This book came to me at a time when I needed the push to get back into living my life creatively. As you may know, I've been looking into finding ways to make myself happier. Writing makes me very happy, but I haven't felt the inspiration to just sit down and do it. I loved every section of this book, until I got to the part about perseverance. This is the section I needed the most, because I struggle with pushing myself to write when I'm not inspired to do so. I've always been a firm believer that inspiration and creativity would come to me when it was ready, and I had to wait for its arrival. I've recently begun to see that my writings have come to a standstill from personal reasons that stopped my inspiration from coming. Reading the section on perseverance made me uncomfortable because I knew it was true. Writing isn't about waiting for inspiration to come. You have to write even when you don't want to. You have to push through it and get something down on the page to get anywhere. Progress doesn't come from waiting for inspiration to come to you. I've always believed that, but I never applied it to my writing. This section made me realize that I need to push myself towards writing if I ever want to finish something.

Another part of the book that I liked is when Gilbert discussed geniuses. She says that we need to stop believing we are geniuses that come up with ideas. Instead, we should believe that an idea comes to us. The genius comes to us. We are the vessels for creativity, and we need to leave ourselves open for its arrival. We also can't stop writing. Geniuses do not wait forever. We have to keep going, or the idea will go away to someone else who will nurture it. Each section of the book is full of magical ideas like this one.

I found that each section of the book had its own unique, magical topic with inspiring stories from Gilbert's own life to emphasis her point. Overall, Gilbert presented her beliefs towards living a creative life in an original way. I would rate this book a 4.5/5. I enjoy Gilbert's writing, and I look forward to reading other works by her in the future.

Have you read Big Magic? What did you think? Let me know in the comments below!

Shannon

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