Are You There, Liz Gilbert? it's me, Ryann!

Happy Friday! I’m having a dinner & brunch-filled catch up weekend with some lovely ladies in my life.  I’m very much looking forward to it. I also plan on reading on my new kindle! And working on my new novel, which I wrote about 30 pages of last night. En fuego!

For the weekend, I want to leave you with this TED interview from Elizabeth Gilbert about creativity. Now. Once, someone told me that I write like Elizabeth Gilbert. At the time, I had read nothing of hers. I didn’t recognize her name, even, because when she really blew up, I was less focused on novels and drastically, manic-ly focused on Broadway.

So I replied to this person who told me I wrote like Elizabeth Gilbert, “I’ve been writing like this my whole life. Maybe Elizabeth Gilbert writes like me.”

This interview was actually my first contact with her and it made me love her. It made me want to be friends with her. And it re-opened a philosophical conversation with myself that I mention here. And she was discussing what I was writing about here when I was 17 and truly disturbed by the artists' lot.

She did remind me of me a bit. So then I read Stern Men, then The Last American Man, and now finally, just yesterday on my kindle (god bless this thing, something about the way it’s easy on my eyes, I can just tear through books!) I read over half of eat pray love. And…I get it. I get the comparison. (Though Emily, saint that she is, says I’m funnier.)

Are you out there, Liz Gilbert? I think we should be friends!

She’s drawn to a lot of things I’m drawn to—mystery or mysticism, philosophy, geography & travel, spirituality, what it means to be a woman, what it means to be a man, how religion affects romance, openness in revealing faults—not to mention, self-deprecating humor, weird metaphors, alliteration, and talking to yourself in a tear-filled frenzy late at night. Not to even kind of mention that whole questioning whether you're supposed to be alone thing.  I like her. And the way the prose reads a golden/yellowy color. How she's sunny or funny even when she's most miserably depressed. I get it. 

But what I admire most about her, I think, is her readability. Even if you don’t agree with her, (this kind of backlash, I discuss here and here) even if plot or moral isn't the soundest, even if she doesn't wrap it up nicely enough (or she wraps it up too nicely depending on who you talk to) the shit just flows. That’s what I’m striving for all the time. Not popularity-readability (though that’s good too) but that way that prose just moves. As Cronin often said, “at the level of the sentence.” I still have lots of issues with structure. That’s why I’m going to school. But I’m ok if that’s never going to be my strongest suit. Because it’s not my top priority and I don’t know that it ever will be. But I’ve read a lot of good books with amazing and honorable structures, plots, moral codes. But a lot of them don’t read half as well as Liz Gilbert. She gets it. Just watch this speech. It’s long, but worth the whole listen. 


"Becoming a published writer is sort of like trying to find a cheap apartment in New York City: it’s impossible. And yet…every single day, somebody manages to find a cheap apartment in New York City." 

For further reading... and even further...