But sometimes—rarely, but magnificently—there comes a day when you’re open and relaxed enough to actually receive something. Your defenses might slacken and your anxieties might ease, and then magic can slip through. The idea, sensing your openness, will start to do its work on you. It will send the universal physical and emotional signals of inspiration (the chills up the arms, the hair standing up on the back of the neck, the nervous stomach, the buzzy thoughts, that feeling of falling into love or obsession). The idea will organize coincidences and portents to tumble across your path, to keep your interest keen. You will start to notice all sorts of signs pointing you toward the idea. Everything you see and touch and do will remind you of the idea. The idea will wake you up in the middle of the night and distract you from your everyday routine. The idea will not leave you alone until it has your fullest attention.
And then, in a quiet moment, it will ask, “Do you want to work with me?”
At this point, you have two options for how to respond.
What Happens When You Say No
The simplest answer, of course, is just to say no.
Then you’re off the hook. The idea will eventually go away and—congratulations!—you don’t need to bother creating anything.
To be clear, this is not always a dishonorable choice. True, you might sometimes decline inspiration’s invitation out of laziness, angst, insecurity, or petulance. But other times you might need to say no to an idea because it is truly not the right moment, or because you’re already engaged in a different project, or because you’re certain that this particular idea has accidentally knocked on the wrong door.
I have many times been approached by ideas that I know are not right for me, and I’ve politely said to them: “I’m honored by your visitation, but I’m not your girl. May I respectfully suggest that you call upon, say, Barbara Kingsolver?” (I always try to use my most gracious manners when sending an idea away; you don’t want word getting around the universe that you’re difficult to work with.) Whatever your response, though, do be sympathetic to the poor idea. Remember: All it wants is to be realized. It’s trying its best. It seriously has to knock on every door it can.
So you might have to say no.
When you say no, nothing happens at all.
Mostly, people say no.
Most of their lives, most people just walk around, day after day, saying no, no, no, no, no.
Then again, someday you just might say yes.
What Happens When You Say Yes
If you do say yes to an idea, now it’s showtime.
Now your job becomes both simple and difficult. You have officially entered into a contract with inspiration, and you must try to see it through, all the way to its impossible-to-predict outcome.
You may set the terms for this contract however you like. In contemporary Western civilization, the most common creative contract still seems to be one of suffering. This is the contract that says, I shall destroy myself and everyone around me in an effort to bring forth my inspiration, and my martyrdom shall be the badge of my creative legitimacy.
If you choose to enter into a contract of creative suffering, you should try to identify yourself as much as possible with the stereotype of the Tormented Artist. You will find no shortage of role models. To honor their example, follow these fundamental rules: Drink as much as you possibly can; sabotage all your relationships; wrestle so vehemently against yourself that you come up bloodied every time; express constant dissatisfaction with your work; jealously compete against your peers; begrudge anybody else’s victories; proclaim yourself cursed (not blessed) by your talents; attach your sense of self-worth to external rewards; be arrogant when you are successful and self-pitying when you fail; honor darkness above light; die young; blame creativity for having killed you.
Does it work, this method?
Yeah, sure. It works great. Till it kills you.
So you can do it this way if you really want to. (By all means, do not let me or anyone else ever take away your suffering, if you’re committed to it!) But I’m not sure this route is especially productive, or that it will bring you or your loved ones enduring satisfaction and peace. I will concede that this method of creative living can be extremely glamorous, and it can make for an excellent biopic after you die, so if you prefer a short life of tragic glamour to a long life of rich satisfaction (and many do), knock yourself out.
However, I’ve always had the sense that the muse of the tormented artist—while the artist himself is throwing temper tantrums—is sitting quietly in a corner of the studio, buffing its fingernails, patiently waiting for the guy to calm down and sober up so everyone can get back to work.
Because in the end, it’s all about the work, isn’t it? Or shouldn’t it be?
And maybe there’s a different way to approach it?
May I suggest one?
A Different Way
A different way is to cooperate fully, humbly, and joyfully with inspiration.
This is how I believe most people approached creativity for most of history, before we decided to get all La Bohème about it. You can receive your ideas with respect and curiosity, not with drama or dread. You can clear out whatever obstacles are preventing you from living your most creative life, with the simple understanding that whatever is bad for you is probably also bad for your work. You can lay off the booze a bit in order to have a keener mind. You can nourish healthier relationships in order to keep yourself undistracted by self-invented emotional catastrophes. You can dare to be pleased sometimes with what you have created. (And if a project doesn’t work out, you can always think of it as having been a worthwhile and constructive experiment.) You can resist the seductions of grandiosity, blame, and shame. You can support other people in their creative efforts, acknowledging the truth that there’s plenty of room for everyone. You can measure your worth by your dedication to your path, not by your successes or failures. You can battle your demons (through therapy, recovery, prayer, or humility) instead of battling your gifts—in part by realizing that your demons were never the ones doing the work, anyhow. You can believe that you are neither a slave to inspiration nor its master, but something far more interesting—its partner—and that the two of you are working together toward something intriguing and worthwhile. You can live a long life, making and doing really cool things the entire time. You might earn a living with your pursuits or you might not, but you can recognize that this is not really the point. And at the end of your days, you can thank creativity for having blessed you with a charmed, interesting, passionate existence.
That’s another way to do it.
Totally up to you.
An Idea Grows
Anyhow, back to my story of magic.
Thanks to Felipe’s tale about the Amazon, I had been visited by a big idea: to wit, that I should write a novel about Brazil in the 1960s. Specifically, I felt inspired to write a novel about the efforts to build that ill-fated highway across the jungle.
This idea seemed epic and thrilling to me. It was also daunting—what the hell did I know about the Brazilian Amazon, or road construction in the 1960s?—but all the good ideas feel daunting at first, so I proceeded. I agreed to enter into a contract with the idea. We would work together. We shook hands on it, so to speak. I promised the idea that I would never fight against it and never abandon it, but would only cooperate with it to the utmost of my ability, until our work together was done.
I then did what you do when you get serious about a project or a pursuit: I cleared space for it. I cleaned off my desk, literally and figuratively. I committed myself to several hours of research every morning. I made myself go to bed early so I could get up at dawn and be ready for work. I said no to alluring distractions and social invitations so I could focus on my job. I ordered books about Brazil and I placed calls to experts. I started studying Portuguese. I bought index cards—my preferred method o
f keeping track of notes—and I allowed myself to begin dreaming of this new world. And in that space, more ideas began to arrive, and the outlines of the story started to take shape.
I decided that the heroine of my novel would be a middle-aged American woman named Evelyn. It is the late 1960s—a time of great political and cultural upheaval—but Evelyn is living a quiet life, as she always has done, in central Minnesota. She’s a spinster who has spent twenty-five years working capably as an executive secretary at a large Midwestern highway construction firm. During that entire time, Evelyn has been quietly and hopelessly in love with her married boss—a kind, hardworking man who never sees Evelyn as anything but an efficient assistant. The boss has a son—a shady fellow, with big ambitions. The son hears about this giant highway project going on down in Brazil and persuades his father to put in a bid. The son uses his charm and coercion to convince the father to throw the family’s entire fortune behind this enterprise. Soon enough, the son heads down to Brazil with a great deal of money and wild dreams of glory. Quickly, both the son and the money vanish. Bereft, the father dispatches Evelyn, his most trusted ambassador, to go to the Amazon to try to recover the missing young man and the missing cash. Out of a sense of duty and love, Evelyn heads to Brazil—at which point her orderly and unremarkable life is overturned as she enters into a world of chaos, lies, and violence. Drama and epiphanies follow. Also, it’s a love story.
I decided I would call the novel Evelyn of the Amazon.
I wrote a proposal for the book and sent it to my publishing company. They liked it and they bought it. Now I entered into a second contract with the idea—a formal contract this time, with notarized signatures and deadlines and everything. Now I was fully invested. I got to work in earnest.
An Idea Gets Sidetracked
A few months later, however, real-life drama derailed me from my pursuit of invented drama. On a routine trip to America, my sweetheart, Felipe, was detained by a border agent and denied entry to the United States. He had done nothing wrong, but the Department of Homeland Security put him in jail anyway, and then threw him out of the country. We were informed that Felipe could never again come to America—unless we got married. Moreover, if I wanted to be with my love during this stressful and indefinite period of exile, I would have to pack up my entire life immediately and go join him overseas. This I promptly did, and I stayed abroad with him for almost a year as we dealt with our drama and our immigration paperwork.
Such upheaval does not make for the ideal environment in which to devote oneself to writing a sprawling and heavily researched novel about the Brazilian Amazon in the 1960s. Therefore, I put Evelyn away, with sincere promises that I would return to her later, as soon as stability was restored to my life. I put all my existing notes for that novel into storage, along with the rest of my belongings, and then I flew halfway across the planet to be with Felipe and to work on solving our mess. And because I must always be writing about something or else I will go mad, I decided to write about that—that is, to chronicle what was going on in my real life, as a way of sorting through its complications and revelations. (As Joan Didion said, “I don’t know what I think until I write about it.”)
Over time, this experience grew into my memoir Committed.
I want to make clear that I do not regret having written Committed. I’m forever grateful to that book, as the process of writing it helped me to sort out my extreme anxiety about my impending marriage. But that book commanded my attention for quite a long while, and by the time it was done, more than two years had passed. More than two years that I had not spent working on Evelyn of the Amazon.
That’s a long time to leave an idea unattended.
I was eager to get back to it. So once Felipe and I were safely married and settled back home in the US, and once Committed was finished, I retrieved all my notes out of storage and sat down at my new desk in my new house, ready to recommence crafting my novel about the Amazon jungle.
Right away, however, I made a most distressing discovery.
My novel was gone.
An Idea Goes Away
Allow me to explain.
I do not mean to say that somebody had stolen my notes, or that a crucial computer file had gone missing. What I mean is that the living heart of my novel was gone. The sentient force that inhabits all vibrant creative endeavors had vanished—swallowed like bulldozers in the jungle, you could say. Sure, all the research and writing I’d completed two years earlier was still there, but I knew at once that I was looking at nothing but the empty husk of what had once been a warm and pulsating entity.
I’m pretty stubborn about sticking with projects, so I prodded at the thing for several months, trying to make it work again, hoping to bring it back to life. But it was useless. Nothing was there. It was like poking a stick at a cast-off snakeskin: The more I messed with it, the faster it fell apart and turned to dust.
I believed I knew what had happened, because I’d seen this sort of thing before: The idea had grown tired of waiting, and it had left me. I could scarcely blame it. I had, after all, broken our contract. I’d promised to dedicate myself completely to Evelyn of the Amazon, and then I’d reneged on that promise. I hadn’t given the book a moment’s attention for more than two years. What was the idea supposed to do, sit around indefinitely while I ignored it? Maybe. Sometimes they do wait. Some exceedingly patient ideas might wait years, or even decades, for your attention. But others won’t, because each idea has a different nature. Would you sit around in a box for two years while your collaborator blew you off? Probably not.
Thus, the neglected idea did what many self-respecting living entities would do in the same circumstance: It hit the road.
Fair enough, right?
Because this is the other side of the contract with creativity: If inspiration is allowed to unexpectedly enter you, it is also allowed to unexpectedly exit you.
If I’d been younger, the loss of Evelyn of the Amazon might have knocked me off my feet, but by this point in my life I’d been in the game of imagination long enough to let it go without excessive struggle. I could have wept over the loss, but I didn’t, because I understood the terms of the deal, and I accepted those terms. I understood that the best you can hope for in such a situation is to let your old idea go and catch the next idea that comes around. And the best way for that to happen is to move on swiftly, with humility and grace. Don’t fall into a funk about the one that got away. Don’t beat yourself up. Don’t rage at the gods above. All that is nothing but distraction, and the last thing you need is further distraction. Grieve if you must, but grieve efficiently. Better to just say good-bye to the lost idea with dignity and continue onward. Find something else to work on—anything, immediately—and get at it. Keep busy.
Most of all, be ready. Keep your eyes open. Listen. Follow your curiosity. Ask questions. Sniff around. Remain open. Trust in the miraculous truth that new and marvelous ideas are looking for human collaborators every single day. Ideas of every kind are constantly galloping toward us, constantly passing through us, constantly trying to get our attention.
Let them know you’re available.
And for heaven’s sake, try not to miss the next one.
Wizardry
This should be the end of my Amazon jungle story. But it isn’t.
Just around the same time that the idea for my novel ran away—it was now 2008—I made a new friend: Ann Patchett, the celebrated novelist. We met one afternoon in New York City, on a panel discussion about libraries.
Yes, that’s right: a panel discussion about libraries.
The life of a writer is endlessly glamorous.
I was instantly intrigued by Ann, not only because I’d always admired her work, but because she is a rather remarkable presence in person. Ann has a preternatural ability to render herself very small—nearly invisible—in order to better observe the world around her in safe anonymi
ty, so that she can write about it, unnoticed. In other words, her superpower is to conceal her superpowers.
When I first met Ann, then, it is probably not surprising that I didn’t immediately recognize her as the famous author. She looked so unassuming and tiny and young that I thought she was somebody’s assistant—perhaps even somebody’s assistant’s assistant. Then I put it together, who she was. I thought, My goodness! She’s so meek!
But I’d been fooled.
An hour later, Ms. Patchett stood up at the lectern and gave one of the most robust and dazzling speeches I’ve ever heard. She rocked that room and she rocked me. That’s when I realized that this woman was in fact quite tall. And strong. And gorgeous. And passionate. And brilliant. It was as if she’d thrown off her invisibility cloak and a full-on goddess stepped forth.
I was transfixed. I’d never seen anything quite like this complete transformation of presence, from one moment to the next. And because I have no boundaries, I ran up to her after the event and clutched her by the arm, eager to catch this amazing creature before she dematerialized into invisibility again.
I said, “Ann, I realize we’ve only just met, but I have to tell you—you’re extraordinary and I love you!”
Now, Ann Patchett is a woman who actually does have boundaries. She looked at me a bit askance, unsurprisingly. She seemed to be deciding something about me. For a moment, I wasn’t sure where I stood. But what she did next was wonderful. She cupped my face in her hands and kissed me. Then she pronounced, “And I love you, Liz Gilbert.”
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