Elizabeth Gilbert was an accomplished author of journalism and fiction, with respectable sales and several awards to her credit, until 2006, when her latest work, Eat Pray Love, became an enormous bestseller. 

Now people ask her to do things like give lectures on creativity, and she does that very well, too.  Check out her speech on TED:  http://tinyurl.com/b6hs2k

Her take on creativity is predictably original, funny, and fascinating.  She says rather than define creativity as individual genius, as in “She is a genius; she writes wonderful fiction,” we should go back to the ancient idea that a genius is something like a small fairy that comes to the writer, or the painter, or the sculptor, and helps him or her out.  So, we should say, “She has a genius.” 

According to Gilbert, all kinds of good things flow from this change in perception.  Mostly, it takes the pressure off.  You don’t have to take all the credit – or all the blame – for the work.  After all, you had a daemon helping you.  The daemon can choose either to show up or not. 

Also, it takes the pressure off the next work after a huge success like Eat Pray Love.  It’s not Gilbert’s fault if the fairy doesn’t show up twice in a row.  Gilbert was there, doing her job.  She was writing.  The daemon?  Maybe she had other plans.  Maybe not.  Maybe she moved on to some other writer. 

As a speaker, Gilbert presents a fascinating personae of someone who is slightly nervous and shy, but still determined to acquit herself well.  So, she paces nervously and wrings her hands constantly, but she smiles and delivers her words wittily and well.  It’s quite an effective attitude to take on – in small doses.  Much more than 20 minutes and we’d begin to get tired of it.  But for twenty minutes, she holds the audience and appears to be humble at the same time. 

The reason it works so well?  Her voice.  It’s a wonderful instrument, warm, musical, resonant, and pleasing.  For a voice to work that well, Gilbert must have considerable technique.  And that undercuts her personae – that of someone who is unaccustomed to all this attention.  I say that not in criticism but in admiration.  The best kind of art appears the most artless.  Real genius makes the arduous look easy.  Gilbert’s art is formidable indeed.