a narrative arts space

Week 2 Book Club

“Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now.” -Rainer Maria Rilke

 

    • Journal

    • Offer your reflections to this week’s Book Club in the comments

    • Create a way to collect ideas + tend to your space

    • Allow any ideas that have arisen settle into your subconscious. Where can you ask them questions and infuse more curiosity into what they may offer?

  • Amy Tan’s “Where Does Creativity Hide”

    Steven Johnson’s “Where Good Ideas Come From”

    Austin Kleon’s “Steal Like an Artist”

    Sometimes by Mary Oliver (a poem)

  • Digital Tools

    1. Notion

      • A flexible tool for creating databases, notes, and repositories for ideas. You can use templates for creative projects and link related concepts together.

    2. Obsidian

      • A knowledge management tool that lets you create interlinked notes, mimicking the way ideas connect in your brain.

    3. Google Keep or Evernote

      • Great for quick note-taking on the go, especially when paired with tagging or categorizing options.

    4. Milanote

      • A visual tool perfect for creative projects, allowing you to map ideas, collect media, and create mood boards.

    5. Trello or Asana

      • Use kanban boards to organize ideas by their development stage (e.g., “Seed Ideas,” “In Progress,” “Revisiting”).

    Manual Systems

    1. An Idea Journal

      • Dedicate a notebook or sketchbook to capturing random thoughts, sketches, or inspirations. Consider dividing sections by themes or projects.

    2. Index Cards or Sticky Notes

      • Write each idea on a card or sticky note and arrange them on a wall or bulletin board for a physical, tactile system.

    3. Bullet Journal

      • Incorporate a “brain dump” or “idea log” into your daily bullet journal layout. Add symbols to mark ideas worth revisiting.

    4. Zettelkasten (Slip-Box) Method

      • A system of notecards or digital equivalents where each note contains one idea and is connected to related ideas, forming a web of knowledge.

    Techniques for Organizing Ideas

    1. Mind Mapping

      • Use a tool like MindMeister or pen and paper to map out connections between ideas, themes, and projects.

    2. Cluster and Theme Ideas

      • Periodically review your collection and group ideas into categories, themes, or projects.

    3. Idea Vaults

      Create separate repositories for:

      • “Someday/Maybe” Ideas: Interesting but not urgent ideas.

      • Active Ideas: Ideas currently being developed.

      • Archived Ideas: Past ideas worth revisiting.

    4. Review Rituals

      • Schedule weekly or monthly reviews of your collected ideas. This practice helps prioritize and reconnect with forgotten inspirations.

    • What brings you alive and inspires you? What energizes you?

    • What are the things that bring you most joy in your life? Are you nurturing them?

    • Does your creative energy come from internal or external sources?

    • What is your melancholy trying to tell you?

    • When was the last time something magical or enchanting happened to you?

    • What time of day do you feel most clear and spacious when it comes to your creativity?

    • Where were you when your last few great ideas came to you?

    • How can you remember the ideas that are presenting themselves to you?

    • How can you encourage yourself not to settle on the first thing that comes to mind?

    • Who or what has been a muse for your creative work?

    • What are others doing that creates a sense of heightened energy in you whenever you hear about it?

    • Who are other artists or creatives you find inspirational?

    • What do you find mysterious and enchanting in the world?

    • What are the qualities you most enjoy expressing?

    • How does it feel to say: “I am evolving into someone I love for who I am, not what I do."?

    • Where can you pay more attention?

    • What does paying attention actually feel like?

    • How do you approach your imagination differently now than how you did as a child?

    • How can you invite your inner child to participate in the creative process?

    • Where is your intuition leading you?

    • Does spirituality and or/culture play a role in your creativity? How?

    • What medium are you naturally drawn to? Why do you think that is?

    • Did your creative niche find you, or did you find your creative niche?

    • What message(s), if any, do you find yourself exploring in your creative work?

    • What are some of your favorite themes to explore?

    • What is a Big Question you think often that doesn't have a black or white answer to it?

Recommend Readings

  • Excerpt from Big Magic
    By Elizabeth Gilbert  

    I’ve spent my entire life in devotion to creativity, and along the way I’ve developed a set of  beliefs about how it works— and how to work with it—that is entirely and unapologetically based  on magical thinking. And when I refer to magic here, I mean it literally. Like, in the Hogwarts  sense. I am referring to the supernatural, the mystical, the inexplicable, the surreal, the divine,  the transcendent, the otherworldly. Because the truth is, I believe that creativity is a force of  enchantment—not entirely human in its origins.  

    I am aware this is not an especially modern or rational way of seeing things. It is decidedly  unscientific. Just the other day, I heard a respected neurologist say in an interview, “The  creative process may seem magical, but it is not magic.”  

    With all due respect, I disagree.  

    I believe the creative process is both magical and magic.  

    Because here is what I choose to believe about how creativity functions: I believe that our planet  is inhabited not only by animals and plants and bacteria and viruses, but also by ideas. Ideas are  a disembodied, energetic life form. They are completely separate from us, but capable of  interacting with us—albeit strangely. Ideas have no material body, but they do have  consciousness, and they most certainly have will. Ideas are driven by a single impulse: to be  made manifest. And the only way an idea can be made manifest in our world is through  collaboration with a human partner. It is only through a human’s efforts that an idea can be  escorted out of the ether and into the realm of the actual.  

    Therefore, ideas spend eternity swirling around us, searching for available and willing human  partners. (I’m talking about all ideas here – artistic, scientific, industrial, commercial, ethical,  religious, political.) When an idea thinks it has found somebody – say, you – who might be able  to bring it into the world, the idea will pay you a visit. It will try to get your attention. Mostly,  you will not notice. This is likely because you’re so consumed by your own dramas, anxieties,  distractions, insecurities, and duties that you aren’t receptive to inspiration. You might miss the  signal because you’re watching TV, or shopping, or brooding over how angry you are at  somebody, or pondering your failures and mistakes, or just generally really busy. The idea will  try to wave you down (perhaps for a few moments; perhaps for a few months; perhaps even for a  few years), but when it finally realizes that you’re oblivious to its message, it will move on to  someone else.  

    But sometimes—rarely, but magnificently—there comes a day when you’re open and relaxed  enough to actually receive something. Your defenses might slacken and your anxieties might  ease, and then magic can slip through. The idea, sensing your openness, will start to do its work  on you. It will send the universal physical and emotional signals of inspiration (the chills up the  arms, the hair standing up on the back of the neck, the nervous stomach, the buzzy thoughts,  that feeling of falling into love or obsession). The idea will organize coincidences and portents to  tumble across your path, to keep your interest keen. You will start to notice all sorts of signs  pointing you toward the idea. Everything you see and touch and do will remind you of the idea.  The idea will wake you up in the middle of the night and distract you from your everyday  routine. The idea will not leave you alone until it has your fullest attention.  

    And then, in a quiet moment, it will ask, “Do you want to work with me?” At this point, you have  two options for how to respond. 

    WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU SAY NO  

    The simplest answer, of course, is just to say no.  

    Then you’re off the hook. The idea will eventually go away and—congratulations!—you don’t  need to bother creating anything.  

    To be clear, this is not always a dishonorable choice. True, you might sometimes decline  inspiration’s invitation out of laziness, angst, insecurity, or petulance. But other times you might  need to say no to an idea because it is truly not the right moment, or because you’re already  engaged in a different project, or because you’re certain that this particular idea has accidentally  knocked on the wrong door.  

    I have many times been approached by ideas that I know are not right for me, and I’ve politely  said no to them: “I’m honored by your visitation, but I’m not your girl. May I respectfully  suggest that you call upon, say, Barbara Kingsolver?” (I always try to use my most gracious  manners when sending an idea away; you don’t want word getting around the universe that  you’re difficult to work with.) Whatever your response, though, do be sympathetic to the poor  idea. Remember: All it wants is to be realized. It’s trying its best. It seriously has to knock on  every door it can.  

    So you might have to say no.  

    When you say no, nothing happens at all.  

    Mostly, people say no.  

    Most of their lives, most people just walk around, day after day, saying no, no, no, no, no.  Then again, someday you just might say yes.  

    WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU SAY YES  

    If you do say yes to an idea, now it’s show time.  

    Now your job becomes both simple and difficult. You have officially entered into a contract with  inspiration, and you must try to see it through, all the way to its impossible-to-predict outcome.  

    You may set the terms for this contract however you like. In contemporary Western civilization,  the most common 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.  

    If you choose to enter into a contract of creative suffering, you should try to identify yourself as  much as possible with the stereotype of the Tormented Artist. You will find no shortage of role  models. To honor their example, follow these fundamental rules: Drink as much as you possibly  can; sabotage all your relationships; wrestle so vehemently against yourself that you can come  up bloodied every time; express constant dissatisfaction with your work; jealously compete  against your peers; begrudge anybody else’s victories; proclaim yourself cursed (not blessed) by  your talents; attach your sense of self-worth to external rewards; be arrogant when you are  successful and self-pitying when you fail; honor darkness above light; die young; blame  creativity for having killed you. 

    Does it work, this method? Yeah, sure. It works great. Till it kills you.  

    So you can do it this way if you really want to. (By all means, do not let me or anyone else every  take away your suffering, if you’re committed to it!) But I’m not sure this route is especially  productive, or that it will bring you or your loved ones enduring satisfaction and peace. I will  concede that this method of creative living can be extremely glamorous, and it can make for an  excellent biopic after you die, so if you prefer a short life of tragic glamour to a long life of rich  satisfaction (and many do), knock yourself out.  

    However, I’ve always had the sense that the muse of the tormented artist—while the artist  himself is throwing temper tantrums—is sitting quietly in a corner of the studio, buffing its  fingernails, patiently waiting for the guy to calm down and sober up so everyone can get back to  work.  

    Because in the end, it’s all about the work, isn’t it? Or shouldn’t it be? And maybe there’s a  different way to approach it?  

    May I suggest one?  

    A DIFFERENT WAY  

    A different way is to cooperate fully, humbly, and joyfully with inspiration.  

    This is how I believe most people approached creativity for most of history, before we decided to  get all La Boheme about it. You can receive your ideas with respect and curiosity, not with  drama or dread. You can clear out whatever obstacles are preventing you from living your most  creative life, with the simple understanding that whatever is bad for you is probably also bad for  your work. 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 self-invented emotional  catastrophes. You can dare to be pleased sometimes with what you have created. (And if a  project doesn’t work out, you can always think of it as having been a worthwhile and  constructive experiment.) You can resist the seductions of grandiosity, blame, and shame. You  can support other people in their creative efforts, acknowledge 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 battle your demons (through therapy, recovery, prayer, or  humility) instead of battling your gifts —in part by realizing that your demons were never the  ones doing the work, anyhow. You can believe that you are neither a slave to inspiration nor its  master, but something far more interesting—its partner—and that the two of you are working  together toward something intriguing and worthwhile. 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.  

    That’s another way to do it. Totally up to you.  

    [pp 34-42] 

  • Excerpt from The War of Art
    By Steven Pressfield  

    When I finish a day’s work, I head up into the hills for a hike. I take a pocket tape recorder  because I know that as my surface mind empties with the walk, another part of me will chime in  and start talking.  

    The word “leer” on page 342... it should be “ogle”...  

    You repeated yourself in Chapter 21. The last sentence is just like that one in the middle of  Chapter 7. That’s the kind of stuff that comes. It comes to all of us, every day, every minute.  

    ... This process of self-revision and self-correction is so common we don’t even notice. But it’s a  miracle. And its implications are staggering.  

    Who’s doing this revising anyway? What force is yanking at our sleeves?  

    What does it tell us about the architecture of our psyches that, without our exerting effort or  even thinking about it, some voice in our head pipes up to counsel us (and counsel us wisely) on  how to do our work and live our lives? Whose voice is it? What software is grinding away,  scanning gigabytes, while we, our mainstream selves, are otherwise occupied?  

    Are these angels?  

    Are they muses?  

    Is this the Unconscious?  

    The Self?  

    Whatever it is, it’s smarter than we are. A lot smarter. It doesn’t need us to tell it what to do. It  goes to work all by itself. It seems to want to work. It seems to enjoy it.  

    What exactly is it doing? It’s organizing.  

    The principle of organization is built into nature. Chaos itself is self-organizing. Out of  primordial disorder, stars find their orbits; rivers make their way to the sea.  

    When we, like God, set out to create a universe—a book, an opera, a new business venture—the  same principle kicks in. Our screenplay resolves itself into a three-act structure; our symphony  takes shape into movements; our plumbing- supply venture discovers its optimum chain of  command. How do we experience this? By having ideas. Insights pop into our heads while we’re  shaving or taking a shower or even, amazingly, while we’re actually working. The elves behind  this are smart. If we forget something, they remind us. If we veer off-course, they trim the tabs  and steer us back.  

    What can we conclude from this?  

    Clearly some intelligence is at work, independent of our conscious mind and yet in alliance with  it, processing our material for us and alongside us.  

    This is why artists are modest. They know they’re not doing the work; they’re just taking  dictation. It’s also why “noncreative people” hate “creative people.” Because they’re jealous. 

    They sense that artists and writers are tapped into some grid of energy and inspiration that they  themselves cannot connect with.  

    Of course, this is nonsense. We’re all creative. We all have the same psyche. The same everyday  miracles are happening in all our heads day by day, minute by minute.  

    [pp 125-129] 

  • Excerpt from Your Mythic Journey
    By Sam Keen and Anne Valley-Fox 

    “I hadn’t seen Jane for years but her occasional letters were filled with echoes of darkness. I  thought about her often. So when I was in California on business I planned to visit her but I  didn’t call ahead of time. The day before I returned home I was driving through town where she  lived and stopped at a roadside phone booth to call her. There was no answer. I left the booth  and walked to a nearby gas station to use the men’s room. And there was Jane with a flat tire. A  coincidence? What does that mean? Though we didn’t know what to name the forces that  brought us together, we both knew the meeting had been arranged.”  

    Whether the world is intimate or impersonal, lawful or magical depends on your perspective.  World views are like glasses: they can be steel gray, rosy, or black and white. In the matter of  cosmic sight we all wear some kind of lenses.  

    Children and primitive people live in a personalized universe. They experience events as tailor made to match their needs. Omens, signs, and miracles flash forth from every tree and hilltop:  bushes burn and are not consumed; birds bring messages from the gods; among the Bushmen of  Africa, the stars (kinfolks of an earlier race now dwelling in the sky) guide the aim of the hunter;  the Hopi snake dance brings summer rains. In childhood we all live at the enchanted center of  things. We know that chairs trip us when we’re angry; we move through the forest and the  thicket opens automatically. The world is a conspiracy contrived to delight us.  

    But once we become mature we put away childish notions of magic, abandon the egocentric  perspective, and learn to observe the world with neutral eyes. We are encouraged to filter out the  voices that address us in the wind and rain, close off supernatural whisperings in dreams, and  become citizens of a universe that is unresponsive to intuitions. We adopt a skepticism that  becomes the fountain of what we narrowly identify as reason.  

    Fortunately, our sophistication does not prevent the world from going its magical way. Things  keep happening that jolt our minds; events bend themselves to fit our private needs; hunches  pan out; clairvoyant moments burst into daylight consciousness; prophetic dreams visit us in  spite of our skepticism; happy accidents, coincidences, or synchronicities are common as breath.  

    [pp 111-112] 

  • Excerpt from Bird by Bird
    By Anne Lamott  

    I like to think that Henry James said his classic line, “A writer is someone on whom nothing is  lost,” while looking for his glasses, and that they were on top of his head. We have so much to  remember these days. So we make all these lists, filled with hope that they will remind us of all  the important things to do and buy and mail, all the important calls we need to make, all the  ideas we have for short stories or articles. And yet by the time you get around to everything on  any one list, you’re already behind on another. Still, I believe in lists and I believe in taking  notes, and I believe in index cards for doing both.  

    I have index cards and pens all over the house—by the bed, in the bathroom, in the kitchen, by  the phones, and I have them in the glove compartment of my car. I carry one with me in my back  pocket when I take my dog for a walk. In fact, I carry it folded lengthwise, if you need to know,  so that, God forbid, I won’t look bulky. You may want to consider doing the same. I don’t even  know you, but I bet you have enough on your mind without having to worry about whether or  not you look bulky. So whenever I am leaving the house without my purse—in which there are  actual notepads, let alone index cards—I fold an index card lengthwise in half, stick it in my back  pocket along with a pen, and head out, knowing that if I have an idea, or see something lovely or  strange or for any reason worth remembering, I will be able to jot down a couple words to  remind me of it. Sometimes, if I overhear or think of an exact line of dialogue or a transition, I  write it down verbatim. I stick the card back in my pocket. I might be walking along the salt  marsh, or out at Phoenix Lake, or in the express line at Safeway, and suddenly I hear something  wonderful that makes me want to smile or snap my fingers—as if it has just come back to me— and I take out my index card and scribble it down.  

    ...Now, I have a number of friends who do not take notes out there in the world, who say it’s like  not taking notes in class but listening instead. I think that if you have the kind of mind that  retains important and creative thoughts—that is, if your mind still works—you’re very lucky and  you should not be surprised if the rest of us do not want to be around you. I actually have one  writer friend—whom I think I will probably be getting rid of soon—who said to me recently that  if you don’t remember it when you get home, it probably wasn’t that important. And I felt eight  years old again, with something important to say that had suddenly hopped down one of the  rabbit holes in my mind, while an adult nearby was saying priggishly, “Well! It must not have  been very important then.”  

    So you have to decide how you feel about this. You may have a perfectly good memory and be  able to remember three hours later what you came up with while walking on the mountain or  waiting at the dentist’s. And then again, you may not. If it feels natural, if it helps you to  remember it, take notes. It’s not cheating. It doesn’t say anything about your character. If your  mind is perhaps the merest bit disorganized, it probably just means that you’ve lost a little  ground. It may be all those drugs you took when you were younger, all that nonhabit-forming  marijuana that you smoked on a daily basis for twenty years. It may be that you’ve had children.  When a child comes out of your body, it arrives with about a fifth of your brain clutched in its  little hand, like those babies born clutching IUDs. So for any number of reasons, it’s only fair to  let yourself take notes.  

    My index-card life is not efficient or well organized. Hostile, aggressive students insist on asking  what I do with all my index cards. And all I can say is that I have them, I took notes on them,  and the act of having written something down gives me a fifty-fifty shot at having it filed away  now in my memory. If I’m working on a book or an article, and I’ve taken some notes on index  cards, I keep them with that material, paperclip them to a page of rough draft where that idea or  image might bring things to life. Or I stack them on my desk along with the pages for the  particular chapter or article I’m working on, so I can look at them. When I get stuck or lost or 

    the jungle drums start beating in my head, proclaiming that the jig is about to be up and I don’t  know what I’m doing and the well has run dry, I’ll look through my index cards. I try to see if  there’s a short assignment on any of them that will get me writing again, give me a small sense  of confidence, help me put down one damn word after another, which is, let’s face it, what  writing finally boils down to.  

    [pp 133-138] 

  • Excerpt from The Creative Habit
    By Twyla Tharp  

    The first steps of a creative act are like groping in the dark: random and chaotic, feverish and  fearful, a lot of busy-ness with no apparent or definable end in sight. There is nothing yet to  research. For me, these moments are not pretty. I look like a desperate woman, tortured by the  simple message thumping away in my head: “You need an idea.” It’s not enough for me to walk  into a studio and start dancing, hoping that something good will come of my aimless cavorting  on the studio floor. Creativity doesn’t generally work that way for me. (The rare times when it  has stand out like April blizzards.) You can’t just dance or paint or write or sculpt. Those are just  verbs. You need a tangible idea to get you going. The idea, however minuscule, is what turns the  verb into a noun – paint into a painting, sculpt into sculpture, write into writing, dance into a  dance.  

    Even though I look desperate, I don’t feel desperate, because I have a habitual routine to keep  me going.  

    I call it scratching. You know how you scratch away at a lottery ticket to see if you’ve won? That’s  what I’m doing when I begin a piece. I’m digging through everything to find something. It’s like  clawing at the side of a mountain to get a toehold, a grip, some sort of traction to keep moving  upward and onward.  

    Scratching takes many shapes. A fashion designer is scratching when he visits vintage clothing  stores, studies music videos, and parks himself at a sidewalk café to see what the pedestrians are  wearing.  

    A film director is scratching when she grabs a flight to Rome, trusting that she will get her next  big idea in that inspiring city. The act of changing your environment is the scratch.  

    An architect is scratching when he walks through a rock quarry, studying the algebraic  connecting of fallen rocks or the surface of a rock wall, or the sweeping space of the quarry itself.  We see rocks; the architect sees space and feels texture and assesses building materials. All this  sensory input may yield an idea.  

    Scratching can look like borrowing or appropriating, but it’s an essential part of creativity. It’s  primal, and very private. It’s a way of saying to the gods, “Oh, don’t mind me, I’ll just wander  around in these back hallways...” and then grabbing that piece of fire and running like hell.  

    I’m often asked, “Where do you get your ideas?” This happens to anyone who is willing to stand  in front of an audience and talk about his or her work. The short answer is: everywhere. It’s like  asking “Where do you find the air you breathe?” Ideas are all around you. 

    I hesitate to wax eloquent about the omnipresence of ideas and how everything we need to make  something out of nothing – tell a story, design a building, hum a melody – already resides  within us in our experience, memories, taste, judgment, critical demeanor, humanity, purpose,  and humor. I hesitate because it is so blindingly obvious. If I’m going to be a cheerleader for  creative urge, let it be for something other than the oft-repeated notion that ideas are  everywhere.  

    [pp 94-96]  

  • Excerpt from Writing Down the Bones
    By Natalie Goldberg  

    It takes awhile for our experience to sift through our consciousness. For instance, it is hard to  write about being in love in the midst of a mad love affair. We have no perspective. All we can  say is, “I’m madly in love,” over and over again. It is also hard to write about a city we just  moved to; it’s not yet in our body. We don’t know our new home, even if we can drive to the  drugstore without getting lost. We have not lived through three winters there or seen the ducks  leave in fall and return to the lake in spring. Hemingway wrote about Michigan while sitting in a  café in Paris. “Maybe away from Paris I could write about Paris as in Paris I could write about  Michigan. I did not know it was too early for that because I did not know Paris well enough.”  

    Our senses by themselves are dumb. They take in experience, but they need the richness of  sifting for a while through our consciousness and through our whole bodies. I call this  “composting.” Our bodies are garbage heaps: we collect experience, and from the decomposition  of the thrown-out eggshells, spinach leaves, coffee grinds, and old steak bones of our minds  come nitrogen, heat, and very fertile soil. Out of this fertile soil bloom our poems and stories.  But this does not come all at once. It takes time. Continue to turn over and over the organic  details of your life until some of them fall through the garbage of discursive thoughts to the solid  ground of black soil.  

    When I have students who have written many pages and read them in class, and the writing is  not all necessarily good but I see that they are exploring their mind for material, I am glad. I  know those people will continue and are not just obsessed with “hot” writing, but are in the  process of practice. They are raking their minds and taking their shallow thinking and turning it  over. If we continue to work with this raw matter, it will draw us deeper and deeper into  ourselves, but not in a neurotic way. We will begin to see the rich garden we have inside us and  use that for writing.  

    Often I will stab many times at something I want to say. For instance, you can look in my  notebooks from August through December 1983 and see that I attempted several times a month  to write about my father dying. I was exploring and composting the material. Then suddenly,  and I can’t say how, in December I transfixed at the Croissant Express in Minneapolis and a long  poem about that subject poured out of me. All the disparate things I had to say were suddenly  fused with energy and unity—a bright red tulip out of the compost. Katagiri Roshi said: “Your  little will can’t do anything. It takes Great Determination. Great Determination doesn’t mean  just you making an effort. It means the whole universe is behind you and with you—the birds,  trees, sky, moon, and ten directions.” Suddenly, after much composting, you are in alignment  with the star or the moment or the dining-room chandelier above your head, and your body  opens and speaks. 

    Understanding this process cultivates patience and produces less anxiety. We aren’t running  everything, not even the writing we do. At the same time, we must keep practicing. It is not an  excuse to not write and sit on the couch eating bonbons. We must continue to work the compost  pile, enriching it and making it fertile so that something beautiful may bloom and so that our  writing muscles are in good shape to ride the universe when it moves through us.  

    This understanding also helps us to accept someone else’s success and not to be too greedy. It is  simply that person’s time. Ours will come in this lifetime or the next. No matter. Continue to practice.  

    [pp 18-20] 

  • Excerpt from Big Magic
    By Elizabeth Gilbert 

    The most important thing to understand about eudaimonia – about that exhilarating encounter  between a human being and divine creative inspiration – is that you cannot expect it to be there  for you all the time.  

    It will come and go, and you must let it come and go.  

    I know this personally, because my genius – whatever it comes from – does not keep regular  hours. My genius, for what he is worth, does not work on human time and he certainly doesn’t  arrange his schedule around my convenience. Sometimes I suspect that my genius might be  moonlighting on the side as someone else’s genius – maybe even working for a bunch of  different artists, like some kind of freelance creative contractor. Sometimes I grope around in  the dark, desperately looking for magical creative stimulus, and all I come up with is something  that feels like a damp washcloth.  

    And then suddenly – whoosh! – inspiration arrives, out of the clear blue sky.  And then – whoosh! – it is gone again.  

    …What I’m saying is this: If my plan is to sit around waiting for [an] unadulterated and  impassioned creative visitation, I may be waiting for a very long time. So I don’t sit around  waiting to write until my genius decides to pay me a visit. If anything, I have come to believe  that my genius spends a lot of time waiting around for me – waiting to see if I’m truly serious  about this line of work. I feel sometimes like my genius sits in the corner and watches me at my  desk, day after day, week after week, month after month, just to be sure I really mean it, just to  be sure I’m really giving this creative endeavor my whole-hearted effort. When my genius is  convinced that I’m not just messing around here, he may show up and offer assistance.  Sometimes that assistance will not arrive until two years into a project. Sometimes that  assistance will not last for more than ten minutes.  

    When that assistance does arrive – that sense of the moving sidewalk beneath my feet, the  moving sidewalk beneath my words – I am delighted, and I go along for the ride. In such  instances, I write like I am not quite myself. I lose track of time and space and self. While it’s  happening, I thank the mystery for its help. And when it departs, I let the mystery go, and I keep  on working diligently anyhow, hoping that someday my genius will reappear. 

    I work either way, you see – assisted or unassisted – because that is what you must do in order  to live a fully creative life. I work steadily, and I always thank the process. Whether I am touched  by grace or not, I thank creativity for allowing me to engage with it at all.  

    Because either way, it’s all kind of amazing – what we get to do, what we get to attempt, what we  sometimes get to commune with.  

    Gratitude, always.  

    Always, gratitude.  

    [pp 72-75]

Sources

Gilbert, Elizabeth. Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear. Riverhead Books, 2016.
Goldberg, Natalie. Writing Down the Bones. Shambhala, 1986.
Lamott, Anne. Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life. Anchor Books, 1995.
Pressfield, Steven. The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles. Black Irish Entertainment, 2002.
Tharp, Twyla. The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life. Simon & Schuster, 2003.

Erin Hallagan Clare8 Comments