Big Magic!?

Come along friend.

I just finished listening to the audio book of Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert. If you haven’t heard of it, it’s a book about living a creative life. Not just an artistic life, but a creative one.

Elizabeth—can I call you Liz? Please?—has some woo woo ideas about creativity. She thinks that ideas are actual sentient, al be it ethereal, things that are just looking to be made real. She asserts that if you open your self to inspiration and creativity, these ideas will find you, will come to you, will create some big magic and through your work can be made into things, not just ghostly thought apparitions.

Like I said, woo woo.

But I think she’s onto something. I know for myself, ideas seem to come out of the ether and lodge themselves into my brain. I don’t have control of them, not do I have the capacity to control them. They come, they go, and some don’t let go.

Take poetry for example. I sit to write a poem, and dammit there is nothing there. I can’t seem to string together letters let alone a creative line. Then, all of a sudden, BOOM! Out of no where a poem rams itself into my frontal cortex while I’m driving home from work.