Aren’t we just substituting the anxiety of not being able to create brilliant work, for the anxiety of a capricious daemon rarely/never showing up? Or worse… What if the “genius” helping us thinks Police Academy 5 was a master work?

Honestly I feel more empowered knowing that the power to succeed at my task is within me, and not dependent on the whim of some supernatural muse.

Whatever works for you I guess.

As far as the basic idea she touts, it’s weird how many people get fixated on the airy-fairy terminology she delves into — which, by the way, I didn’t get the sense she actually buys into on more than a metaphorical level –as a way to discount her argument, which is basically that there is an unconscious level to creaivity, an implied connection to a larger source of knowledge that we don’t fully understand, but that most people have had experience with. Not just in the arts, but in the sciences or any other field which incorporates innovation and invention.

Ask a quantum physicist what they might think of this notion. And maybe get over your own self-importance just a little bit, you stern demanders of “accountability” out there. You sound like a bunch of dried out prune-faced old Puritans.

“Oh my god, I’m a genius! I always knew it!!” Then he calms down and remembers the debt his work owes to Verdi. Although he may not be a compositional genius, I’d still say Wainwright is a brilliant stylist. Probably 99% of successful artists fall under this catagory, and most genii begin life in this way (Mozart ripping off Haydn springs to mind, as does Philip Glass before his time in Paris).

This maybe decribes Gilbert herself; skilled in the genre of self-help literature, but unlikely to feature upon future reading-lists for English undergrads.

Instead of a comment I have a simple question out there for eveyone, possibly related to what Elizabeth Gilbert was talking about. Has anyone ever had one of their characters talk to them?

I was working on a script for a friend a few years back and my main character was an aging woman named Maude. At on point she’s relating a seemingly simple story from her past (about a group of young boys who fell through the ice twenty years earlier and drowned) and everytime I would get into it, the character would “shut down” on me and her story would stop. After about five or six goes at it, finally I realized that she wouldn’t continue was because her own son was one of the boys that were killed and SHE didn’t want to talk about it.

This has happened to me only one other time since. Can anyone out there relate to this, or am I just insane?

Because she sells zillions of copies (mostly due to Oprah’s rec), she’s now an expert on writing and inspiration? What about the poor sclub she abandoned back in Connecticut? I’m a liberal white woman and I don’t want to be associated with this broad. I know, I’m totally ranting, and it’s embarrassing — but I really, really hate her! I smelt the same self-righteous odor on James Frey and if you are inspired by what she says, I guess who am I to judge. But she’s inspiring you all the way to the freaking bank.

The Greeks and Romans didn’t really believe in daemons or geniuses as the source of inspiration. And she gets the concept of the daemon completely backwards. The job of Socrates’ daemon was to prevent him from making mistakes in his reasoning. Socrates (and his enormous intellect) was the creative force, and the daemon served as a supernatural critic.

Nietzsche spends a great deal of energy in The Birth of Tragedy attacking Socrates for relying too much on abstract reasoning, but that’s a different story.

I’ve already passed it along to musician friends and other artists…

I love Tom Waits’ music. I’m also part of the small group of Metallica fans that loves the St. Anger record and the Load record.