Thanks to Elizabeth Gilbert, creativity comes as if by magic

The author of the best-selling novel “Eat Pray Love” tells us how to create without getting in over our heads. A funny, iconoclastic, often surprising and refreshing book. If, like me, you were convinced that to create is often to be a cursed artist, you’re going to fall head over heels every three pages…

The person who introduced me to this book was a girlfriend of mine last year. She said “I read this in one night, it’s so strong it made me cry sometimes, you should read it” and she put it in my hands, so I could take it with me. I started this book, it was interesting, but as is often the case, I stalled. I often stall in my reading.

I don’t know where this stalling habit comes from, because I love reading. But I find it hard to move on and finish books. The lady and I parted ways, and I offered to return the book to her. Very generously, she said “keep it” and I thank her for that, because I recently got my hands on that book again, picked it up and finished it.

When I say “got my hands on it again”, I’m expressing myself badly: I should say that a series of actions and thoughts made me get my hands on it again. Maybe I wasn’t ready to receive it last year, and it took someone lending it to me, me starting it, the lady giving it to me, it sitting in my house for months on end on a pile of things to read, before one day I was finally able to read it, really read it, understand its meaning and finish it. According to the law of attraction, I gradually created the moment of reading and receiving this book…

Maybe that’s what Elizabeth Gilbert is talking about throughout this book: “Big Magic”. I hadn’t paid much attention to the subtitle of this book either (“Living your creativity without fearing it”), but it turns out that while I was reading it, I realized that a lot of things inside me make me fear my creativity, that I’m not completely at ease with it.

as if by magic
Personally, I experience writing both as a beautiful girl whose lover I’d like to be, and who sometimes grants me favors (never enough for my taste), and as a cruel enemy who laughs at me and my creative dreams. But this is a mistake: writing is a friend, always a friend, who may have her moods (just as inspiration can have its whims), but always remains a friend. And if you don’t have a lover to buy you a book, get it now, it’s just come out in paperback book.

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Elizabeth Gilbert “Comme par magie. Vivre sa créativité sans la craindre”, 313 pages, 2016, editions Calmann-Levy