One of the more annoying explanations for how other people achieve success is that it turns on the caprices of things we cannot see: the superstitious and their rituals; the cosmic order of the positive thinking spectrum; the power of vision boards; and male writers and their muses – most famously, Robert Graves in his eyrie in Majorca, where the novelist’s mystical powers were unleashed by mortal women 52 years his junior, probably in bathing suits.
But as most artists well know, if you wait for the muse, you will never finish anything. Creativity is a matter of will, not whimsy.
In among the magical thinkers is the female – usually creative – professional, who mitigates her success with a hardcore feyness that makes me die a little every time I see it. This week, rather surprisingly, it was a tone embraced by Eat Pray Love author Elizabeth Gilbert: in promoting her new book Big Magic about unleashing the creativity within, she referred to “fairy dust”, “flying genies” and the “magical elves” of inspiration.
I say surprising because to date Gilbert has been a sensible career journalist (and a blockbuster memoirist and novelist), who took the guru-aspect of Eat Pray Love with a large pinch of salt and who would, one imagines, be the first to point out that her phenomenal success comes down less to “helpful muses” than to the execution of good ideas on tight deadlines. She also writes a great sentence.
Advance material around Big Magic, which grew out of a TED talk Gilbert did that has been watched by some 10m people, seems to acknowledge that there is nothing mystical about creativity.
So the woo-woo references are probably just a stylistic tic and I get it: it’s a look. Some people like “fairies” the way others like cats, or drag-racing or emoticons, and Gilbert addressing her followers as “dear ones” is just a feminized version of the male habit of calling strangers “dude.”
The problem for me (apart from the simpering, infantalized language of the female-version) is that the fairy dust thing undermines a core principle of the job Gilbert does: she’s a great writer, and she works hard at it.
There is also a subtext to this very female type of chumminess, which is the desperate drum-beat of “like me, like me, like me”. Women are held to different standards of likeability in public life than men, as we know, so that those who forego the kind of aggressively Tiggerish levity or dippy references to the pixies who make it all happen come off not as business-like, but as sour or snappish, both in person and in print.
For instance, many years ago, I interviewed Fay Weldon, who defined writing style as a question of “how you say what you want to say in the shortest time available, so you can all go home”. (She made a similarly abrupt point about office meetings. “I always find that men conduct meetings very long-windedly, they sort of wander off, whereas women get straight to the point, then go home to look after the children.”)
Weldon came off as a bit of a killjoy – she didn’t coat her observations in a lot of fussy window-dressing, just got on and delivered them – but of course she was right on both counts.
A powerful, successful woman talking to other women doesn’t have to be Hillary Clinton: she can have some personality, and it can even lean in the direction of rainbows and unicorns. But the persona of the coy lady artist evoking enchantment over cold, hard talent risks robbing its user of the very thing that got her there in the first place: her own skills, strength and force of will. Be fanciful in your art, by all means. But don’t be babyish about taking credit it.
