I only recently found this talk from 2009. At first I thought she was trying to suggest or preach a new way to think when in a creative flow.
However, as the talk went on, I found that she had changed her way of thinking after interviewing other writers. Adopting their ways of thinking and she wanted to share that with others.
This is a story that Elizabeth uses in her talk;
"I had this encounter recently where I met the extraordinary American poet Ruth Stone, who's now in her 90s, but she's been a poet her entire life. She told me that when she was growing up in rural Virginia, she would be out working in the fields, and she said she would feel and hear a poem coming at her from over the landscape. And she said it was like a thunderous train of air. It would come barreling down at her over the landscape. And she felt it coming. Because it would shake the earth under her feet. She knew that she had only one thing to do at that point, and that was to, in her words, "run like hell."
She would run like hell to the house and she would be getting chased by this poem, and the whole deal was that she had to get to a piece of paper and a pencil fast enough so that when it thundered through her, she could collect it and grab it on the page.
And other times she wouldn't be fast enough, so she'd be running and running and running, and she wouldn't get to the house and the poem would barrel through her and she would miss it and she said it would continue on across the landscape, looking, as she put it "for another poet."
Then there were these times... this is the piece I never forgot; she said that there were moments where she would almost miss it, right? So, she's running to the house and she's looking for the paper and the poem passes through her, and she grabs a pencil just as it's going through her, and then she said, it was like she would reach out with her other hand and she would catch it. She would catch the poem by its tail, and she would pull it backwards into her body as she was transcribing on the page. And in these instances, the poem would come up on the page perfect and intact but backwards, from the last word to the first."
Once you have had a good laugh at how crazy and insane this story sounds, it started to make some sense to me. When I write my creative journals for university, or essays for other modules, an idea comes into my head so fast I don't have a chance to write it down fast enough. And most of the time the sentence comes out on the page in the wrong order of which I meant it to be. So, I have to go back and re-phrase my work once the ideas are out of my head. There is the odd time that my work comes out perfect first time, I think that comes with practice though.
On my blog I have always held back when it comes to writing anything, I am much more confident in my art work and it is a creative blog after all. Showcase my best work right? Things that don't work so well are still as highly valued in my opinion. I work best with a trial and error method, but I don't need to pretend like all the work I produce is gold. I don't know if that is similar to other creative souls out there?
A lot of things that Elizabeth Gilbert made sense to me personally. I'm not sure why creativity comes with 'emotional risks' that we as humans fear. For me, the people that consider themselves to be less creative are the people that question my judgement and ask if I am scared about what comes next.
In the words of Elizabeth Gilbert; "Yes, I'm afraid of all those things. And I always have been.. But don't be afraid. Don't be daunted. Just do your job. Don't be afraid of the work that you feel you were put on this Earth to do."
Click on the link to hear her TED talk; 'Your elusive creative genius'.
http://www.ted.com/talks/elizabeth_gilbert_on_genius
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