Your elusive creative genius - Elizabeth Gilbert

[Music] [Applause]

I am a writer. Writing books is my profession, but it's more than that, of course. It is also my great lifelong love and fascination, and I don't expect that that's ever going to change. But that said, um, something kind of peculiar has happened recently in my life and in my career which has caused me to have to sort of recalibrate my whole relationship with this work.

Um, the peculiar thing is that I recently wrote this book, this memoir called Eat Pray Love, um, which decidedly, unlike any of my previous books, um, went out in the world for some reason and became this big mega sensation, international bestseller thing. The result of which is that everywhere I go now, people treat me like I'm doomed. Um, seriously doomed, doomed, like they come up to me now, like all worried, and they say, “Aren't you afraid? Um, aren't you afraid you're never going to be able to top that? Um, aren't you afraid you're going to keep writing for your whole life and you're never again going to create a book that anybody in the world cares about at all ever again?” So that's reassuring, you know, um, but it would be worse, except for that I happen to remember that over 20 years ago, when I first started telling people when I was a teenager that I wanted to be a writer, I was met with this same kind of sort of fear-based reaction.

People would say, “Aren't you afraid you're never going to have any success? Aren't you afraid the humiliation of rejection will kill you? Aren't you afraid that you're going to work your whole life at this craft and nothing's ever going to come of it and you're going to die on a scrap heap of broken dreams with your mouth filled with bitter ash of failure?” Like that, you know? And um, the short answer to all those questions is yes. Um, yes, I'm afraid of all those things, and I always have been. And I'm afraid of many, many more things besides that, you know? People can't even guess at, like, um, seaweed and other things that are scary.

But when it comes to writing, um, the thing that I've been sort of thinking about lately and wondering about lately is why, you know? Is it rational? Is it logical that, um, anybody should be expected to be afraid of the work that they feel they were put on this Earth to do, you know? Um, and what is it specifically about creative ventures that seems to make us really nervous about each other's mental health in a way that other careers kind of don't, you know?

Like my dad, for example, was a chemical engineer, and um, I don't recall once in his 40 years of chemical engineering anybody asking him if he was afraid to be a chemical engineer, you know? It just didn't come like, “Get chemical engineering, blah blah blah, John, you know? How's it going?” And um, it just didn't come up like that, you know? But to be fair, right, um, chemical engineers as a group, you know, haven't really earned a reputation over the centuries for being alcoholic manic depressives. Um, and we writers, you know, we kind of do have that reputation.

And not just writers, but creative people across all genres, it seems, have this reputation for being enormously mentally unstable. Um, and you know, all you have to do is look at the very grim death count in the 20th century alone of of really magnificent creative minds who died young and often at their own hands, you know? Um, and even the ones who didn't literally commit suicide seem to be really undone by their gifts, you know? Um, Norman Mailer, just before he died, in his last interview, he said, “Every one of my books has killed me a little more.” An extraordinary statement to make about your life's work, you know?

But we don't even blink when we hear somebody say this because we've heard that kind of stuff for so long, and somehow we've completely internalized and accepted collectively this notion that creativity and suffering are somehow inherently linked and that artistry in the end will always ultimately lead to anguish. And the question that I want to ask everybody here today is, um, are you guys all cool with that idea? Like, are you comfortable with that?

Because, um, you look at it even from an inch away and you know, I'm not at all comfortable with that assumption. I think it's odious, and I also think it's dangerous, and I don't want to see it perpetuated into the next century. I think it's better if we encourage, you know, our great creative minds to live, you know? Um, and I definitely know that in in my case, in my situation, um, it would be very dangerous for me to start sort of leaking down that dark path of assumption, you know? Particularly given the circumstance that I'm in right now in my career, which is, you know, like check it out, I'm pretty young—I'm only about 40 years old. I still have maybe another four decades of work left in me, and it's exceedingly likely that anything I write from this point forward is going to be judged by the world as the work that came after the freakish success of my last book, right?

Um, I should just put it bluntly because we're all sort of friends here now—it’s exceedingly likely that my greatest success is behind me, you know? Um, so Jesus, what a thought, you know? Like, that's the kind of thought that could lead a person to start drinking gin at 9:00 in the morning, and you know I don't want to go there, you know?

I would prefer to keep doing this work that I love, and so the question becomes how, you know? And so it seems to me, upon a lot of reflection, that the way that I have to work now in order to continue writing is that I have to create some sort of protective psychological construct, right? I have to sort of find some way to have a safe distance, you know, between me as I am writing and my very natural anxiety about what the reaction to that writing is going to be from now on.

And as I've been looking over the last year for like models for how to do that, I've been sort of looking across time, and I've been trying to find like other societies to see if they might have had better and saner ideas than we have about how to help, um, creative people sort of manage the inherent emotional risks of um, of creativity. And that search has led me to ancient Greece and ancient Rome. Um, so stay with me because it does circle around back, but um, ancient Greece and ancient Rome, people did not happen to believe that creativity came from human beings back then, okay?

People believed that creativity was this divine attendant spirit that came to human beings from some distant and unknowable source for distant and unknowable reasons. The Greeks famously called these divine attendant spirits of creativity “daemons.” Socrates famously believed that he had a daemon who spoke wisdom to him from afar. The Romans had the same idea, but they called that sort of disembodied creative spirit a genius. Um, which is great because the Romans did not actually think that a genius was a particularly clever individual. They believed that a genius was this sort of magical divine entity um, who was believed to literally live in the walls of an artist's studio, kind of like Dobby the house elf, um, and who would come out and sort of invisibly assist the artists with their work and would shape the outcome of that work.

So brilliant! There it is right there—that distance that I'm talking about—that psychological construct to protect you from the results of your work, you know? Um, and everyone knew that this is how it functioned, right? So the ancient artist was protected from certain things, like for example, too much narcissism, right? If your work was brilliant, you couldn't take all the credit for it. Everybody knew you had this like disembodied genius who had helped you. If your work bombed, not entirely your fault, you know?

Um, everyone knew your genius was kind of lame, and uh, this is how people thought about creativity in the West for a really long time. And then the Renaissance came and everything changed, and we had this big idea, and the big idea was let's put the individual human being at the center of the universe, right above all gods and mysteries, and there's no more room for like mystical creatures who take dictation from the divine. And it's the beginning of rational humanism, and um, people started to believe that creativity came completely from the self of the individual. And for the first time in history, you start to hear people referring to this or that artist as being a genius rather than having a genius.

And I got to tell you, I think that was a huge error, you know? I think that allowing somebody, like one mere person, to believe that he or she is like the vessel, you know? Like the font and the essence and the source of all divine creative unknowable eternal mystery is just like a smidge too much responsibility to put on one fragile human psyche. It's like asking somebody to swallow the sun, you know? It just completely warps and distorts egos, and it creates all these unmanageable expectations about performance, and I think the pressure of that has been killing off our artists for the last 500 years.

And um, if this is true—and I think it is true—the question becomes, you know, what now? You know? Can we do this differently? Maybe go back to some more ancient understanding about the relationship between humans and the creative mystery? Um, maybe not, you know? Like, um, maybe we can't just erase 500 years of rational humanistic thought in one 18-minute speech. Um, and there's probably people in this audience who would raise like really legitimate scientific suspicions about the notion of basically fairies who follow people around like rubbing fairy juice on their projects and stuff. Like I'm not probably going to bring you all along with me on this, um, but the question that I kind of want to pose is, you know, why not?

Um, why not think about it this way? Because it makes as much sense as anything else I have ever heard in terms of explaining the utter maddening capriciousness of the creative process—a process which, as anybody who has ever tried to make something, which is to say as basically everyone here knows, does not always behave rationally and in fact can sometimes feel downright paranormal.

Um, I had this encounter recently where I met the extraordinary American poet Ruth Stone, who's now in her 90s, but she's been a poet her entire life and she told me that when she was growing up in rural Virginia, she would be out working in the fields and she said she would like feel and hear a poem coming at her from over the landscape. And she said it was like a thunderous train of air and it would come barreling down at her over the landscape, and when she felt it coming—because it would like shake the earth under her feet—she knew that she had only one thing to do at that point, and that was to, in her words, run like hell. And she would like run like hell to the house, and she'd be getting chased by this poem.

And the whole deal was that she had to get to a piece of paper and a pencil fast enough so that when it thundered through her, she could collect it and, um, and grab it on the page. And other times she wouldn't be fast enough, so she'd be like running and running and running and she wouldn't get to the house and the poem would like barrel through her and she would miss it. And she said it would continue on across the landscape looking, as she put it, for another poet.

And um, and then there were these times—this is the piece I never forgot—she said that there were moments when she would almost miss it, right? So she's like running into the house and she's looking for the paper and the poem passes through her, and she grabs a pencil just as it's going through her, and then she said it was like she would reach out with her other hand and she would catch it—she would catch the poem by its tail and she would pull it backwards into her body as she was transcribing on the page, and in these instances, the poem would come up on the page perfect and intact, but backwards from the last word to the first.

So when I heard that, I was like—that's un, you know, that's uncanny. That's exactly what my creative process is like. It's not at all what my creative process—I'm not the pipeline, you know? Like I'm a mule, and the way that I have to work is that I have to get up at the same time every day and like sweat and labor and like barrel through it really awkwardly. But even I, in my mulishness, even I have brushed up against that thing, you know, at times.

Um, and I would imagine that a lot of you have too, you know? Like even I have had work or ideas come through me from a source that I honestly cannot identify. And what is that thing, and how are we to relate to it in a way that will not make us lose our mind, but in fact might actually keep us sane?

And for me, the best contemporary example that I have of how to do that, um, is the musician Tom Waits, who I got to interview, um, several years ago on a magazine assignment, and we were talking about this. And you know, you know Tom. I mean, for most of his life, he was pretty much the embodiment of the tormented contemporary modern artist, you know? Like trying to control and manage and dominate these sort of uncontrollable creative impulses, you know, that were totally internalized.

But then he got older and he got calmer, and one day he was driving down the freeway in Los Angeles, he told me, and this is when it all changed for him. And, um, and he's like speeding along, and all of a sudden, he hears this little fragment of melody, you know, that comes into his head, as inspiration often comes—elusive and tantalizing—and he wants it, you know? It's gorgeous, and he longs for it, but he has no way to get it. He doesn't have a piece of paper, he doesn't have a pencil, he doesn't have a tape recorder, so he starts to feel all that old anxiety start to rise in him, like I'm going to lose this thing, you know? Um, and I'm going to be haunted by this song forever, and I'm not good enough, and I can't do it.

And instead of panicking, he just stopped. He just stopped that whole mental process and he did something completely novel. Um, he just looked up at the sky and he said, “Excuse me, can you not see that I'm driving? Do I look like I can write down a song right now? You know, if you really want to exist, come back at a more opportune moment when I can take care of you. Otherwise go bother somebody else today. Go bother Leonard Cohen.” You know?

And um, his whole work process changed after that—not the work—the work was still like oftentimes as dark as ever, you know? But the process and the heavy anxiety around it was released when he took the genius out of him, where it was causing nothing but trouble, and released it kind of back where it came from, and realized that this didn't have to be this internalized tormented thing. It could be this peculiar wondrous bizarre collaboration, kind of conversation between Tom and the strange external thing that was not quite Tom.

So when I heard that story, it started to shift a little bit the way that I worked too, and it already saved me once, this idea. It saved me when I was in the middle of writing Eat Pray Love and I fell into one of those sort of pits of despair that we all fall into when we're working on something and it's not coming, and you start to think, “This is going to be a disaster. This is going to be the worst book ever written.” Not just bad, but the worst book ever written. And um, I started to think I should just dump this project, you know?

Um, but then I remembered Tom talking to the open air, and I tried it. Um, so I just lifted my face up from the manuscript, and I directed my comments to an empty corner of the room, and I said aloud, “Uh, listen, you thing, um, you and I both know that if this book isn't brilliant, that is not entirely my fault, right? Because you can see that I am putting everything I have into this, you know? I don't have any more than this, so if you want it to be better, then you got to show up and do your part of the deal, okay?

But if you don't do that, you know what? The hell with it. I'm going to keep writing anyway because that's my job. And I would please like to reflect today that I showed up for my part of the job, because thank you.”

In the end, it's like this: okay, centuries ago in the deserts of North Africa, people used to gather for these moonlight dances of sacred dance and music that would go on for hours and hours until dawn—and they were always magnificent because the dancers were professionals and they were terrific, right? But every once in a while, very rarely, something would happen, and one of these performers would actually become transcendent. And I know you know what I'm talking about because I know you've all seen at some point in your life a performance like this, you know?

And it was like time would stop, and the dancer would sort of step through some kind of portal, and he wasn't doing anything different than he had ever done, you know, a thousand nights before, but everything would align, and all of a sudden he would no longer appear to be merely human, you know? He would be like lit from within and lit from below and all like lit up on fire with divinity. And when this happened back then, people knew it for what it was, you know? They called it by its name. They would put their hands together and they would start to chant, “Allah! Allah! Allah! God! God! God! That's God!”

You know, um, curious historical footnote: when the Moors invaded southern Spain, they took this custom with them and the pronunciation changed over the centuries from “Allah! Allah! Allah!” to “Olay! Olay!” which you still hear in bullfights and in flamenco dances in Spain when a performer has done something impossible and magic. “Allah! Olay! Olay! Allah!” Magnificent! Bravo! Incomprehensible! There it is, a glimpse of God—which is great because we need that.

But the tricky bit comes the next morning, right, for the dancer himself when he wakes up and discovers that it's Tuesday at 11:00 a.m. and he's no longer a glimpse of God. Um, he's just an aging mortal with really bad knees, and you know, maybe he's never going to ascend to that height again, and maybe nobody will ever chant God's name again as he spins. And what is he then to do with the rest of his life?

This is hard. This is one of the most painful reconciliations to make in a creative life, you know? Um, but maybe it doesn't have to be quite so full of anguish if you never happened to believe in the first place that the most extraordinary aspects of your being came from you. But maybe if you just believe that they were on loan to you, you know, from some unimaginable source for some exquisite portion of your life to be passed along when you're finished with somebody else.

And you know, if we think about it this way, it starts to change everything, you know? This is how I've started to think, and this is certainly how I was thinking about it in the last few months, you know, as um, I've been working on the book that will soon be published as the dangerously frighteningly over-anticipated follow-up to my um, freakish success.

Um, and what I have to sort of keep telling myself when I get really psyched out about that is, um, don't be afraid. Don't be daunted. Just do your job. Continue to show up for your piece of it, whatever that might be. If your job is to dance, do your dance. If the divine cockeyed genius assigned to your case decides to let some sort of wonderment be glimpsed for just one moment through your efforts, then “Olay!” And if not, do your dance anyhow, and “Olay” to you nonetheless!

I believe this, and I feel like we must teach it. Olay to you nonetheless just for having the sheer human love and stubbornness to keep showing up. Thank you!

[Applause] Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!