Brisbane Writers Festival presents An Evening with Elizabeth Gilbert

it's my absolute pleasure to welcome you into this wonderful venue tonight my name is Julie beverage I'm the CEO and festival director of Brisbane writers festival before beginning this evening I would just like to acknowledge the yagura' people who are the traditional owners of the land on which we gather tonight to share stories and ideas I pay respect to their past present and future leaders and extend that respect to other Aboriginal people present this evening acknowledgement has to go as well to our principle partners the University of Queensland and our major partner for ideas McCulloch Robertson whose support enables us to dream big dove deep and thrive there's always something wonderful we think about reconnecting with amazing people like Elizabeth Gilbert in the context of events like these the last time Liz was in Brisbane was for inspire creativity in 2014 and she left the room buzzing and hungry for more at home I told my husband that liz is the new Oprah and he doesn't get it and so I say she's the new Elvis she's a modern day Springsteen guiding women through a different River or through an alternative badlands and with that he's read every word and she evokes the thought that we all of us can live inspired and creative lives that we are capable of big magic and I feel equal parts inspired by the life Liz believes I can live and in equal measures envious of the life she leaves the conversation she must have with the amazing people she connects with and the ease with which it all seems to occur so what's the secret why aren't we all Elizabeth Gilbert I'm sure you connect with that sir so at home we've taken to referring to Elizabeth as not just Liz but Erin which is officers middle name and she's made her way into our lexicon and I'm sure that's an experience that would be shared by a lot of you in the room she's become an intimate part of the vulnerable fabric of our inner lives she is a candle burning and flickering and we are a whisper of moths and speaking with her tonight is the wonderful Muir Freeman of the Mamamia Women's Network and so please join me in welcoming both Muir and Liz Cheers you're a sneak you switched your wine into water and oh now I look like a booze bag you do because I'm a designated driver an hour ago and an hour ago we were doing our sound check and singing Madonna songs so I believe you'll be able to find that on the Internet yes welcome hi sweetheart I feel like it's strange welcoming you to Australia because you are almost Australian oh can you tell by my distinctive Australian axe I can in fact you said you were even looking at getting maybe some Australian citizenship I am yeah my husband is an Australian citizen like most Brazilians it's complicated it's complicated but we come here every year his kids are Australian I've been coming to Australia every year for 12 years sometimes twice a year um nice country you have here you guys well done really well - thank you and when I asked you where it is that you base yourself when you're in Australia what did you say Canberra which I understand is the new jersey of Australia I feel you know I still lately I actually have become a little defender of Canberra because you can take somebody hostage and living in New Jersey as I do which is a punch line for Americans I always feel like it's kind of cool to live in the underdog place that everybody thinks it is really embarrassing yeah I kind of imagined that you'd be like Sydney or Melbourne or Brisbane or Byron or somewhere you know I love all of those places this is where the family lives yeah you know you go we did we go where the love is now I asked you when I met you tonight did you drive here uh-huh probably not from Canberra but if you follow losers Facebook page which I'm sure most of you do and if you don't you should you talked about learning to drive in Australia yes I can drive in America more like um I'm not the most confident driver in the world spatial orientation is not a gift of mine machinery also not a gift of mine and but I can do it you know I get around and and I've been cut as I said when coming to Australia for 12 years and I've just never never occurred to me to drive here because I can't wrong side of the road inside the roads cheering well on the wrong side listen I have cultural politeness other side of the road wrong side of the road sounds very pretty there is no right or wrong sighs about me not but you guys totally are on the wrong side of it so but this time you know what I realized that there's a I realized that it's it's against everything that I sort of stand for about how women should position themselves in the world that I let my husband drive me around because he knows how to drive in Australia why does he know how to drive in Australia because he learned he came from a country where they drive on the other side of the road as well but it just I didn't even notice it till this times one of these things that catches up with you or thought why am I just why am I just going to be a passenger in this car and in my own life Dumber people than me have learned how to drive in Australia I am sure I am sure it could be done so I insisted on it and it was tense and it's frightening and now I can do it and I can also be more useful like not just to myself but to my daughter-in-law and my grandkids I can pick them up and take care I can go and do things for people I'm not just you know I just hated the idea of being like I don't know it just makes me feel like somebody sprawled out on a divan eating chocolates like oh I couldn't possibly do that you know like of course you can of course you can do it and I feel like sometimes we just get lazy about what we're capable of um so yeah now I can I Drive all over this it's what I call your dutiful country no it's the 10th anniversary of Eat Pray Love I've got my little dog-eared copy in my bag for you to sign afterwards um Wow tingey yeah right how did you feel when you look at that time it's gone by like 10 minutes underwater no she's good yeah I joke that my husband of Mines husband said to her on their 10th wedding anniversary 10 minutes feels like 10 minutes underwater um it's some cute right he also she said do you think I'm a MILF and he said no I think you're an mi l-h a mother mom I'd like to hang out with but I think we can get them numbers right on that what is um it doesn't feel like 10 years has gone by um if you were to wake me from a dead sleep in the middle night I think this is an interesting question if you had no preparation and somebody violently shook you awake and asked you how old you are how old do you think you are and I think I'm 34 but I'm not I'm 46 um and I'm and I've thought I've been 34 since I was 34 and 34 you just stopped well is that I think I just ma'am that's when I went traveling and I feel like that's when in a weird way that's when I stopped the clock not on aging in life which of course we cannot stop but I stopped the clock on living on life I was not meant to be living and started to live life as I was meant to be living it and then it was good from then so it sort of paused something in me like this is this is how it is now so in a way the Eat Pray Love journey hasn't ended you know I'm still that person you know I became that person on that journey and I'm still that person and then there's a new book coming out at the end of March called Eat Pray Love made me do it yeah which is what like an anthology of stories from women who were inspired by the book to do various things women and men believe it or not um and three of them but still one of them heterosexual it's amazing way but yeah that was a really cool idea that my publisher had as a way of honoring we're trying to think of something cool to do on the 10th anniversary and we came up with this idea to put out a call to ask people to share stories of things that they had done or changed because of Eat Pray Love and that was reading those essays and choosing them was a really powerful experience for me because it was a sort of tidal wave of the same kind of story coming again and again and again and it really answered for me in a way a question I've never been able to answer which is why did this book do this why did eat Pray Love becoming Pray Love what was the thing I don't people have asked me that I don't know what's the answer um I mean I still don't know we'll never know the definition of a phenomenon is I knowable and also unrepeatable if I knew I would do it with everybody room but what I saw reading these essays was that in each person's reading of Eat Pray Love there came a moment and of course this is a selective community of people who will say that their life was changed by that book so it's not every reader but it's these particular readers who really touched by it there came a moment where they realized my life doesn't have to look like this anymore and this was a bunch of different stuff you know this was terrible marriage this was addiction this was you know soul-crushing job this was toxic relationship with dysfunctional family this was you know not finishing college you know all of these sorts of things that they had just decided was what their life was and then something happened reading it I left because he pray love of course is about a woman who says my life doesn't have to look like this anymore what if it what if everything changed what if everything could be overturned and and it could all be done anew and so it was really exciting to see that that's what it is it's this reminder and I think for me it's kind of shocking and it's shocking cuz it happened in my own life as well it's shocking how many women never got the memo that their lives belong to them you know because the memo seems to constantly be that your life is some measure belongs to others all the time to your family to your community to your you know foxed you you've talked about getting to the end of yourself yeah can you explain a little bit about that that I'm here of getting to the end of yourself yeah but not stopping there yeah okay so getting to the end of your power is is a really interesting moment in people's lives and it's a moment the moment that precedes surrender usually and this is something that my friend Rob Bell has - Rob Bell who I love so much and I hope you're all down with talks about all the time when he was studying to be a minister somebody gave him the advice to go sit in on a a meetings because they said what you've got there is a roomful of people who have come to the end of their power and they're not full of anymore they're not walking around pretending to be okay when they're not okay they're not walking around saying that they can do stuff that they can't do they're not walking around in masks they have reached the end of the deceit and they have reached as far as they can go and now they've turned it over in this act of surrender to say I can't manage this anymore I can't manage my life anymore essentially every single person who ever walked into an AAA meeting has come to the end of their power and the end of themselves and they've said I need help and I'm and this isn't working for me and was that you at on the bathroom that was me on the bathroom floor like though I think many of us reach a moment in our life and that moment the scary thing about saying I can't do this anymore this isn't working for me anymore is that you don't know what the next thing is it's not like I had some sort of super rock star moment where I looked in there and I was like this marriage is I'm out of here see yeah you know like I was in a pile of snot for the sixth consecutive month having lost 20 pounds having you know because I didn't know what the next thing is you know a stop I was I couldn't do this anymore and I don't know what the next thing is anymore that is a moment where you have no choice but to start by saying this isn't my life can't look like this anymore and I don't and then people say well what are you gonna do and then you say the three scariest words on earth I don't know I don't know and you're and I think one of the scariest things especially for somebody who likes to sort of take charge of their life is to admit that I don't know is a perfectly legitimate answer sometimes in life sometimes it's the only answer and then you have to start searching you have to start going to wiser people than you and older people than you and professional people who charge you $150 an hour and saying I don't know what do I do now and starting to rebuild something from there but it doesn't happen until after you've come to the end of yourself and then you build the new self you said in your TED talk your 2009 TED talk about creativity I think you started it by saying or maybe it was your 2014 one you started up by saying after you wrote Eat Pray Love and it was this phenomenon and it was bestseller list for a hundred years and everyone has had already been a hundred years at least and everyone was like are you scared are you scared what's going to happen next and you said I don't know and then you wrote committed which you described as having bond I love the out of that book thank him I really did I loved it I would love your growth released if if I could read it but I loved it and I loved it but it didn't have the same resonances ate Pray Love and it didn't have the same commercial success yeah so I was gonna ask you what was more disruptive in your life success oh can we say failure yeah what commercial failure yeah um look life is a disruptive activity but with success I was eight Pray Love just all awesome or were there some challenging things that came with there were some challenging things that came with it but I also was really careful not to make it into a curse because I feel like one of your jobs in life is to try not to turn blessings into curses because there are so few blessings when you get one like you should be kind of go ahead like it say so I was always trying to remind myself having a giant best-selling book is actually not on the list of like like horrible things happen even being many things you happen to be so I didn't ever see it as a problem I saw it as a puzzle right and a puzzle is just a problem with the drama volume turned down right say that again I don't know what I just said a puzzle it was really profound puzzle is just a problem with the drama volume turned to drama right so instead of saying oh my god that are saying like wow this is really interesting I've never been in a situation like this before I don't really know what you do next huh how do I puzzle my way out of this how do I do this in a way that is going to work for my life okay here's things I don't want to do I don't want to never make work again that's something sometimes happens to people after they've had huge success that would be really sad for me cuz I love I love working I don't want to live in constant cannibalistic competition against myself and say that my life is some sort of a stock market grid where the line must constantly be moving upward into the right which means that I must do 10% better than myself every year we scared right and committed you didn't feel different to other books that yeah it was where it felt jarring because I had never written with an audience before um you know Eat Pray Love was my fourth book but committed was my first book that I wrote while people were watching so they say dance like no one's watching I was dancing and everybody was like she's not that good a dancer you know like she's got no hip flexibility I was like you never said it 10 years ago when I was dancing when nobody was watching um so it was weird but I also felt like okay look there's only one way for all of us to get through this and by all of us I meant me the fans of Eat Pray Love and the haters of you Pray Love we're just going to have to break the spell like someone's gonna have to make another book so that you guys can all have an opinion about it and we can all get on with our lives right so the day that committed was published was the most liberating amazing normally book publishing day is often a bit of a letdown sometimes weirdly like oh this is supposed to be a big date it's not that day I just felt like okay spells broken here you go you guys go have go whatever go like love it hate it say it's not as good say it's better say like I know just whatever word then we can just go on and do other things and talk about other things and that Harper Lee having died this week is what I wish Harper Lee had been able to do when she was young and vibrant is break the spell of the things so that so that everybody can get on with their lives throw a police procedural novel out there write a cookbook something do a thing just anything to just break this gals ruin and keep moving forward hero there forward so the end then you've working moss yeah and then you get to do whatever you want then ten year not ten years three and a half years of researching moss and thank you for Alma Whitaker she's an extraordinary feminist wonderful character a gift of a character in a woman that you gave us but that really was not it didn't seem to be in the trajectory in which you were heading right was there a lot of pressure to go in a different way or not even go on another trip yeah get another divorce I just keep getting divorces and write about it um people seem to like it when you do that um different seriously do people say that to you uh no Simon but you know here's the here's look cool I mean the thing is after committed this is why this is why I love the book committed to when I call it a disaster I only mean commercially um you know it's old I think literally one one thousandth of the number of units of Eat Pray Love but that's still an incredible result sure anyone else if you're a course arrangement which is what publishing companies are that's a significant drop-off in sales all right um and if you're somebody who gauges herself on how well you're doing compared to a former version of yourself that's a disaster yeah right thankfully I'm I'm not addressing you know um so so what happened was after that was done I was like well now no one's looking right because now never wandered off everybody wants to go and watch Fifty Shades of Grey to be up yeah or Twilight dad or like whatever the next thing was yeah that was the big thing so now everyone's wandered off now I can do any I felt like okay now I can play like play really freely and the other thing I felt was now I can take huge risks creatively because it doesn't matter anymore you know I just felt like and it shouldn't ever matter but it really felt after committed like it didn't matter I just didn't matter so I thought and I also thought look I have something that very few women creators have ever had in history I have total agency over what I do next and and pay for it myself so I don't need to go to a publishing house and beg them for an advance to write a 500 page historical novel about a virgin who spends her life studying laws like because guess what the elevated page Jannah is it going nowhere I get to just go do it I just get to go do it yeah which is weirdly also what I did in my 20s when no one cared so there's this weird thing that happens in the creator's life there's a period where no one cares about you and you do whatever you want you're totally free and then if you get very lucky there's a period where people care about you and then that can be a lot of pressure and then maybe there's a period where you get over the hump or maybe nobody cares about you again and weirdly what you return to is how you used to create before anybody was watching that make sense absolutely and that's what the signature of all things it was just my dancing dancing in the dark and you said you said that that you give in many ways and the signature of all things was more revealing of you personally than eat Pray Love which seems counterintuitive yeah somebody taught me this that that when you're writing them where you're always writing fiction and when you're writing fiction you're always writing memoir were clever it's a kind of a Cohen but it works because the thing is when you're writing a memoir you are so conscious of how you are curating your story so when people say Eat Pray Love was so intimate it was so revealing you gave so much of yourself away my thought is well not really like if I had published my Diaries that I kept while I was traveling that year that would have been total nakedness but I didn't I curated a version of those diaries and I chose very carefully what was in there and what wasn't in there and it wasn't that I was trying to sell a certain polished version of myself it's just that it was a it was it's an act of art you're making something and you're deciding and I also was very super cautious about what I said about other people in the memoir right so there's a great deal of restraint in there but a lot of other people's stories not in every memoir stories like you guys don't know anything about my ex-husband you know because I was really careful about that because I didn't feel safe talking about a lot of them and so there's things that you you know there's names that are changed there's all sorts of careful things writing about your family there's there's decisions that you have to make that are very calculated and very self protective in a lot of ways when you write a novel all the bets are off because it's not you so it ends up being you write Salma you totally yeah right totally to everyone in that book is me except prudence the one the virtue is one except the virtuous one and that's why she's mysterious too so you can put parts of yourself in everybody yeah and parts of other people your family you can learn more about my family by reading signature of all things and you're gonna read from any memoir you know but but almost like there's things in there that happen to her that are just super magnified versions of things that have happened to me in my life and I can freely smell steak about these I should say yeah whereas in the memoir weirdly a lot of its contained so um you end up I feel like it's like if a book is a crime scene a memoir has been scrubbed and cleaned and disinfected and a novel I've got fingernails and hair and bits of DNA all over that thing because I didn't think to wipe the steering wheel out of a fluid you know um because no I'm like I no one's gonna know it's me but it's always you it's always you and some in some disguise and then brig magic so I mean it's impossible to predict your trajectory big magic came from did it come from the talks that you were doing where did it come from because it was such it's been such a seminal book I bought it for every friend of mine that's a rider that wants to be writer that's not a writer but just he's stuck well that's it's its own degree it's like a brilliant book thank you where did it come from well big magic is a weird book for me because I've never had a writing experience like this for a bunch of reasons one I've been thinking about writing this book for 13 years and the reason I had bunch of reasons why I didn't one of which was I didn't know how to say what I was trying to say I didn't know if I had the authority to say what I was trying to say because it's a manifesto so I think I may have felt like I needed three or four more books under my belt before I had the authority to write a Madison your first book shouldn't be a manifesto about how to be creative like I think I needed to write the signature of all things to be like okay I can talk about you know um and and I needed to have been through success and failure and different kinds of things to feel like I had that right so part of it was that part of it was that I knew I wanted there were things I wanted to say about creativity I always in my fiction and nonfiction been big researcher so everything like signature well things took me four years of research to write about that I've always gone to the experts in a way to find out about things and so for years I've been collecting books about all these different aspects of creativity the neuro psychology of creativity biological aspects of creativity genetics and creativity the links between creativity and suicide creativity and alcoholism creativity and depression creativity and you know and I had hundreds of these books and one day I looked at the shelf and I was like if I have to read even one of these books I'm gonna kill myself yeah like I don't give a so you collected them but you didn't read I didn't read one of them I didn't read one of them here's another thing I didn't do I didn't go sit in a lab with a guy in a white coat it was an expert on creativity and interview him great okay I'm an expert on creativity I've been doing this my whole life and I know what I know there also I think comes a time in a woman's life where you decide that you know what you know hmm where you don't need to back it up with a million footnotes you don't need to maybe go and you know sit in the the latest think tank to hear what the links are between the cerebral cortex and creativity I know I know what I know and what I know to be true is that creativity is this remarkable conversation between human beings and mystery and it's one of the greatest invitations in the world to be allowed to participate in that conversation and that ideas are these strange disembodied life forms that have energy and they have will and they have consciousness they just don't have body and they circle the universe looking for human collaborators going from person to person saying are you my mother are you my mother human mother do you want to work with me do you want to and mostly we say no because we're afraid and every once in a while we yes and when we say yes we enter into the most strange and mysterious relationship with the weirdest most otherworldly force this idea that wants to be made and wants to be made through you just as much as you want it to be made and it is not your master and you are not its master but you're in some strange dance with each other and together you will make a thing that maybe wasn't what the original idea was and maybe wasn't what you had in mind but is a thing that didn't exist before and that maybe has no rational reason for existing the other crazy and beautiful and strange thing about creativity is that when you embark on a creative adventure you are doing the most fundamentally irrational thing you can possibly do you are saying to yourself to your family to the universe to destiny I am going to take the single most precious resource that I possess which is my time my mortal time I'm not here very long I don't know how long I have and once I spend my hours they can never be gotten back this is a currency that that once spent is gone and I'm going to take that currency and when I could be using it to do all sorts of very rational things with my time advancing my empire finding cute people to have sex with you know reproducing working harder so I can build an inground swimming pool in my backyard like all sorts of things that you could be doing I'm going to take that time to make something that nobody needs but nobody asked for that maybe nobody will like that maybe nothing will come of it maybe we'll never sell that maybe you won't even like and I'm going to spend days weeks months years doing this totally irrational thing because dot dot dot I don't know nobody knows why do we do this and we're the only species on earth that does this and all of our ancestors did it and our children are born doing it making things for no reason creating things for no reason it's this aspect of our shared humanity it's so weird you talk about in in big magic a lot about it's this dichotomy between the inspiration and the magic the magical thinking in the magical process and then just the workmen like nature of just showing up yeah you say yeah how do you yeah yeah this is a word we promised we were never going to use a gun against lives how do you turn it out like do you expect like this 80% showing up 20% magic how does it work for you yeah I suppose you can only talk for yourself well somebody said to me the other day I don't get it do you believe in magic or do you believe in a work ethic and I was like yes how do they coexist yeah Jain answer is yes yes the answer is yes because there is no one without the other right so these normally I think what the mistake that people get in terms of creativity is there's this very sort of macho way of looking at it which says I am the master of this thing nothing's happening here nothing's coming through me I am creating everything I am the great artist I am Hemingway I am Picasso I am Nabokov who said when somebody asked him do your characters ever take on lives of their own and he said my characters are galley slaves to my will right like there's that which is like super muscular super aggressive super about being in a battle with this thing and dominating it right and then there's the alternate other way of looking at it which is super airy-fairy flaky new agey which is like i'm just a vessel just a vessel the muse I'm just a muse and I don't even know where it comes from it just like pours through me you know I hate eyes pain also it's so passive you're like I'm a hand puppet of the divine you know um and there's no will in that there's no muscle in that there's no there's no character and that there's no interesting thing in that so what I think is that it's not either of those it's it's a conversation it's a relationship of strange peers where I bring my labor and inspiration brings the mystery and then we do the best we can with it and so the difference in that sort of having it be a relationship like that is that you can have a conversation with it I feel like it's having a conversation with me right ideas come to me and they ask me you know do you want to work with me or not you know do you want to do this thing or not and then I can engage I can look at my life in the nowadays my life and answer reasonably you know one of the things that people will say to me is I've so many ideas I'm just so and I never know which one to do and I was like take charge of it you're the boss of you pick one pick one and tell the other ones to get in line right and this happens all the time where I'm working on a book and I get to the boring part which is you know the fun exciting part was the idea and then I started and now it's two months in and now I sort of hate it and now I'm it's lame and I know it's not going to be as good as I thought it was going to be and then another idea comes all seductive yeah and it's like come away with me I'm sexy you know and here's the thing I know I look at that sexy provocative like harem dancer idea that's like and I'm like yeah but in two months you're gonna look like this ha ha ha so we're gonna finish this and then we'll see how hot you are like later um but you you can assert yourself right so when you pretend that you're just the vessel you don't have the right to say that you don't have the right to push back and when you pretend that you're in a bunk off and that you're totally the master of it then you are not being humble in the face of the real and strange mystery of inspiration so so for me like when I'm working and it's not working so I used to just claim as younger and I would go nuts and I paint myself be like when I get through crying they know drama now what I get that I didn't used to get is that this thing's trying to help you make it and if you can be patient with it it will show you how to make it to what was true so stay with it staring so it's not as much pushing through stay so I'll say - I'll sit in my room and I'll say to the novel look I am so on board I'm so committed to this any time you want to send me some information very helpful but like in the meantime I'll be here for the next hour and and I'm just gonna sit here and I'll be here and I'll plug away and I really want to get up and watch a couple episodes of Breaking Bad but what I'm gonna do is just stay over there because that's my commitment is and I'm going to try and I'm going to work and it's not going to be satisfying and that's okay but I'm here because I know you're and you know sure enough 45 minutes in something's there you know and sometimes I think people spend their lives waiting for inspiration to show up when inspiration is waiting for you it's waiting for you it's like are you I feel like so many times like it'll take me a year to get a book going sometimes because I feel like inspirations in the corner watching me like are you really going to do this and I have to show it that I really am you're prepared and when I show up it shows up you know and when it shows up I show up and we're trying we're both trying to do this thing and what we end up with is something very strange but the experience of doing that I think is the coolest way you can possibly spend your life in those bored not bored but there's no more frustration or boredom or yeah um how do you resist the temptation to just get on facebook because and I say that seriously because you have built this extraordinary in the past year or two Rebecca Sparrow got me onto your Facebook page and it was a revelation I didn't realize that you were on Facebook and not just on Facebook but posting sometimes things that are 2,000 3,000 words long you're right you are engaged and dynamic and the things you poster are so fantastic how do you quarantine that from the work that you have to do as a writer because that's to talk about it seductive yeah well it's a it's a certain amount of time a day and I don't do the 2,000 word ones every single day sometimes I just put a picture I know it's I got a so Misha I don't think you would a picture of goats on pop-tarts wearing sweaters in outer space like sometimes that's the post or a link to something someone else very close to lately that's a nice but you're not sure it like a Godin I tend to it you tend to do you know I think I think there's just this um I'm trying to think of the best way to describe it it doesn't sound fascistic it's this self accountability I hold myself accountable for my work um so I know when I'm I know when I'm not holding myself accountable for my work I know when I'm on Facebook when it's okay that I'm on Facebook and I know when I'm in facebook when I really ought to be doing something else and I hold myself responsible for knowing the difference between those two things I'm a grown-up do you have to pull a sit yeah you have to police everything because there's instant gratification from facing yeah from the interaction that you haven't as a rider you write something on Facebook cool 100,000 likes you get that must feel good yeah or somebody telling me that I'm a dog's breakfast right um but that's social media um no I just I don't know how to explain it other than to say I have to hold myself responsible for my work right and I know that what I'm doing on Facebook is part of my work for instance there would be no big magic in this particular form without the conversations I've had over the years on Facebook with people about the things they're afraid of with creativity that led me to find my voice to write that book so I know I'm being assisted by it also but I also know I'm blowing smoke up my ass if I pretend for a year that by writing a Facebook post every day I'm working on a book because I'm not you know um so so it's really about and when I say the problem with the word discipline is that it's very hard and it has an inbuilt idea of pain um it's friendly tender compassionate self-accountability right which means that some days I don't get it right some days I waste the day and the next I'm like okay so we wasted the day yesterday we're not doing that today um and then maybe we will waste the day to do you know but we'll just keep there's this friendliness that I feel like I've cultivated with myself I think the single most the single biggest advantage or gift that I got out of the Eat Pray Love journey and especially those four months in India in meditation for four months was the friendship that I forged with yousa the weirdest parts of myself the most unlikable parts of myself you know the recognition that all of us are sort of stuck in this car together when I say all of us I mean I mean none of us is a self we're all up Isle of selves and there are parts of ourselves that we like and sort of wish we're in charge all the time and there are other parts of ourselves who get up at two o'clock in the morning and eat it a quart jar of peanut butter and and that's that you know and there are parts of ourselves who are generous and forgiving in their parts of ourselves we're vindictive and snarky and and and what I sort of I used to think that you could only befriend yourself when you had perfected yourself and now I know that you can only befriend yourself when you're like oh I love all you dummies um like so the part of me who sometimes blows off a day or a week or a month it's all right like I got back from my really big big magic book tour for last 4 months in the States and I didn't I've been working on a book and I had been really disciplined about working on it every day even when I was in book tour and I came home so tired and I didn't do anything for almost two months and that was weird and for a while it was relaxing and then it wasn't relaxing anymore and then I panicked and thought maybe I'm not a writer anyway I went through all these things and now we're back we're back online you know but it's but it doesn't benefit you it in any stage to practice self abuse in any way and I know this as much as I know anything the world any voice within your mind that speaks to you with cruelty is not your highest self it simply will never be but then social media is filled with cruelty and a lot of people when they think about being creative what they're terrified about is the response I mean eat Pray Love came out before social media essentially yeah but that idea of you put yourself out there and now in real time you get real abuse and it's unfiltered yeah and you're quite active on your Facebook page how do you manage that how do you not let that infiltrate how you feel about your own work or yourself on a particular day even the way you look yeah um well for one thing miraculously my facebook page is for pretty kind people and they place it's self policing yeah and it also what I've noticed and I noticed this if anybody follows humans of New York do you follow that Facebook Hoani this is interesting um grace vulnerability kindness humor float to the top and savagery sinks because Facebook has um this weird um algorithm thank you that is that you know however many people like a comment it sort of raises it up so I don't have to ban or delete or chop out rude comments because they just sink and the grace Rises every single day because people choose what they and and because of the people who come to that page first of all are obviously readers of you people have tend to be pretty nice people okay people don't hate rate on your page they don't hate read on my page they hate read about people hate me other places but they don't hate me so much on my facebook page um you know because it's a big waste of it's like a lot of time for them to invest that they could be doing other things but it but generally speaking about the criticism look I don't like it you know and I think to pretend that you don't care or that you do like it is kind of weird and sociopathic so I think to start with let's just say it hurts it hurts I don't like it I don't like it when people say mean things about me I like it when people say nice things about me I'm weird that when the only person in the world who's ever had that strange biology um I would prefer it if everybody liked everything I did but I know that that's not possible and I know that if you dare to make a thing and to present it into the world then other people have the right to have an opinion about it and they have a right to speak their opinion about it that's the flow of ideas right in even though now we live in this kind of crazy unfiltered wild anonymous you know comments page world it's just a magnification of what has always been the case which is if I get to speak so do you so when you're creative do you have to by your nature oh to save your view sanity divorce yourself a little bit from how your creativity is received how whatever it is that you've created has been received yeah and you had best believe that it's okay no matter what happens right otherwise you're in quite a world of trouble when the book is published so you need to really convince yourself that you are okay regardless of what they think of you even if it doesn't feel like that in every moment and and some things that I you know I don't read a lot of my reviews anymore because I've I've become really self protective about who I take criticism from and when and tell me about that so you have to take criticism otherwise you won't improve right but you get to choose who you take it from and who you listen to so I have a few rules that people have to pass before they can criticize me that I'll listen number one is the book still in production is there time for me to change anything right I don't read the reviews after the books out it's too late I can't go back and take that obnoxious part out of you Pray Love it's done right so so we have to do it at the right time yeah and the time is when I can change it yeah right I know that seems very obvious but that's a really good reason not to read the room the Critias get too late um so is it the right time yeah do you the person who I'm showing this to have my best interests at heart mmm um you know that friend of yours who advertises herself as being brutally honest hmm her she's just a she's an she's an and when people tell you with pride that they're brutally honest what they are telling you and they're being very clear about it is I am brutal and I cannot wait for the opportunity to brutalize you it's like when people say with all due respect Oh means they've got none fun I hate to say it but no you don't you love to say um so the brutally honest person is just waiting for the chance to harm you so I go to compassionately honest people and there is such a thing you can be honest and you can be compassionate you can hold you can read my work and be very clear about what you think is working and not working in it and hold also in your heart the understanding that I'm a sensitive person that whose feelings can be easily hurt so how you bring this information to me matters right I'll show you my work do I trust your taste you know do you and I see things and read things and feel things the same way and I feel like there was one other one I feel like I had five rules so the reason that I don't often read official book criticism of my work anymore is because as much as I respect and admire the fact that the criticism needs to exist and it's a part of the whole cultural conversation that book critic does not owe anything to me that book critic is not their job is it to make me a better writer they have obligations and ethical responsibilities but those responsibilities are to the newspaper that they work for to the readers who they work for and to their own sense of taste and honesty I'm the last person who they need to be caring about and I don't listen to criticism from people who don't care about me because it will hurt it will end up hurting me John Updike said reading a book review is like of your work is like eating a sandwich that might contain shards of broken glass so even when there's a good review they might throw a little bit of broken glass in there you know and I don't think it's beneficial for me or anybody for me to be ingesting shards of broken glass I would be better if you didn't it's not good for your digestive system especially in white pants there are two Facebook posts of yours that I absolutely loved which were both longer ones at one more recently that was in everybody's Facebook feed everyone I know is talking about it and we're all sending it to each other you talked about the difference between a hobby a job a career and a vocation right can you just recap that sure I can think I can do it I'll try to do it quickly - okay so I think when when people are confused about what they should be doing with their time and with their life I think sometimes they have a lack of clarity about the difference between these four words which often become conflated and confused and misunderstood and the words are Hobby job career and vocation um Hobby is a thing that you do for pleasure and the stakes are so low like coloring in like karaoke like a singing Madonna before the show which I am sorry to say we rocked I'm really good you know it's okay you can but you can bomb you can fail it's something that you is a wonderful thing you don't have to have one but if you have one it's really nice because it's a way that you show that you are not just a cog and the Machine of production that some of your hours belong to mere pure pleasure and your creativity can be rooted in that all right it can just be that it can just be that you do it because it's fun because you like it because it brings you pleasure awesome before television everybody had hobbies right everybody having um now everybody's hobbies television including to a large extent mine the second thing is a job you don't have to have a job a hobby but yet you have to have a job you have to have a job you have to have a way to get by it's a material world you need to feed yourself you need to have a roof over your head unless you have a trust fund or somebody's completely supporting you you should have a job I would argue if you have a trust fund and somebody's completely supporting you you should also have a job it is a great point of honor especially for a woman to have a job to have a way to pay for yourself in the world to have the freedom of mobility that that gives you in the world to be able to change your life if you need to to be able to take care of yourself to be able to pull your own weight got to have a job here's the thing about a job it doesn't have to be great you don't have to like it you don't have to love it it doesn't have to fulfill your every single desire it doesn't have to be awesome it can be boring it can be lame it's fine I've had so many boring lame jobs in my life I know so many artists who'd never want to have a job because they think it's beneath them I always like I wrote four but Eat Pray Love was the book that finally made me not have day jobs and that was Eat Pray frickin love yeah like I'd written three books up until that point and still didn't quit my day jobs because I loved my creativity so much that I didn't want to make it pay for my life he didn't want to burden I did not wash out responsibilities so I had a job I always had jobs I bunch jobs job have one it's great no big deal like it doesn't define you it is not who you are right just what you do just what you do it's fine it's what you do for crust as we Australian size um career here's another thing you don't have to have don't have to have a hobby don't have to have a career don't have to have a career a career something you should have if you're passionate about a thing if you want to devote a bunch of energy into it if you want to pour yourself into advancing and growing and learning and shaping and changing things and being a career is like a super accelerated job like you cannot like your job and that's fine but if you don't like your career you're in the wrong career and you should just get a job right just forget about it and just go get a job like don't pour your life into something unless you want to and that's what a career is lastly a vocation this is a sacred thing this is your calling this is the thing that makes you want to get up in the morning this is the thing when I asked you today what are you most excited about right now in your life usually your vocation is something like that yeah your vocation does not necessarily have to have anything to do with Hobby job or career your vocation is your own people you can lose your job someone can take your career away from you no one can take your vocation away from you that is your sacred gift what are some examples of vocations your it depends on who you are but for some people raising their child as their vocation you know it's the thing they know they were put here to do or travel travel can be your vocation kindness can be your vocation like exercise can be your vocation for me writing is my vocation it also happens to now be my career and your job it's not I guess it's sort of my job yeah for a while when I was a journalist I felt like it was more my job now I'm not a journalist saying or writing books is more of a vocation for me but yeah happens to be my career but writing was my vocation for good 20 years before it was my job and so just because your creativity whatever it is that you do whether it's baking cakes painting writing if it's your hobby your vocation your job or your career it doesn't it doesn't matter like one's not superior to the other no and you also don't have to have a vocation yeah the only thing you have to have a job really that's it the rest of that you don't even have to enjoy no this is great you see how great this is just that's fine you can find because if you have a hobby that you love yeah then your job doesn't really matter if you have a vocation that you care about your volunteer work your commitment to saving the environment can be your vocation and your job can be working at Starbucks you know it's fine so so I think what happens is that we try to make that all one thing so everybody's looking for one thing that they can do that's all of those things that supports them financially that answers their souls calling that is a pleasure to work with see because my vocation is not same as my hobby because my writing is not always pleasurable sometimes it's really arduous since it's really painful sometimes it's really boring karaoke it's always pleasurable my hobby is I wouldn't do a hobby if it wasn't always pleasurable gardening for me is always fun you know so so to conflate any of those things with each other's to misunderstand that's an interesting right there's so many aha moment and and you can find that on your Facebook page where you talk about it in more depth yeah I think there's another book there um we're going to have questions shortly but I wanted to ask you about another post that you wrote which is about how you said you've noticed this thing where women when other women have had plastic surgery and women say I just feel so sad that makes me so sad that such and such looks like she's in a wind tunnel or has these crazy boobs or she uses on the red carpet and so H is so sad so sad and I'm so sad I am sad okay so I read that a little judgy no judging not a little superior I read that and I thought oh I say that all the time and what what do you think's bad about that I think it's I think I think it's a way to gossip and pretend you're not gossiping and I think it's a way to gossip while making yourself look virtuous and I think it's a way to take down another woman's choices about what she's decided to do with her body and her face in her life without acknowledging how tricky it is for all of us to make those choices and that there is this giant drum now where you can land as a woman on what you're willing to augment and change about yourself and you can be in any number of positions along the way and when you land in your position you have to be very careful not to be contemptuous and judgmental of women who have gone farther this way than you or not as far this way as you write so it's hard to do but it's it's a kind of it's a kind of self-hatred and it's a kind of a tree against other women and I just think it's mean and I also think it's distracting I also think there's some deep hypocrisy especially for left-wing feminist women like myself where I'm willing to stand in a picket line to defend to the death the right of another woman to do whatever she needs to do with her uterus but I can judge what she does with her lips and her boobs right like what part this is your right but this somehow you've crossed a line right um you know it's right um you know how about I say your entire body is your business your entire thing that you're doing with how you are walking out into the world as a woman is your business and I think you look great whatever it is you decided to do I think you're great I think you're great and if you need it and I'll tell you this if a woman has made herself look like she's walking through wind tunnel she needed to and she needed to because that's how she was going to feel safe walking through the world but now it's tricky right there's like patriarchy and there's the media and that's your ad that she feels safer walking through that she feels that she has to be a wind tunnel right to walk through the world and to feel good about herself I feel sad for myself that my god is that what I'm going to have to do as I get older to be considered still attractive and just palatable as a woman not even attract well apparently not cuz you don't consider her attractive but when I say I'm sad I guess I'm sad that the base level for women know is the Kardashians I think what if it was a great God gave him as a just a general testing light suggestion exactly she said you know what I mean I'm saying though that is considered the baseline of what's attractive for human yeah but then before that it was Marilyn Monroe and before that it was it was it was um I'm trying to think of who was the great it was I was oh my god let them eat cake it was Marie Antoinette there's always been a superficial beauty queen who is the baseline um you know and there always will be a superficial beauty queen who's the baseline I'm not worried about her and I'm not I'm not worried about her and I feel like the question becomes a distraction from the really important questions about woman's life I don't care what you do with your tits but what if everyone's doing it they aren't they aren't way on they aren't and there won't be some weird dystopian future where literally everyone has new tits that is not going to happen um you know they aren't all doing it a lot of more people are doing it but it's but but what I want to know is are you safe in your house are you safe in your house are you safe in the relationship that you're in I don't care about your boobs do you have control over your own money like the number two cause of death for women in America's domestic violence the most dangerous person in a woman's life statistically speaking is her husband or boyfriend I'm worried about that I don't give a what you do with your face I don't care about this you know I don't care it's the same thing when people like really spend hours and hours and I know that academically them and I'm a huge feminist I know the academically words matter things matter visions matter all this stuff matters but there's stuff that matters more you know I'm the most physically augmented human being you will ever meet in your entire life as a woman is Dolly Parton who is also one of most powerful women in the world you know like what she has done creatively what she's done with her life the way she's controlled her career the way she manages her public image the way she has been expressive and creative and powerful and rich and generous and cool and compassionate like you put her next to I can't believe I'm about to say some yoga hippy mama who's actually really contemptuous and mean yeah I'll take dolly I know like I just want you to be decent and and fine so so I feel like so when I hear the sadness thing I feel like I don't know that I totally because I often hear it and I think if you take away the part of you who's being judgmental and contemptuous then maybe I'll believe that you're actually feeling really sad about Renee Zellweger's face but I don't hear all I hear is contempt all I hear is contempt I'm just making the lines between my fired like here where I would have go chops yeah but this is important too I mean well you know we'll set a little side of time tiredness yeah we but maybe yeah maybe we've reached our okay yeah I wanted to ask you also about with creativity the role of fear that plays and vulnerability and how I know brain a brain brain a brené Brown yeah writes a lot about that yeah um how do you manage those two things day to day when you're talking about creativity well you have to understand that fear and creativity are natural companions in the sort of psychic topography of of your life because I in the book I say that fear and creativity are conjoined twins they're always going to be with each other and and the reason they're always gonna be with each other is because they have completely different motives for how to protect you and how to enhance your life they're working at cross-purposes right so your creativity is constantly going to ask you to enter into realms with uncertain outcome and to enter into landscapes that you've never been in before and to try new things and to take risks that's the job of creativity that's its job description if your mind is an office it sits in the corner of the office where that is what it's trying to do right your fear doesn't want you to do any of that because your fear has been programmed by evolution to be very suspicious of circumstances with uncertain outcome because when your fear doesn't know what's going to happen your fear assumes you're all going to die we're all going to die like I don't know what's going to happen therefore we're all going to die and that's a really good evolutionarily reflex because it keeps you from keeps you from dying a lot of the time um you know like I don't know how deep that water is I'm not going in and I don't know what's around that dark corner I'm not going around there I don't know you know this is what your fears job is and I think that when we battle our fear like so much of the language that we talk about about fears is very aggressive about battling and about you know I'm going to show fear who's boss them and dominate my friend me to get rid of my fear I feel like that doesn't work it doesn't work for me because anything I've ever fought fights back harder first of all like you throw a punch at something usually throws a punch back so anytime I've ever tried to show fear who's boss fear has been very quick to remind me who the boss actually is you know it just doubles down and comes down harder on me um you know and I feel like instead there's something missing from our conversation with fear and one of the things that's missing is just a sense of respect and reverence and gratitude to it every single one of us in this room can probably point to a moment in your life where your life was saved because of your fear where you are literally here and alive because your fear saved your life that's huge you literally owe your life to your fear it's not directly in your life which I imagine probably you can think of a moment then in the lives of your ancestors who managed to live long enough to procreate because their fear kept them alive right so we owe our fear a lot so the first thing that I do when fear arises is to thank it so rather than just hating on it or getting resentful or trying to punch it out the first thing I say is I am so thank you so much I know that you have that your job is to protect me and they're just trying to protect me thank you for all the times you've protected me I am grateful for your service I'm just trying to write a poem right now I'm pretty sure nobody's going to die you know so if you could just stand down that'd be awesome you know and it does if you talk like like all relationships if you explain yourself it's usually works out right it usually works out and and then I try to explain what I'm doing Krieger you're conjoined twin sister creativity and I are about to go on a road trip together and you can come with us because I know you will is how I talk to fear I know you will you always do but you're not allowed to sit in the front seat you're not allowed to touch the radio you're not allowed to hold the mat you're not allowed to choose the snacks and you are absolutely never allowed to drive but you can sit in the back and you can scream every time we get to a corner about how we're all going to die because that's apparently your job and you do it beautifully it's like inside out it's totally yes inside out I was like that movie and when I saw what you described when I talked about this sort of spirit of friendly accept you like just friendliness that I have to wear myself now that includes the friendliness that I feel toward fear damn just it's I've made friends with it it's my it's my oldest companion we've been together forever and it's always going to be with me I have no interest in becoming a fearless person that's a sociopath yeah right I've met some fearless people in my life they're insane and when you look in their eyes that reptilian weird there's something missing something's and they're dangerous to themselves and other people and you just cross the street when you see it you know so I don't want to be fearless I want to be brave and a brave person is somebody who feels fear and then does the thing anyway mmm you know um that's what I want to be and to be brave means that I have to be really patient and generous with the parts of myself who are fearful I don't know how else it works and the vulnerability of putting yourself out there again and again and again yes that is part of overcoming that getting a lot out of the process itself rather than being too attached to the outcome of it yeah and part of that is ego versus soul so you know here's the thing you have an ego I have an ego we all have an ego some of us might have to um you know I have a very substantive very substantial ego we most of us do for good or for bad and the definition of your ego is how you know that you're standing in your ego is it's the part of you that can never be satisfied hmm you know there's never enough cake there's just never enough sushi there's never enough love there's never enough praise there's never there's just never gonna be enough so you you know the ego is a treadmill it's like this acquisition of sentient treadmill where you do a thing and it goes well and then you have it's it doesn't satisfy and that's all right because that's part of the makeup of what it is to be a person and we all have that within us at some level and it's fine and I'm not at war with that a soul is a different thing and the soul asks a whole different series of questions you know the souls questions are all about like you know really the mary oliver what are we going to do with your one wild and wonderful life right what did we come here to do what makes us want to get up in the morning who do we love being with who brings us to life who who sparks joy you know who who makes us feel like we live in a world of infinite possibility how can we align our lives to be so our energy fields are crossing with those kind of people more what's the stuff that you that you do that makes you forget time is passing that's a really good indication of the fact that you're doing soul work is that you look up in two hours has gone by and you didn't even notice that's and all the soul wants is wonder and connection and love and joy and I have that too you know so so the ego part of me when I write a book and somebody says something terrible about it is injured you know but the soul part of me is like unaffected hmm the soul part of me is like can we do it again come on let's do it again I was so awesome and sometimes you feel like you took this leap I had a conversation with Bernie Brown about this on my podcast where when inspiration calls and you leap and it doesn't work right and and like there's this I don't know if you have this here but this is bumper-sticker all over the very delusional United States that says jump and the net will catch you leap in the net will catch you look we're all grown-ups here sometimes it doesn't catch you sometimes you jump and you land in a heap of broken bones and it didn't work and at that moment your ego is so broken and so wounded and your Souls like that was so much fun yeah when do we get to jump off a cliff again did you see how long we floated did you see that bird wasn't that cool we were up there and now we're down here we did it that's soul work right so I'm willing to take the ego bruising if I get to keep doing this all work and people who try to create lives where they're never going to get that bruise never get to do anything off a cliff mmm you know which is kind of a cool thing to get to do while you're here we are going to take questions in about just a few minutes so um think of your questions if you have them what about I wanted to ask you about the practicalities of your day and living a creative life because you travel the world you speak your own book tours how do you have a routine how do you manage your writing how do you do all that I'm right by season not by day so I used to write every day before I was published author because you have to because otherwise you'll never be a writer right but now that I have projects I write by project and my projects usually involve a huge amount of preparation so right now for instance I'm working on a novel about New York City in the 1940s been promiscuous showgirls I want to write about women using sexuality as currency and not long punished for it um how did that for them op because I'm sick I'm just sick of but you know it's like the story of promiscuous woman is always the story of you know ending up with your throat cut in an alley and I don't think that that is the true history of women and sexuality and I think that there a lot a lot of women who went through seasons in their life of great sort of reckless pleasure seeking and then maybe we're done with that and went on and had perfect lives and and in the 40s I think there were a lot of women like that I've met some of them now these women in their 90's telling the research process like for these reading tons of novels written in the 1940s and the most important thing for me is to try to read work written in the years that I'm writing about so that I can find the language so not so much with stuff written about that I've had stuff written in that time letters diaries novels films just trying to sort of agree so it's a lot of research so I'm not actually writing the book right now I'm just researching the book and that actually when you have to dive date yeah cuz you freedom anything wrong yeah this one probably won't be quite as long as it's I'm not writing I don't think it's going to be quite as long a book and it's more about sort of period of life rather that book was 150 years ban and this is just sort of a moment in this woman's life so do you do something every day are you yeah I try to I mean I didn't for that time when I was tired and I got back from dementia but but you know what it doesn't take a lot this is the thing I feel like I've seen people quit jobs you know I yeah I have a job quitting jobs too because they want to write a book hmm and I always say you don't need 40 hours a week to write a book I don't know any writer who writes 40 hours a week you're lucky if you're gonna write two hours a week like you don't need you're going to have too much time on your hands and it's going to feel really like a huge amount of pressure I'd rather that you set your alarm for an hour earlier earlier than work and got up in the morning if you're a morning person and it worked on your book for 40 minutes a day for four years then quit for two months and try to do it all at once because for me I feel like the more steadily you can do the so so I just have a rule that to work on the book an hour a day everyday and you can find that hour you can find that and it might just be rating for you if your mates reading it right now it's just reading and taking notes now when it comes time to actually write I will clear off the calendar and sit down and then I will you know get up and but but even in my best days I can't think of a day of my life where I was able to write for more than four hours you know it's it's not easy to sustain that you know um I don't know maybe you guys do I don't know creative people who literally create all day long it takes you know Lisa I think is the idea that maybe that's what you have to do to being a proper writer look likes the best books you've ever read were written in an hour a day um I really do think so and I think sometimes that feels boring and it's not very glamorous because it feels like you should be in a fugue state and you should be you know but that's but you know the I love Garrity's line never hurry never stop never hurry no it's like ordinary it's never hastened never stopped but it the idea is don't you don't need to chase this thing like a maniac but don't ever stop either and an hour a day is very manageable um half an hour day I'll do it you can find a half an hour day I have people who get on Facebook and say to me I would love to be creative but I have absolutely no leisure time and I'm just like you are literally on a social media site telling me and then sometimes just for fun I go look at their Facebook feed and I go look at that they do and like the that they like the five minute cat video that they'd like you had five minutes last week I know where your time is going cuz you're advertising it like you know and and I had you know one of the most important questions that with that I ever got as a creative person was when I was in my 20s and I had a bunch of jobs and I didn't never had enough time to write and I still had that dream I write about this in big magic when a letter that Melville wrote to Hawthorne saying I dream I'm dreamin this book that I want to write and I'm dreaming of the slow green grass growing summer hours in which a man ought to compose inspiration right because every artist dreams that there's going to be this day that comes when you have the beautiful sunlit studio and and somebody gave you a grant and you've got a stick I'm supportive of your work and you've got maybe an adventure like we all it ain't happening not yet Melville never got it and he wrote Moby Dick anyway you know like I never got it and I wrote it pre love anyway like we don't you don't get this kind of time I wrote my first two books in the reading room of the New York Public Library because it was the only quiet place in my life because I had so many roommates and I didn't have anywhere to go and so I wrote it in the library would go there every day and work I never got a room of my own until my third book in but I did the work anyway when you love it you do the work anyway so I was complaining to this older artist who I really admired this amazing woman about the fact that I didn't have enough time for my work the complaint the constant complaint that creative people have and she said the most important question anybody's ever asked me creatively she said what are you willing to give up to have the life that you keep claiming you want and and I said I mean it hit me like this and I said wow I guess I have to really learn how to start saying no to things that I don't want to do and she got this really compassionate big grin and she said always know it's so much worse than that you have to start learning how to say no to things you do want to do with the recognition that you have limited human energies and you cannot do all of the things hard enough to say no to stuff you don't want to do and so I was just sort of processing it and she said um that you know she said you have enough time she said what's your favorite TV show this is in the 90s and I said The Sopranos she said not anymore you're never watching another girl and I never did I still don't know how ended although I guess none of us from what I've read nobody knows how it ended um but she said you're done you're done she said you're telling me you have time for Tony Soprano's life but not yours the one that you keep saying that you want to have you don't have time for you're like she's like what's your favorite restaurant that you go to with your friends she's like you have time for that you know what's your favorite magazine I said The New Yorker she said you have time to read all those great writers in The New Yorker and you have no time for your own work right you're canceling that subscription stop telling she said that veggie Street really strict but she's like basically she said are you serious about this or are you just pretending that you're serious about this because if you're serious about this then you'll start making sacrifices so that you can have the life that you keep pretending that you want that's essentially what she was calling me out on you keep pretending that you want to be a writer and then you keep going out to bars till 1:00 a.m. with your friends so which is it going to be right which is going to be what are you willing to give up and and it was so life-affirming and I've had that conversation with myself again and again and again I have to rehab that conversation with myself and you have to keep giving up new things like I'm off and looking at where where's your energy going right because a lot of the complaint that we have is I don't have any energy on iminium something right all the time I don't mean energy and I had to get really real with myself about this recently and be like I have tons of energy I just wasted on stupid I wasted on I waste it on things I wasted on trying to make people like me who don't like me I waste it on trying to save friendships that are toxic I waste it on staying up reading stuff on Instagram I waste I like I waste it on hating myself there's a good waste of energy that's a wonderful place for a bunch of energy to go I waste it on judging myself I wasted on criticism I wasted on contempt for other people my energy is going in all sorts of places for me as an inherently energetic person to say I just wish I had more energy this is the metaphor I always use is like Mike Tyson saying I wish somebody had given me some more money so I wouldn't go bankrupt guys spent five hundred million dollars on things like albinos Serbian Tigers and golden bathtubs there's an equivalent in there about what we're doing with our energy what if you have plenty of energy but you're just squandering it pouring it away into stuff you don't care about stuff you can't fix stuff that's never going to get better stuff that doesn't matter what matters what really matters and how much are you willing to actually do something about it rather than pretending that you care about it with your level of fame and and the connection that so many of us feel that we have with you how do you create boundaries so that all your energy doesn't go out to everybody I'll give you an example is that on this last tour I realized I was going to be on tour for big magic for four months a tour that started in September in New York and ended in descent middle of December in Germany and that does include what I'm doing here right um and it was a basically different city almost every day for four months and and I wanted to because I'm passionate about talking about creativity and I wanted to bring this out and I like doing this and I realized the only way if I was very real with myself that I could figure to do this without getting sick was to not do the book signing lines afterwards um and and I'd raining they are they aren't if you are doing one book event they are if you're doing four months impose you know and they're draining they're not training if you don't care about people but they're draining if you like to meet people where they're meeting you so if somebody comes to me in a book signing line and they're in tears because they want to tell me how much my book meant to them I want to meet them where they are emotionally which means that I have to show up at a certain level of energy for them right and if and if the next person you know is really shy and I need to draw them out that's takes energy and if the next person is weirdly passive-aggressive and about to say something really savage to me I have to meet that with a certain kind of energy you know it's like each person has to be met where the who they are and that takes and and I really struggle with this because I feel like I don't want to be ungrateful people travel a long way to see me I know what it means to have an author signing a book that I love I don't want to be that be a diva in my ass and I finally just said the only way I can do this is by not not doing this anymore and by telling the audience every night like I'm doing with you why I'm doing it right explaining why I'm not doing it and letting them hear my explanation and letting me be okay with their disappointment right like I think one of the major ways that you can start to create healthy boundaries in your life so that all your energy isn't going into what Pranay Brown calls the biggest energy suck of all which is saying yes when you want to say now how many of you are so tired because you've been spending your life saying yes when what you really want to say is no right so if you can learn that it's okay that other people get disappointed mmm you know um there's this story going around that says if you start saying no to people and setting boundaries with them they will like you more I am here to disabuse you of that they won't they liked you better when you did everything they wanted you to do they liked you better when you took on the extra work they liked you better when you were like I'll pick up the kids from daycare they liked you better when you were like no it's fine I'm fine I can do it they liked you better when you sat in the book signing line for three hours and took selfies with everybody and signed every single book they liked me better right but I don't have infinite energy and I don't have infinite time and there's work that I want to do before I die and I don't know when that day comes and because of that I have to be okay with other people being disappointed when I say I'm terribly sorry but the answer is no because I'm making something that really matters to me and that has to be all right and that's the true believe in please raise your hand and we will get someone to you with a microphone I think there's someone just down here I'm hi hi I'm sorry I've had my back to you all night Hepler thanks so much Shay coming um I'm gonna try and make this short actually what does yeah you are what does it start look like for you is it an idea is it you're sitting at the desk and waiting for inspiration to arrive what does that look like for you the desk doesn't usually come till a couple years after the idea because I need so much preparation to get to the desk um before I actually start writing but the the start is usually just a tap tiny tiny tiny tiny like this of curiosity and I've spoken about this before about how much I advocate curiosity over passion we live in a society that has a really big fetish about passion and everybody's waiting for passion everybody wants lightning in the bottle everyone wants the voice from God everyone wants to be able to say and that was the moment my whole life changed and I knew this is not how most people's lives evolved so really when the creative journey to me is a trail of breadcrumbs not a not a lightning bolt right so it's about paying very close attention to the in like almost almost invisible tiny little clues that come to me where a part of me goes that's kind of interesting that's like 1/8 of a percent interesting and having the the trust in curiosity to look for the next breadcrumb that's associated with that well that's cool what would it be a bit but and then now you're you're on the journey so it's it doesn't start with a thunderclap it starts with something a voice that you almost cannot hear the tiniest tiniest hint usually it barely even has a pulse but I have such trust in curiosity and I have such trust that if my curiosity is telling me something that is interesting there's a reason and I also trust that if I'm interested in something other people might also be interested in it because I'm a pretty representative human being so that's that's how what the start looks like for me you would barely notice it yeah thank you I'm gonna let you be the bad cop who calls it over here sorry I've got the mic and hopefully I can articulate this question because it's kind of bumbling in my mind a bit you made some interesting points about you've got all this you've got limited amount of time and we often use this time to hop on Facebook and like I have no time so you know what am I going to do with that but sometimes it's just you're so tired and it's easier to pop on Facebook it's easy it is like sitting from the TV it's easier to zone out for you what do you do to actually go you know what it's easier for me to you know hop on Reddit and just scroll through and just zone out as opposed to using that time in some way that you want in the way you want to live your life so what is it that gives you that little ding to say you know what I'm wasting my time here um it's easier but it's more boring you know like if I could find something to do that was more interesting than writing I would do it and I've never found it and even when writing is hard and even when it's unrewarding for me and even when it's difficult even when I can't solve a narrative problem it's still the most interesting thing in the world for me so there's a limit to how many hours I can watch Big Bang Theory before I'm like this isn't this is easy but it's I'm not feeling alive I'm not feeling I'm not getting anything out of this this isn't doing anything for me and again it's also about sort of self accountability I also know that if I it's weird exercises like this for me as well um the negotiation begins almost as soon as I wake up about the first thought I have every day as I'm not exercising today before I even open my eyes and then the negotiation begins and sometimes the only way to stop the negotiation is to do the thing yeah right sometimes I get so tired of the negotiation of my mind about should I work on my book or should I watch TV should I work on my book so what so I so bored of that conversation there's really only one way to have that conversation go away and that's to work out work and sometimes the only way to stop the negotiation about should I exercise is just just exercise and then that's settled you know otherwise it's going to never stop got one more question um right down here you've had your hand up Wow you can just shout it out I really appreciated your use on here and invite you into the car that really helped a lot and the other I feel like that cousin with fear is overwhelmed that seems so remote that when you know where you want to go hmm put the mic up to mess up you have to be patient to arrive there I know I am finding it hard to deal with having a clear vision but still being patient enough to know how do you deal in the day-to-day when your goal is over here and yeah there's so much to be done between here and there and it's overwhelming because you think I should be focusing on all those big things yeah but there's 800 details between here and there and yes maybe four years of research yeah and for other projects it might be 800 different facets that come into the production of the ideas yeah made yeah if the project is an alphabet you're a B and you want to be at X or you can see the whole alphabet right you can't produce the alphabet one day you have to unite eight years to get to the whole alphabet I feel you just answer it you know I mean I know that you know yeah yeah might have some bigger inside words I mean do I have any better better help than that for you um I think you know I've always I love this line al doctor oh the American novelist had a line that said you can drive across an entire speaking of driving and drive across an entire continent say it's dark and you're driving across the outback you can drive at full speed with headlights that only show 20 meters you know what I mean like you it's and so you're actually making tremendous progress but you don't need to you don't need to eat it so you only need to see this much ahead of you right now right and if you're trying to if you're trying to see the whole continent as you're as you're spanning it of course you're going to become overwhelmed you know and and so for that I guess there's just I mean I wish there was a more glamorous answer than a list right I mean a list and a kitchen timer right okay here's the list of things I have to do here's the kitchen timer I set it for one hour what can I do on this list in the next hour mmm so you match the timer to the list and then that's that's living in the real right that's hard when you're trying to be you're already thinking about the future yeah you know and you also have to you know my friend again I keep talking about Ann Patchett but she's so great she has this wonderful metaphor about how her favorite part of the project of her creative project is before she begins writing before she even begins researching a book the dream of the book because the dream of the thing is so beautiful and the favorite part is when she's alone with the dream and it's unsullied and and she calls up the tourmaline butterfly it's this jeweled butterfly that's floating and you only she can see it and it floats around her head and it's so and it catches the light and it's follows her everywhere and while she's washing dishes she's dreaming about this beautiful thing that she's going to make it's so precious and this is the one that's going to win her the Pulitzer you know and this is like this is the novel that's going to make her really ascend to the level of dust I have Suki this is the one you know like and it can be the great thing about the dream is it can be anything you want because there's no limits on on your fantasy about what you want this thing to be that you're making and a lot of people spend their life there you know and if that's satisfying a great terrific but if you want to make a thing what you have to do then and the way M describes is so perfect is you've to pluck that fluttering beautiful immaculate perfect unsullied tourmaline butterfly out of the sky and place it on the workbench and take a mallet and smash it into a thousand pieces because that thing can never be made that thing can never be made it doesn't exist it can never it can only exist in the ether can never exist in the wheel so if you want to keep it in the ether keep it an ether and never make anything but if you want to make a thing you have to murder that thing and just let it be you have to shatter it and then the thing that you're going to make when you're finally done like this is the thing I love about the creative process and the reason it doesn't make me so tormented because I actually love that this is true that when I'm done with my attempt at a tourmaline butterfly what I have created is the most jacked-up up a weird thing it's like I took some silly putty and some glue and I took like some cigarette butts and like an old circus poster and a hinge from an abandoned Shack behind the middle school and I like sewed it all together I like look I'm go to butterflies you know and like it's got one wing that's kind of like this it is so far removed from this but here's the thing this thing is real and true and this thing is fantasy and I like the real and the true thing more than I like the fantasy and I want to spend my life doing that and the cool thing about being if you can be friendly to yourself as a creator is when you're done thinking about jacked up cigarette butt silly putty half-assed limping butterfly what I always feel when I'm done with it is I'm like that's cool that is so cool no one ever made one like that before and you know what probably for a good reason and no one will ever make one like that again because the immaculate perfected thing is strangely mass-produced right perfection is is very boring because it's like some ideals there but the weird cooking thing it's the thing that only you could have made and only you can make it in the time and the restrictions they'll that you have in your real life you know with the materials that are on hand with the time that you've got with the talents that you have which are also limited you know and and the way that when you make that crazy jacked-up butterfly what you're saying with it to the world is I made a thing look I'm here I'm here and here's the evidence I'm here I made a thing and the arrogance of belonging that lovely line that the poet David White talked about that I mentioned in big magic races in order to create you must stand in the arrogance of belonging it's a kind of entitlement that's very different from Kardashian and Kanye entitlement it's not a kind of entitlement that says stands on chair and says I'm the greatest that will never work it's never worked for me to do that to kind of pump myself up to do work by saying I'm the greatest because guess what probably not like all evidence points to some other pretty great greatests you know but guess what else I'm not not the worst not the worst there's an enormous amount of real estate between the worst and the greatest and I'm somewhere in there and by standing in my bare feet and bare face somewhere in between the worst and the greatest and taking the materials that I've got the time that I've got the talents that I've gotten the energies I've got and making a thing and then being like hey guys look at me think you know and when I write sometimes when I make a thing and I get really criticized for it like when I used to read my reviews they would tell me everything that was wrong with the thing and I'd be like do you think I don't know that do you think I don't know that this isn't you think I think this is a tourmaline butterfly I think this is just a cool thing that I made and guess what I'm gonna do now I'm gonna make another one unlike any one that anyone else ever did and that's an amazing way to spend your life and so when I focus on that instead of crossing the continent in one bound you know or creating the perfected dream object or winning then you can do not anything like the whole you can do anything thing is also a line you can't but you can do something and doing something I think is better than the dream of doing anything what a fantastic nartz and done leave thank you you're welcome it's just been an extraordinary it night to hear everything that you've had to say and he is to making more up butterflies yes thank you all so much thank you for coming thank you here Thank You Mia was it a pill but thank you - thank you guys tonight you you

Channel: Brisbane Writers Festival

Views: 67,026

Rating: 4.870605 out of 5

Keywords: bwf16, Big Magic, Eat Pray Love, Elizabeth Gilbert, Liz Gilbert, The Signature of All Things, Creativity, Brisbane, Brisbane Writers Festival, Mia Freedman, Mamamia, mamamiaaus, Julie Beveridge, Human Ventures, Human Creative

Id: vLbD61S2Lnc

Length: 95min 41sec (5741 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 02 2016