How do writers and other artists live with the knowledge that despite their best efforts, they might fail?
A couple of weeks ago I blogged about a book that “sells” an answer that question – Big Magic, written by mega-bestselling author Elizabeth Gilbert. Anyone who read my blog knows I did not think much of the book. A reader told me that a lot of the ideas Gilbert had mentioned in Big Magic had also appeared in her world famous TED talk, which was watched by millions.
I felt compelled to watch the video and, when I did, I realized that I had more I wanted to say about her ideas, particularly her strangely dim opinion about artists accepting personal responsibility for their art. In her TED talk, Elizabeth Gilbert makes the extraordinary claim that the terrible pressure of artists taking either blame or credit for their art “has been killing off our artists for the last 500 years.” What does she mean? is she talking about artists going extinct like the wooly mammoth? When I last checked Twitter, there was no artist shortage; in fact, there seems to be more artists than the world knows what to do with. Besides, almost everyone who has lived during the last 500 years has died.
So does Gilbert think that humans are fragile souls? We have survived famines, Ice Ages, plagues, pestilences, earthquakes, wars, and fearsome predators, yet taking responsibility for having written a good or bad story kills us? According to Gilbert, essentially yes. She argues that, as artists, we need a “protective construct” to shelter us from fears of failure and to keep us from soaring too high on tsunamis of praise.
Her “protective construct” is for us artists to stop taking either credit or blame for our work, and to instead give credit to our elusive “spirit guardians,” whom Gilbert believes are responsible for our best ideas. “Stop thinking this extraordinary energy comes from you,” she says.
Our overwhelming sense of personal responsibility, she argues, is an ugly outcome of the Renaissance. Before the Renaissance, she says, the Greeks and Romans believed, more “sanely,” that artists, instead of being geniuses, had geniuses – creative spiritual beings that gave artists their greatest ideas, removing the terrible burden of responsibility of art from the artist.
To prove that humans must have relief from artistic responsibility, Gilbert makes some bizarre assumptions. She assumes that artists claiming responsibility for their art is the main cause of mental illness, addiction, narcissism, and suicide in creative types. Where is she getting her information? Does what she is saying align with what mental health professionals say about the causes of mental illness, addiction, and suicide?
From all I have read, mental illness has roots in the biochemistry and physiology of the brain. That is why drugs like lithium relieve symptoms of bipolar disorder. Mental illness also tends to run in families; it has a genetic origin. Environmental factors may also play a part, but how much of a part is hard to say.
Does taking responsibility for the success or failure of artistic creations bring latent mental illness to the surface? Or does it go further and turn normally sane people into mentally ill ones? Does accepting blame of credit for art cause a mentally healthy person to contract bipolar disorder?
It is true that mentally ill people tend to be drawn to the arts, but did art make them that way, or is mental illness somehow conducive to creativity? No one is quite sure. What we do know is that not everyone who is mentally ill is an artist, and not everyone who is an artist is mentally ill. Some of my favorite writers such as Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, and Carl Sagan never ascribed credit for their work to spirit guardians, yet they never suffered from mental illness or addiction; in fact, overall, they were happy with their lives.
Were they freaks? How did they manage to evade the unbearable burden of taking credit for their work? Maybe it is clear by now that I totally disagree with Elizabeth Gilbert about almost everything. Her arguments are fear-based and I do not believe taking responsibility for art causes mental illness.
I have bipolar disorder, and it manifested long before I began writing regularly. My problem with Gilbert is not just her fuzzy thinking and acrobatic feats of illogic. For me, the issue of being able to take ownership of my art is personal.
I lived most of my life with the “elusive genius” theory of creativity, but I called it the “elusive muse.” I had experienced those rare moments of euphoric inspiration that seemed to come from nowhere; the rest of the time, I was chronically frustrated because I was unable to summon that altered state at will.
Believing creativity was beyond my control kept me blocked for many years that I could have been writing. While I did not believe that inspiration is literally magic as Gilbert does, I did think of it as an elusive force I was helplessly dependent upon and terrified of scaring away.
Gilbert fuels that fear in her book on Big Magic by warning artists that the best creative ideas will “lose interest” in you unless you act on them at once. She claims that when inspiration strikes, you must not hesitate; to keep an idea from dashing off, you must make a “contract” with it promising to express the idea to the best of your ability; if you neglect to fulfill your promise in a timely manner, the idea will scamper off and seek representation elsewhere.
But back to my story: After a long spell of creative drought, I finally realized that writing was an act of will; it was not about waiting to be acted upon by a mysterious outside force. What makes writing special, what makes it art, is the fact that, from start to finish, I create it.
Gilbert says that most of the time she spends writing is just “unglamorous labor”; to her, that kind of writing is nothing special; it is only special if it comes from outside her. I could not disagree more; there is nothing special about being the conduit of something else. I am an artist, not a secretary.
But what about that euphoric feeling I used to get when an amazing idea would strike? Did I give up on that? For a while, I did. I stopped expecting it. I stopped trying to force it. I told myself, “Just write a sentence.\”
When I limited myself to a sentence, I had a happy surprise: I almost always wanted to write more, and it took discipline to stop. In other words, I rediscovered my desire to write so that I no longer needed to force myself.
Writing became fun again. I stopped clock-gazing. I began writing whenever I chose, and I stopped whenever I chose. At every moment, my writing came from a place of wanting, so I ended up writing a lot. It became easier and easier to enter the relaxed state where ideas flow freely.
There were no spirits at work. Everything I experienced is explainable by what goes on inside my mind. I read an insightful book on the psychology of creativity called Writing the Natural Way by Gabriele Rico. It offers practical ways to make the mental shift that I associate with focused creative activity. It made me aware that I had control over the experience of most people refer to when they say “inspiration.”
However, I do sometimes suffer from anxiety about sharing my work. Here, Gilbert did me a big favor; she made me realize that I want to take credit for my mistakes. They were how I learned. By trying to convince artists to surrender the privilege of claiming their errors, Gilbert has made me determined to keep it.
Even if my writing fails on every level, despite my best efforts, failure is not bad. It means I tried. It means that of all the passive things I could have been doing, such as watching television, I chose to do something exciting and risky, even knowing that I might be ridiculed for my efforts. Failure means that my love for writing overcame my fear of looking foolish. That is not a disaster, but something to celebrate.
The freedom to claim responsibility for my writing, all of it, the good and the bad, is a gift. Without the possibility of failure, there is no triumph in success. Any art worth doing is an expression of courage; without risk, courage withers and art loses its power. Believing fairy tales to ease my fears is not the answer, which is why if I ever see a “spirit guardian” trying to seize control of my hand as I type, I will not make a “contract” with it; I will call an exorcist.
If you enjoyed this post you might like my other writing. Take a moment and sign up for my free starter library. Click here. Also my new novel \”The Ghosts of Chimera\” will soon be published by the folks over at Rooster and Pig Publishing.