Writing is a hard process but if you love it, it will be the most beautiful craft. By reading Elizabeth Gilbert’s Big Magic and many interviews of the Turkish author Ellif Shakaf, I underlined some thoughts about «that thing» usually named «The calling». That thing you can’t deny, you’re a creative person, you see and feel the world in another way. Sometimes is hard being different. Sometimes you’d like to be like everybody else, but you have a gift, and you have to face it. Obviously, you need to have fun being a creative person.
Those are some thoughts from Elizabeth Gilbert and Ellis Shakaf:
- Make something creative in order to live healthy and sane. If not, your brain will look for something to work. And perhaps it will not a good thing (maybe you can be self destructive or break your relationship, etc.)
- Storytelling is not about being perfect, is about being honest with you, putting you on a chair and writing whatever you feel. Ellif believes is more important to feel than to know something. As Marcus Aurelius wrote in his memories “don’t expect to write Plato’s Republic. Don’t be perfectionist». Elizabeth Gilbert says that perfectionism is a kind of fear, an intelectual way to hide your afraid to show you.
- Do your job no matter what people think about you. Your novel or short story is a gift at the end of your creative journey, not a curse.
- We need a time to escape for ourselves at the point to forget who we are, our families and focusing in the craft of creating stories. For instance, Mihaly Csíkszentmihályi discovered by interviewing some artists that they have in common the feeling of not being «alive» in the moment there were creating something. That’s the great moment of connection with the universe, with the magic and with your soul.
- Done is better than good. People usually don’t finish their jobs. They stop their projects. It’s much better a work finished than a work pretend to be perfect but unfinished.
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