Considering my new three Bs, I think it only fitting that my first biweekly (i.e., twice weekly) post be a Bookmark about my own Banal Magic’s starting point: Elizabeth Gilbert’s Big Magic.

Oh, and while Gilbert’s book is not a novel with a plot that can be spoiled, I still feel obligated to say, before I go any further, that, as with every Bookmark I will write, I am writing this post for those readers who have already read the book and/or for those who just don’t care about spoilers in general. So if you’d rather read a book before hearing/reading others’ opinions, well, go read the book! Then come back. I’ll be here. ^_^

</obligatory spoiler alert>

Anyways, what do I think about the book? How do I feel about it?

In a word: ambivalent.

In a few more words: I have a love-hate relationship with it.

Let’s start with the love.

The book starts right off the bat with a topic near and dear to my heart: courage. Gilbert asks, “Do you have the courage to bring forth the treasures that are hidden within you?” (loc 100). The framing of her question acknowledges upfront that the creative life is a courageous life. (Ralph Keyes does it even more explicitly, and about writing specifically, in his book, The Courage to Write.)

Speaking as a neurotic creative, what I sometimes need more than anything else is just to feel like there’s someone out there who understands that, yeah, this whole creative living thing is hard! Putting out one’s own creative work is, as one of Big Magic‘s headers puts it, “Scary, Scary, Scary” (loc 134). It’s much easier on the nerves to just colour in the lines of someone else‘s work (creative or otherwise). (That is, in fact, why adult colouring books are even a thing: colouring pictures that others have drawn, bypassing the terror — and the responsibility — of the blank canvas or page entirely, is soothing. >_<)

Best of all, Gilbert provides a way of thinking about how to deal with the inevitable fear that comes with leaning into one’s creativity. I don’t believe she’s the first to anthropomorphise emotions, turning them into characters — she’s certainly not the last (witness Pixar’s Inside Out) —, but her analogy of fear as a road trip companion — that one cannot ever get rid of XD — is to me both charming and helpful. (Personally, when I’m caught in the throes of anxiety, to help me cope with said anxiety, I often envision it as a character with crazy eyes ම_ම who is somehow behind the wheel of my metaphorical car [à la Cruella de Vil in the Disney animated movie One Hundred and One Dalmatians].)

Knowing that someone understands that pursuing a creative life is scary, and so doing it at all is the very definition of courage, is both a relief and a comfort. And the tip for how to address the scared part of you? A lovely bonus!

Another bonus is the way Gilbert doesn’t just give explicit permission to create (notably, without having to suffer All The Angst™), which may already be quite revelatory to some readers in and of itself, but goes further by exhorting her readers to cultivate a sense of personal entitlement, to have the shameless arrogance to create. As someone who lives in a society that still peddles the myth of the starving artist, I sometimes feel like, yes, I do need permission to do this crazy thing known as trying to live a creative life and since I am sometimes also nothing but a sad sack of self-doubt, it’d also be nice if someone told me, yes, I belong here in this creative arena and anyone who tells me otherwise can fuck off.

That’s what I love about Big Magic.

What I don’t love?

My biggest beef by far is arguably the main thrust of her book, the very reason behind the title: her insistence that there’s actually magic. Magic as a metaphor is helpful. Claiming magic is real is delusional.

To be fair, Gilbert does, in fact, say, “choose your delusion” (loc 2024). She makes no bones that she herself is choosing a delusion, that she is adhering to a belief system about creativity that is “entirely and unapologetically based upon magical thinking” (loc 316).

I can respect that she believes it — and I respect her even more for being unapologetic about it! After all, I have what some might call delusions of my own that I choose to “believe” so as to enable me to navigate the world as my best self (or, at least, as my better self ^^’).

However, I think her particular delusion is not only not helpful, it is in fact potentially harmful. (If I thought it harmless, I would just shrug my shoulders and say, “To each their own”.) Magical thinking is dangerous. Not being rooted in reality — the reality where real harm happens to real people — is dangerous.

Even if I were to allow that her magical thinking about creativity in particular doesn’t seem all that harmful (because it’s not like people are dying — or even close to dying —, amirite?), let me point out that it is still actually counterproductive to her entire project of helping others pursue their creativity, for it gets in the way of that very pursuit.

By externalising creativity — and even elevating it to the level of divinity, which gives said externality added weight —, one can be absolved of responsibility for not creating when one does not feel inspired because, oh, look, the creative spirit just isn’t there. One of Gilbert’s novels-to-be apparently stopped waiting for her to get her act together and write it, so it went away to a more receptive vessel — Ann Patchett — to pour its divine essence into and through (loc 529) her. So Gilbert couldn’t possibly write that novel because the inspiration for it had left her (loc 433). And so she didn’t. She stopped working on it.

Look, I’m not saying that Gilbert did not make the right choice in abandoning her efforts to write the novel that Patchett apparently ended up writing (some creative efforts should be abandoned), but the romance of her story — especially the kiss! (locs 465, 513) — both reinforces the idea that creatives must be conduits to some kind of magical muse and obscures the much more important point that one must still do the work of, you know, working, even when one does not feel the magic of said muse.

To be fair, Gilbert does acknowledge that our work doesn’t get done just by sitting on our duffs and waiting for magic to happen to us. She says:

Most of my writing life, to be perfectly honest, is not freaky, old-timey, voodoo-style Big Magic. Most of my writing life consists of nothing more than unglamorous, disciplined labor. I sit at my desk and I work like a farmer, and that’s how it gets done. (loc 596)

But Gilbert spends so much time talking about enchantment that I’m afraid the stronger takeaway of the book is not that one should proactively do the work of creating one’s art on the regular, but that one should just passively wait for the magical creative spirit to come a-calling whenever it feels like it.

It is doing the work, showing up at our writing desk, every day, that really matters. So that is what should be emphasised — not spirits of any flavour. It is not giving ourself an external being we can blame or credit for our creativity. It’s just sitting our ass down at our desk and doing the creative work.

(A small aside here to acknowledge that, no, of course, the creative process doesn’t have to involve sitting at a desk every day. There are just as many ways of creating as there are creatives. Some don’t sit at desks. Some don’t create daily. Whatever. However they do their work, on whatever cadence they do their work, working creatives work.)

It’s not the Muse. It’s not God. It’s not an impish sprite or a trickster god. It’s nothing supernatural or divine. It’s nothing extraordinary in that sense. It’s the ordinariness of a human being rolling up their sleeves and getting to work. Don’t get me wrong: what a human being can create can absolutely be extraordinary. The creative process, and even some of the creations themselves, can absolutely be magical — but only in the figurative sense, never in the literal sense.

It’s not Big Magic. It’s small magic. It’s banal magic.

Bibliography

Gilbert, Elizabeth. Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear. Ebook. New York: Penguin Random House, 2015.