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I liked how positive this book is, the pages are  quick to read and they carry weight.

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I generally find all Liz's talks on creativity rather inspirational. This book just combines all her views on the subject. I just warn you: her perception of the creative process is rather mystical.

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We are all creators in one way or another, and Elizabeth Gilbert demystifies the process with joy, empathy and wit. Big Magic is a must-read for everyone wishing to live a more creative, inquisitive and fulfilling life. Don’t forget to buy an extra copy of the book for your favorite college or trade school graduate, the relative launching a business, or the friend in need of an emotional boost.

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I originally bought this for my Kindle. However after reading it, I bought 2 books as gifts.  I am a visual artist and it is a great read for me.  But whether you are a writer, painter, musician or non of these it is a must read.  My husband is none of these and he said he saw himself in so many things she said.  He liked it.I have reread it several times and I learn something new each time.  I read chapters from it at least once a week and more when I get artist block.I love the way Elizabeth Gilbert writes.  She is blunt and in your face at times.  Great!!

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It was great to find a great new book on creative, inspiration and empowerment. It’s a very positive positive and upbeat read and it really fuels the creative juices and empowers the artist the writer, the yoga instructor whatever your thing is it you’ll feel really empowered. There’s some great suggestions and exercises that move towards a more positive pattern in your life. If you want to refresh the whole process, this is the book to read. Definitely got the creative juices flowing. And then today’s world positivity is definitely a welcome hors d’oeuvre.

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“Are you considering being a creative person? Too late, you already are one,” Gilbert asserts. In Big Magic, living a creative life means living a life driven by curiosity over fear and this life is accessible to all who seek it. She breaks down creativity into five essential ingredients: courage, enchantment, permission, persistence, and trust. Whether readers believe in a magical world or not, her description of ideas, why they choose us, and when and why they leave is inspiring to no end and her roadmap through the twists, turns, and potential pitfalls of creativity are applicable to all who dare to venture on their own creative journey.Gilbert tackles our biggest creative fears and inner demons head-on with delicious humor, wit, and grace. She allows fear a spacious spot in the car on our creative road trip, but never allows it to give us directions and certainly not take the driver’s seat. Time and again, she effectively and effortlessly silences our inner critic on such universal experiences as: worrying about what others think of us and our creations, bowing to perfectionism instead of completion, evaluating our art as low or high, as brilliant or a disaster, the struggle to declare ourselves worthy of living a creative life, the desire to be fearless or passionate when all we need is courage and curiosity, and much more. She also explores various paradoxes of creativity: the desire for permission and the fact that we never needed it to begin with, that creativity takes persistent hard work on our part and also moments of divine inspiration that come from something else entirely, that no creation is entirely original and yet authentic expressions are always original, and the ultimate paradox: that our creative expression must be the most important thing in the world and it also must not matter at all.Written in easy to digest, bite-size chapters, readers will feel as if they’re chatting over a glass of wine with their amusing and insightful bestie, Liz, as she masterfully weaves together numerous stories from her personal and professional life with hard-earned creative wisdom, always with an endearing self-awareness that at times borders on self-deprecation, and with a charm that is nearly flirtatious. The lessons are so powerful and relatable that if one were to learn this much about their creative life in a year of therapy, they could consider it a great investment. Big Magic ultimately provides readers with the necessary courage and inspiration to live bigger, happier, and more interesting lives, coaxing out of us our own unique hidden treasures.-- Lisa Blair, MA

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I find Elizabeth Gilbert interesting. But I only partially agree with her.I bought and read Eat, Pray, Love (after the movie—which I never saw—came out). Then I took it to my local secondhand bookstore and traded it for credit.Some of you know I am a bookaholic (*cough* hoarder). Two new books arrived at my house today. My daughter says, “Why do you still buy books? Duh, you can borrow them from the library for free.”I did my share of traipsing back and forth from the library with shopping bags full of books every two weeks from the time I was six until my kids were grown. I’ve bought books at garage sales for ten cents. I still buy used books, but if there’s a book I want to read now and I can’t find it used or on sale, I’ll gladly pay $24.95 for it, anticipating a long-term relationship. I like to devour them, and then come back to them again and again to re-digest them.But one time through Eat, Pray, Love was enough. It didn’t earn space on my bookshelf (or in my closet, or in a box on the floor of my study…). I enjoyed the intimate look at Gilbert’s life and the glimpse of how her brain works, but I’ll never read it again. Her worldview is foreign to me. She credits the universe with the power to answer prayer. I can’t relate. The universe is a created thing. The Creator is the One Who answers prayers.When Big Magic came out, I wanted it because it is subtitled Creative Living Beyond Fear. Elizabeth Gilbert is nothing if not interesting and creative.Yet, as I read Big Magic, I found myself longing for The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron.Katie, my youngest (but all grown up) daughter, visited and found Big Magic in my study. “I read this,” she said.“Yeah, I’m a little disappointed in it,” I said.“Me, too. But why?”“I bought it hoping that it would take me to the next level in my writing. But it’s not that helpful.”“That’s because you’re already creative. This book is for beginners.”Katie’s evaluation is right on the nose. If you’ve always wanted to do something creative, but held back for fear of not being good enough, this book may be just the kick-start you need.So, the mini-review of Big Magic is: it’s not The Artist’s Way; it’s more Creative Lite.But let’s go a little deeper.On page 86, Gilbert says, You do not need anyone’s permission to live a creative life. I’m disappointed in that, because most books on creativity start out by granting readers permission to express themselves.Gilbert characterizes ideas as being entities having lives and agendas of their own. Their main agenda is to be given birth as art. So they go around suggesting themselves to likely hosts. In other words, the idea approaches you. You can squash it or ignore it. You can let it wait until the spark dies. You can suggest it move on. Or you can run with it.Then Gilbert tells the story of a wonderful novel she began writing about a spinster from Minnesota who falls in love with her boss and goes to the Amazon. Gilbert had a contract for the book and did extensive research. She invested a great deal of time and effort into it. Unfortunately, events in her personal life intervened, and she temporarily set aside the novel.When she went back to it after a two-year hiatus, it was dead. Though she tried to resurrect it, nothing she tried could bring it back to life.One day, when telling her friend Ann Patchett about it, Patchett told her she was currently writing that book. In fact, she got the idea right around the time they first met each other. Gilbert says the idea transmitted itself to Patchett when she gave her a kiss.Interesting. But total b.s.Not that people don’t independently come up with the same original idea as someone else all the time. Gilbert says in her book,"When the nineteenth-century Hungarian mathematician Janos Bolyai invented non-Euclidean geometry, his father urged him to publish his findings immediately, before someone else landed on the same idea, saying, “When the time is right for certain things, they appear at different places, in the manner of violets coming to light in early spring.”In the late 1990s to early 2000s  I wrote a novel which never saw light of day. I am in the process of rewriting it, but I’m keeping several scenes from the original manuscript. One pivotal scene that I can’t (or don’t want to) leave out is going to seem ripped-off from The Hunger Games, even though I wrote it a decade before Suzanne Collins and she never kissed me. Sigh.Gilbert tells some great stories in this book. If you like Lindsey Sterling’s story about being The Only Pirate at the Party, you’ll love the section called Walk Proudly (pages 260-264).Some good advice Gilbert gives in Big Magic:Stop complaining if you want to live a more creative life (page 117).Don’t quit your day job. Most artists don’t make a living from their art and must have a back-up job to free themselves from the burden of expecting art to pay the bills (pages 151-156).Don’t think that success looks like money or acclaim. If you love what you’re doing, that’s success (pages 182-184).It’s not what you know, it’s who you know. Translation: get an agent (page 193).When you have no inspiration, follow curiosity (pages 237-239).However, in my opinion, some of her advice is flawed. She also says, “Whenever anybody tells me they want to write a book in order to help other people, I always think, Oh, please don’t…I would so much rather you wrote a book in order to entertain yourself than to help me” (pages 98-99).I suspect most of Big Magic was written for Elizabeth Gilbert’s own entertainment. It certainly wasn’t her intention to help me, and she succeeded. Big Magic will get traded in for credit next time I go to the used bookstore.

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Honestly, there's nothing revolutionary in this book as far as what Gilbert is saying. She hasn't found some magical new formula for unlocking your creativity. Instead, what she has done is create a dialog, as if you were sitting down to coffee with a friend and confessing that you really wanted to be creative but... Gilbert deals with the variety of things that could follow that "but", and she pulls apart each and every one.Will everyone appreciate this book? Probably not. Gilbert does slay some pretty sacred cows, including the notion of the "tortured" artist, but I think she makes a very compelling case for all the cows she slays. The bottom line of this book, really, is do you want to be a creative person because you want the sense of accomplishment and transcendence that creativity can inspire, or do you want to be a creative person because you're hoping to make millions and be lauded by the masses? If it's the second, Gilbert basically tells you that you need not apply, and I agree with her. Creativity may pay off monetarily or in the form of social approbation, or it may not, but if all you really want is to create, who cares? Gilbert holds up all the fears that commonly hold people back and says, "So what?"While I'm not a religious person, I got where she was going by likening creativity to a sort of religious calling. As she says, she doesn't advocate for people moving out to a mountain and living a life of solitary devotion to creativity--unless that's your thing, in which case you should do it. Instead, she's advocating for creativity as a form of not just self-expression, but as a way for people to make something beautiful solely for the sake of making something beautiful. As she says, it's both essential and non-essential. At heart, I think that's what makes us human: that we create things that aren't necessary merely because we like the look of them, or the sound of them, or the taste of them, or the way they feel when we wear them. It's in the act of creating--even if our creation is bad or misunderstood or unloved--that we are able to get outside of our own heads for a bit. We can forget about our mundane worries and struggles and we can experience moments of pure joy.Not that she's saying that all this can come about without some fear and struggle and some sense of pain. What she advises is that we learn to live with these things without allowing them to control us. I know this seems simplistic, but she does such a great job of laying out how to avoid being controlled by your fears. What she's revealing here is that what holds most people back is themselves. What does it matter if people dismiss your creativity or think you're strange? The best kind of creativity, Gilbert says, is the kind that's done entirely because *you* want to do it, not because you're trying to appeal to the masses. The Big Magic, really, is experiencing the joys of creativity for yourself and not for some nebulous, unknown consumer market. If you're fortunate, the market may follow. If not, it won't. Either way, you'll have created something and will have the pride of knowing that it's yours. And when you're done, you'll let it loose, acknowledge that it may not be perfect, and go on to make something else. You can do all this with a sense of awe that you're doing something that fulfills a need deep within yourself. It won't feed you or clothe you or put a roof over your head (unless your creative outlet is something like farming or weaving or carpentry, in which case you may well fulfill some of these essential needs as well), but it will provide you with experiences that you can hoard like treasures, to be pulled out and admired and marveled at whenever you so desire.Reading this book was so good for me because it helped me to see how counterproductive some of the nagging voices in the back of my head are. It encouraged me to take creative leaps and to be philosophical when those leaps sometimes fail, as they inevitably will. Gilbert has helped me to see that, no matter what, I will always long for that creative outlet, so why bother denying it to myself? I can engage with it for the pure joy of engaging with it, and if anything else comes of it, great. If not, well, I'll have been living the life I want to live, and that really counts for more than anything else.

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I quite enjoyed this. Conversational, practical, unashamed. This is Elizabeth Gilbert's approach to being a writer. The "Creative Living Beyond Fear" part of the title is a bit off, but I suppose one could apply that in the sense of "even if you're afraid, practice your art anyway."It doesn't feel like new-age schlock.Side note: I wasn't a fan of Eat, Pray, Love. I mostly enjoyed Italy. Then I got to India and realized it was the same thing in a different location. And then I got to Bali and stopped. Couldn't finish.On the order of being truly alive: From page 10: "She asked herself when was the last time she’d felt truly light, joyous, and— yes— creative in her own skin."Practical, from page 22: "If your goal in life is to become fearless, then I believe you’re already on the wrong path, because the only truly fearless people I’ve ever met were straight-up sociopaths and a few exceptionally reckless three-year-olds— and those aren’t good role models for anyone."Her theory on ideas, page 34-35: "I believe that our planet is inhabited not only by animals and plants and bacteria and viruses, but also by ideas. Ideas are a disembodied, energetic life-form. They are completely separate from us, but capable of interacting with us— albeit strangely. Ideas have no material body, but they do have consciousness, and they most certainly have will. Ideas are driven by a single impulse: to be made manifest. And the only way an idea can be made manifest in our world is through collaboration with a human partner. It is only through a human’s efforts that an idea can be escorted out of the ether and into the realm of the actual."Grace, from page 75: "Whether I am touched by grace or not, I thank creativity for allowing me to engage with it at all."Authenticity, from pp. 97-98: "Anyhow, the older I get, the less impressed I become with originality. These days, I’m far more moved by authenticity. Attempts at originality can often feel forced and precious, but authenticity has quiet resonance that never fails to stir me. Just say what you want to say, then, and say it with all your heart. Share whatever you are driven to share."Higher education at incredible dollar cost with little return, from page 103: "But I worry that what students of the arts are often seeking in higher education is nothing more than proof of their own legitimacy— proof that they are for real as creative people, because their degree says so."Believing in yourself, from page 108: "So take your insecurities and your fears and hold them upside down by their ankles and shake yourself free of all your cumbersome ideas about what you require (and how much you need to pay) in order to become creatively legitimate. Because I’m telling you that you are already creatively legitimate, by nature of your mere existence here among us."On enjoying being an artist, from pp. 118-119: "I believe that enjoying your work with all your heart is the only truly subversive position left to take as a creative person these days."A reaction to the commentary on the pointlessness of art, from page 128: "The fact that I get to spend my life making objectively useless things means that I don’t live in a postapocalyptic dystopia. It means I am not exclusively chained to the grind of mere survival. It means we still have enough space left in our civilization for the luxuries of imagination and beauty and emotion— and even total frivolousness."The wholeness of our connection to the earth, from page 203: "Without that sense of relationship, Robin warns her students, they are missing out on something incredibly important: They are missing out on their potential to become cocreators of life. As Robin puts it, “The exchange of love between earth and people calls forth the creative gifts of both. The earth is not indifferent to us, but rather calling for our gifts in return for hers— the reciprocal nature of life and creativity.” Or, to put it more simply: Nature provides the seed; man provides the garden; each is grateful for the other’s help.And her sense of wonder, from pp. 250-251: "As long as I’m still moving in that direction— toward wonder— then I know I will always be fine in my soul, which is where it counts."