Souvenirs of a creative life
How to find inspiration in the process.
This week I am nearing the halfway mark of the 30 day reading challenge (running all of April) and I am feeling motivated and committed. There is something that fills you up with inner satisfaction knowing you are sticking to a promise that you made to yourself.
Have you been reading or following along? I’d love to know what book you’ve been reading this week.
Another promise I have upheld for nearly 3 months now is writing these substack posts weekly. Inevitably, with this cadence comes the challenge of finding something new and fresh to write about every week. Particularly this week, I’ve been spending a lot of time with my family and when it came down to writing this post, I found myself at a loss.
The struggle to find inspiration when you don’t have it is real. But then I remembered, that one of my favorite writers and thinkers, Elizabeth Gilbert, once said that one should never rely on inspiration when it comes to creativity.
In her book, Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear, she has a section about “Persistence” that summarizes my current experience.
“Frustration is not an interruption of your process; frustration is the process. The fun part (the part where it doesn’t feel like work at all) is when you’re actually creating something wonderful, and everything’s actually going great, and everyone loves it, and you’re flying high. But such instances are rare…
How you manage yourself between those bright moments, when things aren’t going so great, is a measure of how devoted you are to your vocation, and how equipped you are for the weird demands of creative living. Holding yourself together through all of the phases of creation is where the real work lies.”
This reminder highlights that inspiration isn’t always something that’s going to be present — but that doesn’t mean that the work stops. Enduring these moments of frustration, tinkering with what is in front of you, and persisting through, is what the real work is about.
While leafing through my book, I found a few underlined sections that I wanted to share with you, in case you might need some inspiration for creativity. Here they are:
“The essential ingredients for creativity remain exactly the same for everybody:
courage, enchantment, permission, persistence, trust — and those elements are universally accessible. Which does not mean that creative living is always easy; it merely means that creative living is always possible.”
If you find yourself thinking you want to take up a creative endeavor, but that you don’t have the perfect conditions for it, then Elizabeth Gilbert has some wise words for you.
“I do not know of any creative soul who does not dream of calm, cool, grass-growing days in which to work without interruption. Somehow, though, nobody ever seems to achieve it. Or if they do achieve it — that idyll is usually temporary — and then life will inevitably rush back in… Reality’s demands are constantly pounding on the door and disturbing them.”
At the end of the day, Gilbert says that making time for our creativity should be like a habit that we persistently do over and over again. Creativity shouldn’t be tied to an outcome but instead the process. We shouldn’t wait for inspiration to strike, but instead, do what we feel we must.
Our creativity is waiting to be expressed one way or another and if we search for the perfect conditions, it will never come.
Nonetheless, creativity nourishes us and if we are called to it, we must answer.
“Perhaps creativity’s greatest mercy is this: By completely absorbing our attention for a short and magical spell, it can relieve us temporarily from the dreadful burden of being who we are. Best of all, at the end of your creative adventure, you have a souvenir—something that you made, something to remind you forever of your brief but transformative encounter with inspiration.”
Reading this quote gives me goosebumps because it touches on something I’ve been experiencing time and time again when I write these posts. Finding ways to synthesize my thoughts, make sense of the world and at the same time relate to it and through it, through literature, is what makes me happy. This creativity is my form of inspiration and it gives me innate satisfaction.
So with that, I close out my “creative souvenir” for the week.
If you’ve been feeling the need for some creative inspiration, I highly recommend picking up Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear by Elizabeth Gilbert. The book itself is fun and filled with personal anecdotes and stories about living a creative life and all that it encompasses.
A gentle reminder that sometimes, something as simple as reading a book and writing a review of it, can be your form of creativity. Creativity comes in all variations and explorations.
Until next week.
xx
Toni
PS: It’s never too late to jump into the 30-Day Reading Challenge. It’s running all of April 2025, and you can join us by posting a picture of your book when you read daily.