Big Magic: The Chat
On sentient ideas and breaking out of the misery delusion
Lizzie: Ok! Where do you want to start? Maybe why and when you first read Big Magic? I was surprised to hear you were already a fan long ago.
Carrie: I read it maybe... two years ago, originally? I’ve lost all sense of time now so that might be wrong. But a friend I admire and whose writing I really enjoy recommended it. I was really struggling with anxiety and procrastination, especially on creative projects, and needed something to help unlock my brain. So I figured, why not this? “Why not” is indeed a great reason to read this book.
Lizzie: Haha I totally agree. I first read it also a couple (?) years ago, when my friend was moving and giving away some books, including this one.
Carrie: I love that our first encounters were both of the “why not/this was free” variety.
Lizzie: This is where we need to confront the elephant in this chat, which is Eat, Pray, Love.
Carrie: Getting right to it! Yes, let’s go there.
Lizzie: So Big Magic is written by Elizabeth Gilbert, who is also the author of mega-bestseller Eat, Pray, Love. This extremely earnest (and also extremely white and privileged) memoir turned her into a guru for many but also a cultural punchline for, I hate to say it, people like us. I wasn’t interested in Eat, Pray, Love and even less interested in the person who wrote it until—and I know this exactly—April 2016, when Elizabeth Gilbert was on the Longform podcast.
Carrie: I’ll admit up front that I’m the classic Eat, Pray, Love hater: never read it, never saw the movie, use the punchline often. Is that fair? No. Is it understandable? I think even Elizabeth Gilbert herself would agree, yes.
Lizzie: Oh she would definitely agree.
Carrie: Which is part of her charm! But anyway, continue.
Lizzie: So Liz (let’s just call her Liz) is on this podcast I have listened to for years, about longform journalism. True heads know that before Eat, Pray, Love, Liz was a very successful and widely respected magazine journalist, and the interview talks about some of her stories from that period, but also about her transition away from that phase of her career and into the Eat, Pray, Love era—and also her transition out of that madness and into an artistic and creative existence that is much more, well, normal. I found her to be so insightful and inspiring, especially about how she managed not to get crushed by bananas success, that I immediately bought and read Eat, Pray, Love, something I thought I would never, ever do. But I guess I still found it a little embarrassing, hence the only jumping on Big Magic when it was free.
Carrie: It’s okay, this is a safe space. I didn’t know you’d read it! The truth comes out!
Lizzie: I liked it! Some parts are better than others (Italy > Bali, by a million miles), but she’s the kind of writer whose voice is just very pleasant to hang out with, which is also key to Big Magic’s charms. We’ve also both read the novel she wrote after Eat, Pray, Love, which is called The Signature of All Things and is AN AMAZING BOOK, hands down, no embarrassment or hedging. I love it so much.
Carrie: I can see that! Her voice is one of the things I enjoyed about Big Magic also. And yes, I loved The Signature of All Things. Tore through it. I loved how vivid it was; I found myself just really getting lost in it.
Lizzie: It was also a wild swerve, in that it is a doorstop of a novel about a 19th-century female botanist studying mosses. The fact that THAT was Liz’s follow-up to Eat, Pray, Love made me a hundred times more interested in her. [Editor’s note: She actually wrote another book in between, another memoir called Committed.] And then came Big Magic. Readers may remember that I called it “completely deranged,” and here’s why: Big Magic is a book about “creative living,” and its driving principle is that ideas are sentient entities. Lest anyone think I’m kidding or exaggerating, here is a quote: “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 is our world is through collaboration with a human partner.”
Carrie: That is the central argument, yes! And one of maybe three ideas that has stuck with me after both readings. Probably because it is a bit deranged. But memorable!
Lizzie: Before we dive into this, what are the other ideas that have stuck with you?
Carrie: The one that helped me out a lot the first time is externalizing and anthropomorphizing your fear. (I feel like I should put the disclaimer “somewhat embarrassingly” on that admission, but instead I’ll just literally take a page out of Liz Gilbert’s book and just lean right on into it.) There’s a section where she imagines the beginning of creative projects as her going on a road trip with creativity and fear both in the car, and giving fear some ground rules for what it is and isn’t allowed to do along the way. I remember that was the first time I’d really thought about my anxiety as some sort of separate entity that could be addressed—I’m not much for, say, talking to myself or doing affirmations in the mirror, so it was a new one for me. And crazily, it really helped! I did what she did: sat down and wrote a letter to it. I didn’t think that would do ANYTHING for me and somehow it did. Kind of like writing an angry letter to someone you hate that you know you’ll never send? But you just need to get it out?
Lizzie: Yes! I recently did a yoga class where the teacher said almost the exactly same thing about fear (to the point where I think she must have been ripping off Big Magic), and I cried.
Carrie: You cried!!! I love it. This is so validating.
Lizzie: If the last year hasn’t turned you into a person who cries in yoga class, Big Magic may not be for you. But if you are—and truly, who isn’t at this point?—you will probably love it.
Carrie: Blurb that and put it on the back, Liz.
Lizzie: Before we get back to the “sentient ideas” thing, I’ll also say that I so appreciate her unapologetic embrace of fun and joy in the creative process, when so many of us feel that is it, and should be, dark and painful.
Carrie: Absolutely. That’s the other one that I keep coming back to, and that has honestly changed so much about the way I think about my work. The process doesn’t have to suck! That’s not a sign of legitimacy! It’s just a buzzkill. This after decades of making writing in particular the most painful, drawn out affair. Surprise, not a requirement!
Lizzie: Yes! Being hard is not the same thing as destroying you. It’s just hard sometimes, and that’s ok. Other times it’ s pretty easy, and that’s also great!
Carrie: Yes! “Working hard” and “feeling like shit” aren’t the same part of the Venn diagram. In fact, they might be mutually exclusive? Hot take? I love working hard, as it turns out, when I’m not simultaneously torturing myself.
Lizzie: Is this something all millennials need to unlearn?
Carrie: I don’t know about that, but I think it’s something all of the people we shared high school English classes with need to unlearn.
Lizzie: Haha yes, definitely. What do you think of the sentient ideas?
Carrie: My instinctive reaction is to make an ehhhhhh sound, if that tells you anything.
Lizzie: I was right there with you on my first read, but then on my mid-pandemic, post-book deal re-read, I was shocked to find myself completely convinced of its truth.
Carrie: It’s not that I think it’s completely insane — it’s just not the way I think about things. Not for me, but I can absolutely see why it works for people (including, I guess, you). I’ve never been able to get on board with the idea of any sort of muse, and this feels like a cousin of that concept. Just doesn’t do it for me. That being said, I do believe in a benevolent force that ties us all together—people, animals, nature, etc—which is absolutely not any less weird or woo woo, and I respect that. The feeling of being creatively in the zone is a) one of my favorite things about being alive and b) to me, a sign that I’m aligned with that benevolent force, which sounds bonkers, and that’s fine! No less bonkers than sentient ideas, at least. One sister’s sentient idea is another sister’s spiritual alignment, I suppose.
Lizzie: Haha indeed. I guess I was convinced by sentient ideas this time because I’ve had many of the experiences she describes—the electric current of one hitting you; all the signs in the universe pointing you back to it; the way an idea whose time is right starts to pop up everywhere (which is definitely happening with my book idea)—but I had, for reasons I can’t quite explain, interpreted them as bad signs.
Carrie: Interesting!
Lizzie: Especially after I signed the book contract and started to work on the first chapter, I felt so much energy every morning, and somehow I became convinced that it was a sign that my book was the wrong path and this energy was telling me to write a novel (something I’ve never done and I’m certainly not being paid to do, the way I’m being paid to write the nonfiction book I sold). Reading Big Magic at that moment helped me reorient that and say, no, this is your book talking to you. This is your book wanting to work with you.
Carrie: Aww! Haha. What do you think is behind this impulse to assume it was a bad thing?
Lizzie: I guess this is part of the “writing must suck” delusion. If it’s fun and I feel inspired, it must be by something I’m not actually doing! I also think it’s totally natural that other ideas will try to seduce you away from your idea of the moment, because yeah, writing is hard and can be boring a lot of the time. Reconceiving the strength it takes to stay with your idea as being part of an interaction and a relationship, rather than a solitary force of will, is helping me.
Carrie: Well said! I like that a lot. I almost always go through something similar when starting a new project, that feeling of “wait, what about this OTHER thing???” You’ve found a way to frame it much more kindly than I have, though. I just think it’s anxiety cropping up to pull me away from whatever I’m doing, and trying to create the pressure I always thought I needed to be effective, but it turns out was just a sham designed to make me miserable for no real reason. Knowing that it’s a sham makes it much easier to resist—“Oh, I don’t have to feel panicked in order to make this happen. I can do it calmly and methodically, and the work will be better for it.” Going back to the idea that misery isn’t a secret ingredient.
Lizzie: That’s great! Another crucial part of sentient ideas for me is that it turns my job into “showing up.” What happens after I show up isn’t the point, and it’s not something that’s entirely under my control. I just have show up for my idea and trust that eventually it will also show up for me.
Carrie: You have been excellent about that part of your job in the pandemic, I must say. I’m really impressed.
Lizzie: “Showing up” is everywhere for me during the pandemic, I guess because of how quarantine has made it 100% clear and undeniable that it’s the only thing I can control.
Carrie: Yup, talk about a punchline. “Surprise! Nothing is anything! Good luck!”
Lizzie: The whole world was a lie! Have fun!! In that spirit, something I see happening in the pandemic world is that Work and Jobs are being treated and recognized as pointless drudgery. Which, to be clear, I agree with 100%. But it’s also completely the wrong mindset to give into when I have to write a whole book.
Carrie: Haha yes, not the most effective in your situation, no matter how correct it may be. As someone who is about to start an extremely exciting and extremely demanding full-time job, I empathize. [Editor’s note: Carrie works at Netflix now!!] The dream job is no job, but here we are.
Lizzie: I have to LOVE this book, and I have LOVE this process. Big Magic is about figuring out how to infuse the drudgery with inspiration, in the face of all evidence to the contrary. If I have to believe in sentient ideas for a while in order to get there, I will.
Carrie: Yes! Instead of losing yourself to the misery delusion. Seems fair enough. Also, I appreciate that it seems like Liz Gilbert has a pretty healthy sense of humor about Being Liz Gilbert. That seems like the only way to experience mega-fame and come out of it even remotely functional. As someone who’s cared less and less lately about being known for anything or having any sort of public profile (even just online, among friends real and imagined), I found her focus on process over recognition very meaningful. As we’ve discussed ad nauseam by this point, I’ve taken a hard turn away from social media and the internet as a whole over the past couple of years. I’ve subsequently realized that—at least for me—relieving myself of that pressure (which I didn’t even know was there!) let me figure out the work I’m supposed to be doing. Whereas previously, I assumed that the internet and social media in particular had to be part of that work in order for it to mean anything. So the Big Magic focus on “show up how you show up,” on staying in your process rather than getting attached to the outcome, really resonates with me these days. And also, that your process doesn’t have to look like anyone else’s! And that’s great!
Lizzie: Social performances are over. All we have is how we approach being alive every day.
Final editor’s note: There’s also a Big Magic podcast, called Magic Lessons, in which Liz coaches normies through their creative projects and challenges. My favorite episode is called “Living the Dream and Facing the Nightmare,” which is about the particular struggles of being a professional author, someone who has had some creative success already and has to figure out how to keep going. There are only two seasons of the show so it’s a very doable listen!
Also, Carrie is off social media now but you can subscribe to her newsletter here.