Image: A different kind of Art
Speaking at the sold-out session at the Sydney Opera House, the author of Eat Pray Love, Committed and The Signature of All Things, urged women to get past their need to produce perfect work before letting it loose on the world. ‘If you want to live a creative life somehow you have to take on your perfectionism,’ she said, adding that it was a particularly huge issue for women who often held themselves back from fear of failure or judgement whereas men would jump in.
‘There are so many things your creative work doesn’t have to be,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t have to be good; it doesn’t have to be important; it doesn’t have to be world-changing; it doesn’t have to be marketable. It just has to be done.’
She said the only way she finished her first novel was by letting it be ‘unbelievably flawed’, adding that she could point out things wrong with everything she had ever written. ‘I could show you characters I’ve killed because I didn’t know what else to do with them. I could show you research I didn’t do because I just didn’t have the time or couldn’t stay with something. It’s all held together by sticky tape and glue and shoelaces on the back.’
Even in her latest novel, The Signature of All Things, she’s conscious of a character that she ‘didn’t know’ like the rest of them ‘I’d written her but I didn’t feel her in the way that I feel these other characters. She was really kind of just a plot device.’
When she sent the book out to early readers and friends they all said the character was ‘weak’ and ‘unformed’.
But having already worked on the novel for almost four years, Gilbert decided against trying to fix it. ‘I would have had to dismantle the novel back to the earliest chapters which was a little bit like a carpenter building a house and then at the end saying: ‘The foundation’s off by three inches take the whole thing down. It’s a huge waste of resources and time and it might have some particular charm that then gets destroyed in the rebuild.’
The ‘total curse’ of perfectionism – or the fear of not being good enough – was just one of the ‘bottomless list’ of fears that can block women from fully releasing their creativity, she observed. Gilbert tackles the topic of fear in her next book, Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear, to be released on September 22.
She confessed she had been a ‘terrified person almost my entire life’. But, she said, she reached a point where she realised that fear was ‘terribly, terribly boring’, because it resulted in the same reaction every time. ‘I realised my fear was like a song that had just one note, one word and that word was stop, stop, stop, stop.’ So now when she begins a new project she has a conversation with her fear and allows it a lot of internal space, rather than fighting against it or denying it.
‘There is no way to live a creative life without stirring up your fear,’ she told the audience. ‘Your fear will always be a part of your creative life because creativity asks us to enter into realms of uncertain outcome and there is nothing that fear hates more.’
To have that conversation with fear, Gilbert said, women first had to learn to ‘stand tall in a certain degree of entitlement’ that they were allowed to express themselves creatively.
Rather than ‘diva entitlement’ Gilbert said she was referring to the kind of entitlement that British poet David Whyte described as the ‘arrogance of belonging’.
‘His experience, and what he believes, often stops people from living a creative life is the most destructive kind of narcissism: the self-esteem issues; the self-abuse; the shame, that sort of entwinement in the darkest parts of yourself that refuse to allow you to be free. The arrogance of belonging will actually allow you to participate in the world in a way that will bring you out of that and let you actually be part of things instead of just being trapped in your own shell.’
‘It’s the arrogance that says: I am part of all of this and as a constituent of all of this I am entitled to have expression, to have opinions. I’m entitled to create, which is a particularly difficult thing for women to claim.’
In question time Gilbert tackled two of the common issues for anyone involved in creative work: what to do if you can’t start and what to do if you can’t finish.
One woman described trying to come back to her creative work after a period where she wasn’t producing. She prepared her space with her chosen mediums but found herself struggling to start. Gilbert’s advice: try making art in a bus station, the lobby of a corporate office, or an off-track betting place: ‘Go to some place that just seems devoid of art and make art there.’ Sometimes creating a sacred space in which to create could ‘almost fuck your head up too much’, she said, because people feel what they are going to do is not good enough for the space.
‘You’re elevating it too high,’ she said. ‘Bring it down to the earth and to the dirt and start there and then eventually you’ll move back into your beautiful sacred space.’
Another question highlighted what can happen when people get close to finishing creative work. ‘Suddenly I’ve got clean sheets, clean bathroom and even jam to show for it,’ said the male questioner. ‘But I find it very, very hard to actually finish.’
Gilbert said family expectations can lie at the heart of someone being afraid to succeed in their creative work. ‘Lots of times when people won’t finish something I feel like they’re holding on to some loyalty to somebody. There’s somebody who will be betrayed by you finishing and by you succeeding and by you shining.’
It can be the product of someone breaking their family mould. ‘If they have some sort of idea of what you’re supposed to be and you went and did something else that is a great act of betrayal of those people if you succeed.’
Even if that person is dead, she said, it was important to have a conversation with them and say: ‘I’m going to betray you now because I’m going to finish this and it’s going to be beautiful and I’ll be happy.’
‘You have to put the thing on the school bus and send it to school,’ she said.
