Big Magic

Big Magic Plot Summary

Introduction

When Elizabeth Gilbert was in her twenties, she made a solemn vow to her creative life. Standing alone in her bedroom one night, she got down on her knees and swore her fidelity to writing for the rest of her natural life. Unlike many dramatic promises made in youth, this one she actually kept. Through years of waiting tables, through rejection letters and small successes, through love and heartbreak, she maintained her devotion to creativity above all else. Not with the expectation of success or fame, but with something far more precious: the commitment to live a creative life simply because it made her feel alive. This devotion to creativity as a way of life rather than a means to an end forms the heart of what creative living truly means. It isn't about having the right credentials or winning prestigious awards. It isn't even about being particularly good at what you do. Creative living is about choosing curiosity over fear - about recognizing that human beings have been making things for forty thousand years, long before we even figured out how to farm. We are inherently creative creatures, and the impulse to make something from nothing exists within all of us. The question isn't whether you're creative - you are. The question is whether you'll have the courage to bring forth the treasures hiding within you, regardless of the outcome.

Chapter 1: Courage: Embracing the Unknown in Creative Pursuit

Jack Gilbert was a great poet who deliberately chose obscurity over fame. After publishing his first collection in 1962 to critical acclaim, he disappeared from the literary scene for twenty years. He went to Europe, lived in a shepherd's hut on a Greek mountainside, and chose a life of solitude and creative contemplation over the celebrity that could have been his. When he finally published another collection decades later, the literary world fell in love with him again. And again, he disappeared. This was his pattern: emergence followed by retreat, brilliance followed by silence. I discovered Jack Gilbert's work when I took a teaching position at the University of Tennessee that he had held the previous year. Though I never met him personally, his students told me he was extraordinary - a man who seemed to live in a state of uninterrupted marvel. He taught them not so much how to write poetry, but why: because of delight, because of stubborn gladness. He taught them that creativity was a means of fighting back against "the ruthless furnace of this world." Most importantly, Jack Gilbert asked his students to be brave. Without bravery, he told them, they would never be able to realize the vaulting scope of their own capacities. Without bravery, they would never know the world as richly as it longs to be known. Without bravery, their lives would remain small - far smaller than they probably wanted their lives to be. Once, after a poetry class, Gilbert took aside a shy student who had confessed her desire to be a writer. He asked her, "Do you have the courage? Do you have the courage to bring forth this work? The treasures that are hidden inside you are hoping you will say yes." This question lies at the core of creative living: Do you have the courage to bring forth the treasures hidden within you? I believe we are all walking repositories of buried treasure. The universe buries strange jewels deep within us all, and then stands back to see if we can find them. The hunt to uncover those jewels - that's creative living. The courage to go on that hunt in the first place - that's what separates a mundane existence from a more enchanted one.

Chapter 2: Enchantment: Ideas as Living Energy

One spring day in 2006, I was trying to figure out what to write next. My instincts told me it was time to return to fiction after several years away from it. An idea came to me, inspired by a story my partner had told me about Brazil in the 1960s. Apparently, the Brazilian government had attempted to build a highway across the Amazon jungle. They poured fortunes into this ambitious plan, but when the rainy season came, the jungle essentially devoured their project - equipment, road, everything - as if it had never existed. When I heard this story, chills ran up my arms. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up. I felt a little sick, a little dizzy, as if I were falling in love or had just heard alarming news. I knew immediately what was happening, because I'd experienced these symptoms before: inspiration was visiting me. I decided to write a novel about the Amazon, about a highway construction project gone wrong, about a spinster from Minnesota who gets sent to Brazil to solve a problem and finds herself transformed. I began researching this novel. I ordered books about Brazil, made calls to experts, and studied Portuguese. I cleared space in my life for this work, cleaned off my desk, committed myself to early mornings of writing. The idea was growing, taking shape, becoming real. But then life intervened. My partner was denied entry to the United States by border officials, and I had to leave the country to be with him while we sorted out our immigration issues. I put my Amazon novel in storage along with the rest of my belongings and promised to return to it later. When I finally came back to the United States almost two years later, I eagerly retrieved my notes and sat down to resume work on my novel. But I made a distressing discovery - the novel was gone. Not the physical notes and research, but the living spirit of it. The idea had vanished, leaving behind only an empty husk of what had once been vibrant and alive. I believe this happened because I had broken my contract with inspiration. I had neglected the idea for too long, and it had simply moved on to find another partner. This is how I've come to understand the strange mechanism of creativity - ideas are alive. They are disembodied, energetic life-forms that move around the universe searching for human collaborators. Ideas have no material body, but they do have consciousness and will. And the will of an idea is to be made manifest. The only way an idea can be made manifest in our world is through collaboration with a human partner. When an idea finds someone who's willing to bring it forth, it's a marriage of spirit and form. But when that marriage is neglected, divorce is inevitable.

Chapter 3: Permission: The Freedom to Create

I didn't grow up in a family of artists. My father was an engineer and my mother was a nurse. They were conservative, responsible people who voted for Reagan. Yet I learned how to be a rebel from them, because just beyond the reach of their basic good citizenship, my parents did whatever the hell they wanted with their lives. My father decided he wanted to be a Christmas tree farmer, so he moved us to a farm and planted seedlings. He didn't quit his day job to follow this dream; he just folded it into his everyday life. When he became interested in beekeeping, he just got bees and began. My mother believed she could build, sew, grow, knit, mend, patch, paint, or decoupage anything her family needed. She cut our hair, baked our bread, grew our vegetables, made our clothes. She shaped her own world exactly to her liking while nobody was looking. It was their example of quietly impudent self-assertion that gave me the idea I could be a writer. I never recall my parents expressing worry about my dream. If they did worry, they kept quiet about it. I think they had faith I would always take care of myself because they had taught me to do so. It also never occurred to me to ask an authority figure for permission to become a writer. I'd never seen anybody in my family ask for permission to do anything. They just made stuff. So that's what I decided to do: I decided to just go make stuff. Here's what I'm getting at: You do not need anybody's permission to live a creative life. Maybe your parents were terrified of risk, or obsessive rule-followers, or too busy with their own problems to nurture your creativity. Forget about it. Look back at your grandparents or great-grandparents - the immigrants, slaves, soldiers, farmers, sailors. Go back far enough and you will find people who were not passive consumers. You will find people who spent their lives making things. This is where you come from. This is where we all come from. For most of history, people just made things, and they didn't make such a big deal out of it. The earliest evidence of recognizable human art is forty thousand years old, while the earliest evidence of agriculture is only ten thousand years old. Somewhere in our collective evolutionary story, we decided it was more important to make attractive, unnecessary items than it was to feed ourselves reliably. The urge to create is fundamental to our humanity - perhaps even more fundamental than our need for stability.

Chapter 4: Persistence: Creativity as a Lifelong Journey

When I was about sixteen years old, I took vows to become a writer. I mean, I literally took vows—the way a young woman of an entirely different nature might take vows to become a nun. I created my own ceremony, retreating to my bedroom one night, lighting a candle, getting down on my knees, and swearing my fidelity to writing for the rest of my natural life. My vows were strangely specific and, I would argue, realistic. I didn't promise that I would be a successful writer or a great writer. I simply vowed I would write forever, regardless of the result. I promised to try to be brave, grateful, and uncomplaining. I also promised I would never ask writing to take care of me financially, but that I would always take care of it—by any means necessary. The curious thing is, I actually kept those vows. I kept them through the chaos of my twenties when I was irresponsible in every other imaginable way. I wrote every day. On bad days, when I felt no inspiration, I would set the kitchen timer for thirty minutes and make myself sit there and write something, anything. I had read that John Updike said some of the best novels ever written were created in just an hour a day. Everything took forever. I had no chops, no game. It could take me a whole year just to finish one tiny short story. I was mostly imitating my favorite authors. But that's what beginners do - everyone imitates before they can innovate. Over years of devoted work, I began to recognize the emotional patterns of creativity—or, rather, my patterns. I could see there were psychological cycles to my creative process that were always pretty much the same. "Ah," I learned to say when I would inevitably begin to lose heart for a project just a few weeks after enthusiastically beginning it. "This is the part of the process where I wish I'd never engaged with this idea at all. I remember this. I always go through this stage." I found that if I just stayed with the process and didn't panic, I could pass safely through each stage of anxiety and on to the next level. I've always been willing to work hard so that my creativity could play lightly. I held on to my day jobs for so long because I wanted to keep my creativity free and safe. I maintained alternative streams of income so that when my inspiration wasn't flowing, I could say reassuringly, "No worries, mate. Just take your time. I'm here whenever you're ready." So many times I have longed to say to stressed-out, financially strapped artists, "Just take the pressure off yourself, dude, and get a job!" There's no dishonor in having a job. What is dishonorable is scaring away your creativity by demanding that it pay for your entire existence. Toni Morrison used to get up at five o'clock in the morning to write novels before going off to her job in publishing. J.K. Rowling wrote while she was an impoverished single mother. Ann Patchett waited tables at TGI Fridays and wrote in her spare hours. People don't do this kind of thing because they have extra time and energy; they do it because their creativity matters to them enough that they are willing to make all kinds of sacrifices for it.

Chapter 5: Trust: Finding the Wonder in Your Work

My friend Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer teaches environmental biology at a college in New York. Her students are all fervent young environmentalists, desperate to save the world. Before they can get down to the business of world-saving, Robin often asks them two questions. The first question is: "Do you love nature?" Every hand in the room goes up. The second question is: "Do you believe that nature loves you in return?" Every hand in the room goes down. At which point Robin says, "Then we have a problem already." The problem is this: These earnest young world-savers honestly believe that the living earth is indifferent to them. They believe that humans are nothing but passive consumers, that our presence here is a destructive force. They believe that humans are here by random accident, and that therefore the earth doesn't care about us. Robin warns her students that without a sense of reciprocal relationship with nature, they are missing out on something incredibly important: They are missing out on their potential to become co-creators of life. Inspired by this notion, I now often ask aspiring young writers the same line of questions. "Do you love writing?" I ask. Of course they do. Then I ask: "Do you believe that writing loves you in return?" They look at me like I should be institutionalized. Most of them report that writing is totally indifferent to them, or worse - that writing flat-out hates them. Writing messes with their heads, torments them, hides from them, punishes them, destroys them. As one young writer I know put it, "For me, writing is like that bitchy, beautiful girl in high school who you always worshipped, but who only toyed with you for her own purposes. You know in your heart that she's bad news, and you should probably just walk away from her forever, but she always lures you back in. Just when you think she's finally going to be your girlfriend, she shows up at school holding hands with the captain of the football team, pretending she's never met you." Are you beginning to see how screwed-up this is? Why would your creativity not love you? It came to you, didn't it? It drew itself near. It worked itself into you, asking for your attention and devotion. It filled you with the desire to make and do interesting things. Creativity wanted a relationship with you. That must be for a reason, right? Do you honestly believe that creativity went through all the trouble of breaking into your consciousness only because it wanted to kill you? I believe that our creativity grows like sidewalk weeds out of the cracks between our pathologies - not from the pathologies themselves. But so many people think it's the other way around. For this reason, you will often meet artists who deliberately cling to their suffering, their addictions, their fears, their demons. They worry that if they ever let go of all that anguish, their very identities would vanish. But I've found that it's nearly impossible for me to write when I am unhappy. Emotional pain makes me the opposite of a deep person; it renders my life narrow and thin and isolated.

Chapter 6: Divinity: The Sacred and Profane of Creative Living

My final story comes from Bali, from a culture that approaches creativity quite differently than we do in the West. This story was told to me by my old friend and teacher Ketut Liyer, a medicine man who took me under his wing years ago to share his wisdom. As Ketut explained, Balinese dance is one of the world's great art forms - exquisite, intricate, and ancient. It is also holy. Dances are ritually performed in temples, as they have been for centuries. The choreography is vigilantly protected and passed from generation to generation. These dances are intended to do nothing less than keep the universe intact. Back in the early 1960s, mass tourism reached Bali for the first time. Visiting foreigners became fascinated with the sacred dances, and the Balinese welcomed tourists into the temples to watch, charging a small fee. As tourist interest increased, the temples became overcrowded. Someone had the idea to bring the dancers to the tourists, performing sacred dances at beach resorts where visitors could watch comfortably. But some high-minded Western visitors were appalled. This was desecration! These were sacred dances! You can't perform sacred dances at a profane beach resort for money! The Balinese priests, unclear why the Westerners were so upset but not wanting to offend them, came up with a solution: they would create new, non-sacred dances to perform at the resorts, while keeping the truly sacred dances in the temples. That's exactly what they did. Adapting gestures from the old sacred dances, they devised what were essentially "gibberish dances" and performed these at the tourist resorts. Everyone was happy - especially the high-minded Westerners who felt the proper order had been restored. But over the next few years, something unexpected happened. Those new, meaningless dances became increasingly refined. The dancers grew into them, and working with freedom and innovation, they transformed the performances into something magnificent. The dances became transcendent. Unwittingly, the dancers were calling down divine inspiration, even though they were just trying to entertain tourists. The Balinese priests, noticing this phenomenon, had a wonderful idea: Why not borrow these new fake dances, bring them into the temples, incorporate them into religious ceremonies, and use them as prayer? In fact, why not replace some of the stale old sacred dances with these vibrant new ones? So they did. At which point the meaningless dances became holy dances, because the holy dances had become meaningless. The lines had blurred between sacred and profane, high and low, right and wrong - and the whole paradox thoroughly confused the Western purists. This story perfectly captures the fluid nature of creativity and inspiration. Creativity is sacred, and it is not sacred. What we make matters enormously, and it doesn't matter at all. We toil alone, and we are accompanied by spirits. Only when we are at our most playful can divinity finally get serious with us. Make space for all these paradoxes to be true inside your soul, and you can make anything.

Summary

The creative life is a path for the brave - not the fearless, but those willing to walk alongside their fear without letting it drive the car. Embracing creativity means refusing to accept the false dichotomy between suffering and joy, between serious art and playful creation. The most potent creative work emerges not from tormented martyrdom but from a place of stubborn gladness, from what Elizabeth Gilbert calls "the arrogance of belonging" - the simple belief that you have the right to be here, to make things, to follow your curiosity wherever it leads. Throughout these stories - of Jack Gilbert's deliberate obscurity, of ideas that migrate between writers, of Balinese dancers who turn tourist entertainment into sacred art - we see a common thread: creativity thrives when we approach it with trust rather than suspicion, when we believe it loves us as much as we love it. The treasures hidden within you are not trying to torment you; they are simply waiting for you to say yes to their emergence. Whether you create for an audience of millions or simply for the joy it brings you, the act of making something from nothing connects you to the deepest currents of human experience. Your creativity isn't a burden to be shouldered but an invitation to play, to wonder, to remember that you are, by your very nature, a maker of things. The world doesn't need more tortured artists; it needs more people willing to create with courage and joy, regardless of the outcome.

About Author

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Elizabeth Gilbert

Elizabeth Gilbert is an award-winning writer of both fiction and non-fiction. Her short story collection Pilgrims was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway award, and her novel Stern Men was a New York Times notable book. Her 2002 book The Last American Man was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critic’s Circle Award. Her memoir, Eat, Pray, Love, spent 57 weeks in the #1 spot on the New York Times paperback bestseller list. It has shipped over 6 million copies in the US and has been published in over thirty languages. A film adaptation of the book was released by Columbia Pictures with an all star cast: Julia Roberts as Gilbert, Javier Bardem as Felipe, James Franco as David, Billy Crudup as her ex-husband and Richard Jenkins as Richard from Texas.Her latest novel, The Signature of All Things, will be available on October 1, 2013. The credit for her profile picture belongs to Jennifer Schatten.

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