Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear

A botanist friend of Gilbert’s asks her students whether they love nature and whether nature loves them. Her students love nature but don’t think that nature loves them. Instead, they think human existence is random and not connected to the earth. They lack a relationship with the earth that Gilbert notes ancient people felt. Gilbert’s friend believes people ignore their ability to help the earth while the earth helps them.

Gilbert asks young writers whether they love writing and whether writing loves them. They usually say no; many of her students see writing as causing suffering instead. Writers, artists, and others feel suffering is important to their work, but Gilbert says it shouldn’t be. She relays an anecdote about novelist Katie Arnold-Ratliff, who became blocked after a professor told her: “Unless you are emotionally uncomfortable while you are writing, you will never produce anything of value” (207). Arnold-Ratliff felt like she wasn’t following the correct path in writing because she wasn’t suffering. She finally wrote a book she enjoyed writing and abandoned the need for suffering.

Artists commonly assume that suffering creates authenticity. This is dangerous, and can cause mental health conditions or addiction. People suffer, Gilbert acknowledges, but she does not think that artists should seek out suffering. Gilbert herself was told by a teacher that she hadn’t suffered enough to write. She didn’t listen and instead worked with more lightness and playfulness (210). Addiction can hinder creativity, not help it. Suffering is not one’s creative identity; successful artists are successful despite, not because of it.

The tormented artist is a persona, a role that people play, which they use to excuse their bad behavior. Real suffering is not something to romanticize, Gilbert says. Gilbert’s own issues with depression and anxiety have not been creative periods for her; rather, they hindered her creativity. She sees her work as a reason to be healthy and fight against suffering. She believes that those artists who died by suicide or dealt with addiction did once love their work. However, she thinks that they would never say that their work loved them. She believes that her work loves her and that it was her destiny to be a writer, and looks at her work with positivity. Inspiration tries to partner with her, and she trusts it. She wonders whether it is irrational to trust something that she can’t see but argues that everyone has beliefs that they can’t explain and that people should choose a positive delusion.

She describes how to move away from suffering by becoming a trickster instead of a martyr. Martyrs think they must sacrifice everything and live in pain, while tricksters have fun and are upbeat and playful. She contends that creativity originated in playfulness, but that now there is a focus on suffering. She believes that a trickster trusts in the universe and does not experience anxiety: “He trusts himself [...] He trusts his own cunning, his own right to be here, his own ability to land on his feet in any situation […] the trickster trusts the universe” because the trickster knows that “It’s all just a game” (224-25).

Gilbert told author, sociologist, and speaker Brené Brown about her trickster concept. Brown saw that her own creativity had too much seriousness and suffering, which she had thought was normal. She saw that storytelling was easier than writing for her, and decided to “trick” herself into finishing a book. She invited two friends to take notes while she told stories about the topic and then she wrote down what she told them. This freed her from suffering, another example of Big Magic.

Gilbert’s first published story, “Pilgrims,” was scheduled for publication in Esquire in 1993. When the magazine needed to be shortened, she had to decide whether to revise the story or wait to publish it. She couldn’t keep the integrity of the story while cutting it, but realized that the new story was just different and not worse. She found a new way of writing and saw that work is not “sacred.” Instead, the act of being creative, and its impact on a person’s life, is sacred. A literary agent contacted her because of this publication.

Gilbert dislikes when creatives refer to their work as a “baby.” This implies that they are not seeing their work lightly, which means that they will have issues when they have to change their work or deal with criticism or feedback: “Your creative work is not your baby; if anything, you are its baby” (233). This is because the work creates and changes the person. Because she didn’t see “Pilgrims” as her baby, she was able to edit it and then let it go.

She also tells people to abandon the concept of passion. Some people have a passion and some don’t, and telling them to find their passion is unhelpful. Instead, she just works rather than waiting for her passion, trusting that creativity is always there. She explains how to discover inspiration when passion is gone by using curiosity. She sees curiosity as something everyone can access, while passion isn’t. Curiosity helps people find an interest, even a small one, which they can then follow. This may or may not lead to a passion.

After letting her Brazil novel go, she didn’t have other ideas immediately. She then decided to become curious, leading to an interest in gardening. She pursued it, then researched the history of specific flowers and plants. This led to writing a book three years later, The Signature of All Things, which centers on a family of 19th-century botanical explorers. She cites this as another example of Big Magic.

Curiosity elicits continuous work, but passion can be fleeting. She cites well-known people who work continuously with curiosity, such as American author Joyce Carol Oates, American author and actor James Franco, American musician Bruce Springsteen, Spanish artist Pablo Picasso, and American director Mike Nichols, who would rewatch his “failures” with curiosity to understand them better. He found them interesting. Gilbert believes that people stop being creative because they don’t understand how to see something as interesting; they see it as hard instead. Looking at one’s work as interesting can change one’s mindset and help them persevere through difficult times.

Gilbert notes that people will have failures, such as a finished book she threw out because something wasn’t right about it. Failure can be disappointing, but it’s merely one’s ego that is hurting. Buddhists call the ego a “hungry ghost” that continually has needs. People shouldn’t let their egos or hunger drive them. Instead, they should see that they also have a soul, which is unconcerned about success or failure. Souls want wonder, she says, and creativity can provide that wonder. This “quiets the hungry ghost” (250). The ego is what feels mad, upset, or defensive.

She considers how to deal with failure and tells people to forgive themselves and keep moving to the next thing. She once wrote an article for GQ magazine, and the editor told her it wasn’t right and to leave it and start writing the next one. People should not focus on their failures or analyze them. They should proceed to the next project, even if it’s different creative work, so that they can stop thinking about the failure. She cites learning to draw when she was having problems with a book, how Albert Einstein played the violin when he was blocked, and how a baseball player friend quit and started to play soccer when he was having trouble. He finally went back to baseball and could play better.

Similarly, writer Clive James tricked himself into working again after he was blocked and depressed due to a failed play. His daughters asked him to improve their bicycles, so he painted and decorated them. He then painted other kids’ bicycles the same way. When he finished, he “realized that ‘failure has a function. It asks you whether you really want to go on making things.’ To his surprise, James realized that the answer was yes” (256-57). This experience helped move him back into writing. Gilbert notes that this is an example of “Big Magic” because doing another activity helped trick him back into writing.

The final part of creative trust is to share one’s work with the world. This is “fierce trust,” a trust that does not care about the result and involves trust in one’s worth and creativity, no matter what the results are. Gilbert asks people to consider what they love to the extent that failure and success don’t matter.

She relates a story about a man who wanted to be an artist and traveled to France to paint and be inspired. He met some young aristocrats, who invited him to a masquerade ball. He didn’t realize the theme was “medieval court” and dressed as a lobster. Instead of leaving, he decided to take pride in the work he had done on his costume. He realized that his openness came from his life as an artist. He trusted in his costume and proclaimed himself the “court lobster,” inspiring laughter. Similarly, creatives must be proud of their work.