I’m probably not the target audience for this book—I’m not particularly looking for encouragement in creative pursuits—but my fiancé got a copy as a gift and I ended up picking it up from the shelf while waiting for a library hold on a different book to come in. Gilbert’s tone is conversational and engaging, and she tells lots of great stories about her own writing life, and about the artistic pursuits of others, all under the broad themes of Courage, Enchantment, Permission, Persistence, Trust, and Divinity.
Early in the book, she defines “creative living” as “living a life that is driven more strongly by curiosity than by fear” (9). Later in the book, she returns to the idea of curiosity—noting that she thinks that telling someone to follow their curiosity is better than telling them to follow their passion, since passion may feel too big or intimidating or people may not know what theirs is, whereas with curiosity, you can start small and see where it takes you. I like that, and I liked Gilbert’s own story about following her curiosity, when she realized she was interested in gardening (though she never had been previously). She talks about how she planted a garden, then found herself doing research to find out where the plants in her garden came from. She then realized she was interested not so much in the “garden itself, but the botanical history behind it—a wild and little-known tale of trade and adventure and global intrigue,” which ended up being the subject of one of her novels (243).
Gilbert is big on choosing to look at things in ways that make things easier for yourself, not harder for yourself, which makes a lot of sense to me. Like: she rejects the idea of the tortured artist/thinks that “too many creative people have been taught to distrust pleasure” (209). She talks about interpreting certain situations in certain ways, like when she writes about how a story she submitted was rejected, then later ended up being accepted by the same person for the same publication. The accepted story was submitted by Gilbert’s agent, and she talks about how she could have a negative interpretation of this, thinking that “it’s who you know” that matters, rather than talent (193). But as she puts it, she would rather take it as proof that “miraculous turns of fate can happen to those who persist in showing up” (ibid.) (As she also points out, she doesn’t know the other circumstances around the initial rejection or later acceptance: maybe the first time around, her story was read at the end of a long and difficult day; maybe the second time around, the person reading it was in a great mood.) Even some things she chooses to believe that may seem bonkers (ahem, like the idea that ideas have their own “will” and “consciousness”(35)) can be seen in this same spirit: if you start with the idea that there is an abundance of ideas and that the right one will come to you, your experience of creativity may end up being less pressured, more full of a sense of wonder.
I like how much joy there is in this book, whether Gilbert is advising readers to “Sneak off and have an affair with your most creative self” (161) or talking about a woman she knew who became an expert in ancient Mesopotamian history at the age of eighty or relating a story about a guy in a lobster costume. And now I kind of want to read that novel that Gilbert wrote that came from her curiosity about plants!
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