Big Magic

by Elizabeth Gilbert

  That’s how a trickster gets the job done.

  Lightly, lightly.

  Ever lightly.

  Lighten Up

  The first short story I ever published was in 1993, in Esquire magazine. The story was called “Pilgrims.” It was about a girl working on a ranch in Wyoming, and it was inspired by my own experience as a girl who had worked on a ranch in Wyoming. As usual, I sent the story out to a bunch of publications, unsolicited. As usual, everyone rejected it. Except one.

  A young assistant editor at Esquire named Tony Freund plucked my story out of the slush pile and brought it to the editor in chief, a man named Terry McDonell. Tony suspected that his boss might like the story, because he knew Terry had always been fascinated with the American West. Terry did indeed like “Pilgrims,” and he purchased it, and that’s how I got my first break as a writer. It was the break of a lifetime. The story was slated to appear in the November issue of Esquire, with Michael Jordan on the cover.

  A month before the issue was to go to press, however, Tony called me to say there was a problem. A major advertiser had pulled out, and as a result the magazine would need to be several pages shorter than planned that month. Sacrifices would have to be made; they were looking for volunteers. I was given a choice: I could either cut my story by 30 percent so that it would fit in the new, slimmer November issue, or I could pull it from the magazine entirely and hope it would find a home—intact—in some future issue.

  “I can’t tell you what to do,” Tony said. “I will completely understand if you don’t want to butcher your work like this. I think the story will indeed suffer from being amputated. It might be better for you, then, if we wait a few months and publish it intact. But I also have to warn you that the magazine world is an unpredictable business. There may be an argument for striking while the iron is hot. Your story might never get published if you hesitate now. Terry might lose interest in it or, who knows, he might even leave his job at Esquire and move to another magazine—and then your champion will be gone. So I don’t know what to tell you. The choice is yours.”

  Do you have any idea what it means to cut 30 percent from a ten-page short story? I’d worked on that story for a year and a half. It was like polished granite by the time Esquire got their hands on it. There was not a superfluous word in it, I believed. What’s more, I felt that “Pilgrims” was the best thing I’d ever written, and, as far as I knew, I might never write that well again. It was deeply precious to me, the blood of my blood. I couldn’t imagine how the story would even make sense anymore, amputated like that. Above all, my dignity as an artist was offended by the very idea of mutilating my life’s best work simply because a car company had pulled an advertisement from a men’s magazine. What about integrity? What about honor? What about pride?

  If artists do not uphold a standard of incorruptibility in this nefarious world, who will?

  On the other hand, screw it.

  Because let’s be honest: It wasn’t the Magna Carta we were talking about here; it was just a short story about a cowgirl and her boyfriend.

  I grabbed a red pencil and I cut that thing down to the bone.

  The initial devastation to the narrative was shocking. The story had no meaning or logic anymore. It was literary carnage—but that’s when things started to get interesting. Looking over this hacked-up mess, it dawned upon me this was a rather fantastic creative challenge: Could I still manage to make it work? I began suturing the narrative back into a sort of sense. As I pieced and pinned sentences together, I realized that the cuts had indeed transformed the entire tone of the story, but not necessarily in a bad way. The new version was neither better nor worse than the old version; it was just profoundly different. It felt leaner and harder, not unappealingly austere.

  I never would have written that way naturally—I hadn’t known I could write that way—and that revelation alone intrigued me. (It was like one of those dreams where you discover a previously unknown room in your house, and you have that expansive feeling that your life has more possibility to it than you thought it did.) I was amazed to discover that my work could be played with so roughly—torn apart, chopped up, reassembled—and that it could still survive, perhaps even thrive, within its new parameters.

  What you produce is not necessarily always sacred, I realized, just because you think it’s sacred. What is sacred is the time that you spend working on the project, and what that time does to expand your imagination, and what that expanded imagination does to transform your life.

  The more lightly you can pass that time, the brighter your existence becomes.

  It Ain’t Your Baby

  When people talk about their creative work, they often call it their “baby”—which is the exact opposite of taking things lightly.

  A friend of mine, a week before her new novel was to be published, told me, “I feel like I’m putting my baby on the school bus for the first time, and I’m afraid the bullies will make fun of him.” (Truman Capote stated it even more bluntly: “Finishing a book is just like you took a child out in the backyard and shot it.”)

  Guys, please don’t mistake your creative work for a human child, okay?

  This kind of thinking will only lead you to deep psychic pain. I’m dead serious about this. Because if you honestly believe that your work is your baby, then you will have trouble cutting away 30 percent of it someday—which you may very well need to do. You also won’t be able to handle it if somebody criticizes or corrects your baby, or suggests that you might consider completely modifying your baby, or even tries to buy or sell your baby on the open market. You might not be able to release your work or share it at all—because how will that poor defenseless baby survive without you hovering over it and tending to it?

  Your creative work is not your baby; if anything, you are its baby. Everything I have ever written has brought me into being. Every project has matured me in a different way. I am who I am today precisely because of what I have made and what it has made me into. Creativity has hand-raised me and forged me into an adult—starting with my experience with that short story “Pilgrims,” which taught me how not to act like a baby.

  All of which is to say that, yes, in the end, I did squeeze an abbreviated version of “Pilgrims” into the November 1993 issue of Esquire by the skin of its teeth. A few weeks later, as fate would have it, Terry McDonell (my champion) did indeed leave his job as editor in chief of the magazine. Whatever short stories and feature articles he left behind never saw the light of day. Mine would have been among them, buried in a shallow grave, had I not been willing to make those cuts.

  But I did make the cuts, thank heavens, and the story was cool and different because of it—and I got my big break. My story caught the eye of the literary agent who signed me up, and who has now guided my career with grace and precision for more than twenty years.

  When I look back on that incident, I shudder at what I almost lost. Had I been more prideful, somewhere in the world today (probably in the bottom of my desk drawer) there would be a short story called “Pilgrims,” ten pages long, which nobody would’ve ever read. It would be untouched and pure, like polished granite, and I might still be a bartender.

  I also think it’s interesting that, once “Pilgrims” was published in Esquire, I never really thought about it again. It was not the best thing I would ever write. Not even close. I had so much more work ahead of me, and I got busy with that work. “Pilgrims” was not a consecrated relic, after all. It was just a thing—a thing that I had made and loved, and then changed, and then remade, and still loved, and then published, and then put aside so that I could go on to make other things.

  Thank God I didn’t let it become my undoing. What a sad and self-destructive act of martyrdom that would have been, to have rendered my writing so inviolable that I defended its sanctity to its very death. Instead, I put my trust in play, in pliancy, in trickery. Because I was willing t
o be light with my work, that short story became not a grave, but a doorway that I stepped through into a wonderful and bigger new life.

  Be careful of your dignity, is what I am saying.

  It is not always your friend.

  Passion vs. Curiosity

  May I also urge you to forget about passion?

  Perhaps you are surprised to hear this from me, but I am somewhat against passion. Or at least, I am against the preaching of passion. I don’t believe in telling people, “All you need to do is to follow your passion, and everything will be fine.” I think this can be an unhelpful and even cruel suggestion at times.

  First of all, it can be an unnecessary piece of advice, because if someone has a clear passion, odds are they’re already following it and they don’t need anyone to tell them to pursue it. (That’s kind of the definition of a passion, after all: an interest that you chase obsessively, almost because you have no choice.) But a lot of people don’t know exactly what their passion is, or they may have multiple passions, or they may be going through a midlife change of passion—all of which can leave them feeling confused and blocked and insecure.

  If you don’t have a clear passion and somebody blithely tells you to go follow your passion, I think you have the right to give that person the middle finger. Because that’s like somebody telling you that all you need in order to lose weight is to be thin, or all you need in order to have a great sex life is to be multiorgasmic: That doesn’t help!

  I’m generally a pretty passionate person myself, but not every single day. Sometimes I have no idea where my passion has gone off to. I don’t always feel actively inspired, nor do I always feel certain about what to do next.

  But I don’t sit around waiting for passion to strike me. I keep working steadily, because I believe it is our privilege as humans to keep making things for as long as we live, and because I enjoy making things. Most of all, I keep working because I trust that creativity is always trying to find me, even when I have lost sight of it.

  So how do you find the inspiration to work when your passion has flagged?

  This is where curiosity comes in.

  Devotion to Inquisitiveness

  I believe that curiosity is the secret. Curiosity is the truth and the way of creative living. Curiosity is the alpha and the omega, the beginning and the end. Furthermore, curiosity is accessible to everyone. Passion can seem intimidatingly out of reach at times—a distant tower of flame, accessible only to geniuses and to those who are specially touched by God. But curiosity is a milder, quieter, more welcoming, and more democratic entity. The stakes of curiosity are also far lower than the stakes of passion. Passion makes you get divorced and sell all your possessions and shave your head and move to Nepal. Curiosity doesn’t ask nearly so much of you.

  In fact, curiosity only ever asks one simple question: “Is there anything you’re interested in?”

  Anything?

  Even a tiny bit?

  No matter how mundane or small?

  The answer need not set your life on fire, or make you quit your job, or force you to change your religion, or send you into a fugue state; it just has to capture your attention for a moment. But in that moment, if you can pause and identify even one tiny speck of interest in something, then curiosity will ask you to turn your head a quarter of an inch and look at the thing a wee bit closer.

  Do it.

  It’s a clue. It might seem like nothing, but it’s a clue. Follow that clue. Trust it. See where curiosity will lead you next. Then follow the next clue, and the next, and the next. Remember, it doesn’t have to be a voice in the desert; it’s just a harmless little scavenger hunt. Following that scavenger hunt of curiosity can lead you to amazing, unexpected places. It may even eventually lead you to your passion—albeit through a strange, untraceable passageway of back alleys, underground caves, and secret doors.

  Or it may lead you nowhere.

  You might spend your whole life following your curiosity and have absolutely nothing to show for it at the end—except one thing. You will have the satisfaction of knowing that you passed your entire existence in devotion to the noble human virtue of inquisitiveness.

  And that should be more than enough for anyone to say that they lived a rich and splendid life.

  The Scavenger Hunt

  Let me give you an example of where the scavenger hunt of curiosity can lead you.

  I’ve already told you the story of the greatest novel I never wrote—that book about the Amazon jungle, which I neglected to nurture, and which eventually jumped out of my consciousness and into Ann Patchett’s consciousness. That book had been a passion project. That idea had come to me in a brain wave of physical and emotional excitement and inspiration. But then I got distracted by life’s exigencies, and I didn’t work on that book, and it left me.

  So it goes, and so it went.

  After that Amazon jungle idea was gone, I didn’t have another brain wave of physical and emotional excitement and inspiration right away. I kept waiting for a big idea to arrive, and I kept announcing to the universe that I was ready for a big idea to arrive, but no big ideas arrived. There were no goose bumps, no hairs standing up on the back of my neck, no butterflies in my stomach. There was no miracle. It was like Saint Paul rode his horse all the way to Damascus and nothing happened, except maybe it rained a bit.

  Most days, this is what life is like.

  I poked about for a while in my everyday chores—writing e-mails, shopping for socks, resolving small emergencies, sending out birthday cards. I took care of the orderly business of life. As time ticked by and an impassioned idea still had not ignited me, I didn’t panic. Instead, I did what I have done so many times before: I turned my attention away from passion and toward curiosity.

  I asked myself, Is there anything you’re interested in right now, Liz?

  Anything?

  Even a tiny bit?

  No matter how mundane or small?

  It turned out there was: gardening.

  (I know, I know—contain your excitement, everyone! Gardening!)

  I had recently moved to a small town in rural New Jersey. I’d bought an old house that came with a nice backyard. Now I wanted to plant a garden in that backyard.

  This impulse surprised me. I’d grown up with a garden—a huge garden, which my mother had managed efficiently—but I’d never been much interested in it. As a lazy child, I’d worked quite hard not to learn anything about gardening, despite my mother’s best efforts to teach me. I had never been a creature of the soil. I didn’t love country life back when I was a kid (I found farm chores boring, difficult, and sticky) and I had never sought it out as an adult. An aversion to the hard work of country living is exactly why I’d gone off to live in New York City, and also why I’d become a traveler—because I didn’t want to be any kind of farmer. But now I’d moved to a town even smaller than the town in which I’d grown up, and now I wanted a garden.

  I didn’t desperately want a garden, understand. I wasn’t prepared to die for a garden, or anything. I just thought a garden would be nice.

  Curious.

  The whim was small enough that I could have ignored it. It barely had a pulse. But I didn’t ignore it. Instead, I followed that small clue of curiosity and I planted some things.

  As I did so, I realized that I knew more about this gardening business than I thought I knew. Apparently, I had accidentally learned some stuff from my mother back when I was a kid, despite my very best efforts not to. It was satisfying, to uncover this dormant knowledge. I planted some more things. I recalled some more childhood memories. I thought more about my mother, my grandmother, my long ancestry of women who worked the earth. It was nice.

  As the season passed, I found myself seeing my backyard with different eyes. What I was raising no longer looked like my mother’s garden; it was starting to look like my own garden. For ins
tance, unlike my mom, a masterful vegetable gardener, I wasn’t all that interested in vegetables. Rather, I longed for the brightest, showiest flowers I could get my hands on. Furthermore, I discovered that I didn’t want to merely cultivate these plants; I also wanted to know stuff about them. Specifically, I wanted to know where they had come from.

  Those heirloom irises that ornamented my yard, for instance—what was their origin? I did exactly one minute of research on the Internet and learned that my irises were not indigenous to New Jersey; they had, in fact, originated in Syria.

  That was kind of cool to discover.

  Then I did some more research. The lilacs that grew around my property were apparently descendants of similar bushes that had once bloomed in Turkey. My tulips also originated in Turkey—though there’d been a lot of interfering Dutchmen, it turned out, between those original wild Turkish tulips and my domesticated, fancy varieties. My dogwood was local. My forsythia wasn’t, though; that came from Japan. My wisteria was also rather far from home; an English sea captain had brought the stuff over to Europe from China, and then British settlers had brought it to the New World—and rather recently, actually.

  I started running background checks on every single plant in my garden. I took notes on what I was learning. My curiosity grew. What intrigued me, I realized, was not so much my garden itself, but the botanical history behind it—a wild and little-known tale of trade and adventure and global intrigue.

  That could be a book, right?

  Maybe?

  I kept following the trail of curiosity. I elected to trust completely in my fascination. I elected to believe that I was interested in all this botanical trivia for a good reason. Accordingly, portents and coincidences began to appear before me, all related to this newfound interest in botanical history. I stumbled upon the right books, the right people, the right opportunities. For instance: The expert whose advice I needed to seek about the history of mosses lived—it turned out—only a few minutes from my grandfather’s house in rural upstate New York. And a two-hundred-year-old book that I had inherited from my great-grandfather held the key I’d been searching for—a vivid historic character, worthy of embellishing into a novel.