Ann Patchett recommended Big Magic and I love Ann Patchett‘s writing so much, I went out and got a copy of Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear. 

Part memoir, part self-help book, Elizabeth Gilbert‘s latest is  an easy read in a conversational tone. The author of Eat Pray Love, Gilbert writes about taming fear to release our inner creativity.

She talks about the magic of creation as she and other artists have experienced it, from the idea to developing it, from writers block to the rejection letter, from publishing to criticism. It takes courage.

As a writer in the midst of a scary moment — I’m revising a novel, painfully, slowly — I appreciated her words. Especially these:

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?”

You do not need anybody’s permission to live a creative life.

Share whatever you are driven to share. If it’s authentic enough, believe me— it will feel original.

Whether you are young or old, we need your work in order to enrich and inform our own lives.

Somebody would send me a rejection, and I would knock it right back over the net, sending out another query that same afternoon.

Why would your creativity not love you? It came to you, didn’t it?

You were born to create, regardless of the outcome.

Now you might read Big Magic,  and say you got something completely different out of it. If you did, let me know. If you haven’t read it, go find a copy. The story about Ann Patchett’s Big Idea is worth it.

I’ve met that magic. And we’re together for always, regardless of the outcome. And that’s enough.

ⓒ Mary K. Tilghman

Elizabeth Gilbert’s Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear was published by Riverhead Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House, in New York, 2015.