In ‘Big Magic,’ Gilbert offers hope amid fear and self-doubt

“Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear” by Elizabeth Gilbert (Riverhead Books, 276 pages, $24.95)

Anyone who has ever contemplated some creative endeavor has heard the nagging voices of fear and self-doubt:

You have no talent.

You won’t be taken seriously.

Someone else already did it better.

You’ll be rejected, criticized, ridiculed or ignored.

Elizabeth Gilbert knows about those voices. She’s heard them, both before and after writing “Eat, Pray, Love,” her best-selling memoir that became a movie and a cultural phenomenon. She has felt fear, embraced it, learned to deal with it and continued on.

Her latest book, “Big Magic,” digs deep into the creative process and challenges readers to embrace their fears in order to live a creative life.

Correction: In order to live. Period. Because being creative is part of living, Gilbert would argue – always has been, always will be.

And creativity, she says, is more than a little bit magical.

Inspired in part by a 2009 TED Talk in which Gilbert mused on the crazy and impossible things we expect from artists, her new book is part pat-on-the-back, part slap-in-the-face, a permission slip for readers to stop making excuses and get to work.

“Some of the art that people have created across the centuries is absolutely sublime, and probably did emerge from a grand sense of seriousness and sacredness, but a lot of it didn’t,” Gilbert writes.

“A lot of it is just folks messing around for their own diversion – making their pottery a little prettier, or building a nicer chair, or drawing penises on walls to pass the time. And that’s fine, too.”

Reading Gilbert’s work is like talking to a girlfriend. Her words and tone encourage without being condescending. She’s practical, funny, and not afraid to share her own struggles and failures.

Through the years Gilbert has captured ideas and lost them, including one that may or may not have flitted off to inhabit the mind of Ann Patchett and become that author’s best-selling novel, “State of Wonder.” (Gilbert swears it did, and she’s happy about it.)

She has had work rejected. She has chopped away huge swaths of her writing to meet editors’ demands. She has battled perfectionism. She has worked for the man to pay the bills and kept writing to feed her soul.

“There’s no dishonor in having a job,” Gilbert says. “What is dishonorable is scaring away your creativity by demanding that it pay for your entire existence.”

Coming off her last novel, “The Signature of All Things,” whose protagonist is a 19th-century botanist, Gilbert’s new book is a fresh and modern surprise that fans of her work will relish.

“We are terrified, and we are brave. Art is a crushing chore and a wonderful privilege. Only when we are at our most playful can divinity finally get serious with us,” she writes.

“Make space for all these paradoxes to be equally true inside your soul, and I promise – you can make anything.”

This story was originally published September 24, 2015 at 7:08 PM with the headline "In ‘Big Magic,’ Gilbert offers hope amid fear and self-doubt."