nobody will even notice. And that’s awesome.

So the book is asking you to go on with whatever creative activity you do regardless of any external factor. However, creative activities have been plagued from towering expectations of fame, success and being known, and the book has a recipe for that too:

I have a friend, an aspiring musician, whose sister said to her one day, quite reasonably, “What happens if you never get anything out of this? What happens if you pursue your passion forever, but success never comes? How will you feel then, having wasted your entire life for nothing?” My friend, with equal reason, replied, “If you can’t see what I’m already getting out of this, then I’ll never be able to explain it to you.”

Finally, a line of thoughts that really got me: “the tortured artist”. Gilbert exposes the theme:

Suffice it to say that the modern language of creativity—from its youngest aspirants up to its acknowledged masters—is steeped in pain, desolation, and dysfunction. Numberless artists toil away in total emotional and physical solitude—disassociated not only from other humans, but also from the source of creativity itself.

And then argues

I believe that our creativity grows like sidewalk weeds out of the cracks between our pathologies—not from the pathologies themselves.

Because think about it: If the only thing an idea wants is to be made manifest, then why would that idea deliberately harm you, when you are the one who might be able to bring it forth? (Nature provides the seed; man provides the garden; each is grateful for the other’s help.)

A quote to close:

What you produce is not necessarily always sacred, I realized, just because you think it’s sacred. What is sacred is the time that you spend working on the project, and what that time does to expand your imagination, and what that expanded imagination does to transform your life.

You might have not really read a lot of  “vudu” magic lines in here that might give you an idea of the magic talked in the book, but for that you better go and read it yourself. For me, it made me reminisce of the time where I used to write and wonder and dream more. And to dispel myths that I have kept dearly to justify not responding to a creative experience. These are the ideas that stuck the most: how ideas travel from host to host (spoiler alert, they are desperately looking for a kind host to nest), how you need to separate what the trade is / does and ideas of success of the act of creating itself and the that there’s more than one way to be an artist or creative person, we don’t need to fall for the myth of the tortured artist, you can create when in good times too. This last one was a little trip for me, because my poems always whisper when I’m in deep pain, abandonment pain, a wound I have had since forever and whenever it’s poked suddenly I feel the call for creation, some lines on my head. I read that creativity lives in attention and few things bring you to attention more than pain. I don’t think Big Magic is a read that will be enjoyed by everyone, but you might and you don’t have to be a creative or call yourself one to enjoy it, you can look at it from a give yourself permission to fail and work on whatever is that you love perspective and of that the book does plenty.