Lecture: Elizabeth Gilbert
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Introduce yourself to journalist Elizabeth Gilbert in a crowd of people vying for her attention, and she leans in and smiles, listening intently; suddenly, you and she are the only people in the room.
Getting people to tell their stories is simple, Gilbert says: all you have to do is listen. She claims she picked this skill up while working as a bartender in the ’80s, but it seems like an inborn talent.
Since her first published story appeared in Esquire in 1993, Gilbert has worked as a staff writer at Spin and GQ magazines. She has also written four books, which have garnered a Pushcart Prize, a National Book Award nomination for non-fiction, and a New York Times Notable book mention. Her newest book, a memoir called Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything, Across Italy, India, and Indonesia, came out in February 2006.
On February 22, 2006, Gilbert spoke to Professor Ted Conover’s graduate seminar, “The journalism of empathy,” and later lectured to a group of students and faculty gathered in the atrium of NYU’s Department of Journalism. She spoke of her love of travel, described writing as a sacred commitment, and dismissed the notion that you must suffer for your art.
Born on an isolated farm in Litchfield, Connecticut, Gilbert and her older sister “grew up working,” she wrote in Eat, Pray, Love. They were “the very miniature models of [their] hardworking farmer/nurse of a mother—a pair of junior Swiss Army Knives, born to multi-task,” she told the crowd at her lecture.
Doing their chores, Gilbert and her sister looked forward to evenings spent telling stories with the family. But when Gilbert’s Uncle Nick around, the competition for attention could be fierce. “You only had a short period of time to capture their attention [when] Uncle Nick was there,” Gilbert told NYU students and faculty, “because he was funnier than you.” As a result, Gilbert writes with her audience always in mind, not just to inform, but to captivate.
Spurred by her “passionately adolescent anti-nuclear convictions,” Gilbert saved up her babysitting money and, in 1985, bought herself a ticket to Russia. She was 16 and the Cold War was underway. “I wanted to make peace and save the world by meeting other teenagers,” she told this reporter in a February 2006 interview. Gilbert was so galvanized by the experience that she began studying Russian and chose to major in political science when she enrolled in NYU in the late ’80s.
When she graduated in ‘91, she hit the road again, working in bars and diners across the U.S. In Wyoming, she worked on a ranch. For Gilbert, travel provided literary fuel. “I knew I didn’t have a lot to say yet,” she told her audience at NYU. “I had to go collect it.” The people and places she encountered during those years inspired her first book, a collection of short stories called Pilgrims (1997).
With Pilgrims, Gilbert developed a passionate commitment to the craft of writing that has never cooled. “Take on [writing] the way people take on monastic vows,” she urged the students at her lecture. “Whatever you have to give up, whoever you have to give up to do that, do it.” According to Gilbert, this devotion helps writers weather the inevitable rejections.
Gilbert also discouraged students from buying into the myth of the tortured artist. Despite the Hemingway model of “punching holes in your soul,” said Gilbert, suffering is not an intrinsic part of the creative process. In her opinion, the suffering writer archetype is a “masculine tradition.” According to Gilbert “It’s all about the classic Western idea of The Great Man: mighty, misunderstood, powerful, sulking, solitary, omnipotent.” She contends there’s far more to be gained from embracing “a more feminine ideal” with “less ego, less violence, less self-destruction and less isolation at its core.” She asserted, “Gentleness to the self is just as important as discipline, and will enable you to produce more work.”
Despite her evangelical faith in what some have called “the journalism of empathy,” Gilbert is a firm believer in thorough reporting. While reporting her 2002 book, The Last American Man, a nuanced portrait of the struggles of modern day mountain man Eustace Conway, Gilbert made “giant stacks of index cards and divided them into topics.” Her topics included: Fathers, The European Interpretation of American Frontiership, Woodsmanship, and Utopias. After doing “tons of research and tons of reading,” she said, “I can pull out ideas from the different sections.” “It’s almost like painting by numbers,” Gilbert told Professor Conover’s seminar, prior to her lecture.
Once the research is done, Gilbert told the class “you just pick a person to tell your story to and write it with them in mind.” You can choose a different person for each project, said Gilbert, but it’s imperative that you choose one. “If you write to one person directly, then you write to everyone,” she asserted. “But if you write to everyone, you end up writing to no one.”
What do you do if the right words don’t come to you, a student asked, during the question-and-answer period after Gilbert’s talk. “Don’t be fooled,” said Gilbert. “[Writer’s block is] a trickster sent to keep you from what you’re meant to be doing.” It comes to sap your confidence, she insisted. Gilbert confronted this trickster at an artist’s residence in Wyoming in 2004, while writing her memoir, Eat, Pray, Love. For her first drafts, she confided, “I’m a plough mule, not an artist.” Facing down writer’s block, she said, “I will plough one row, turn around and plough another row, and all those rows are pages.”
Gilbert’s universe is filled with a cast of mythical characters. She talks about ideas as if they were sprites. “Ideas are animate,” she said at the lecture. “They’ve visited you because they hope you’ll make them real.” If you don’t pay attention to your sprite, she warned her listeners, it will “go and sit in the mind of someone who set her alarm clock an hour before work each day to write.” Different ideas have different personalities, she maintains. By her lights, a writer must respond appropriately in order to coax an idea out of hiding. There are “ideas like birds you have to sneak up on; loud ideas that clang and bang; ideas like gum under the table; [and ideas like] potatoes you have to dig out of the ground in winter,” she said, recalling what Tom Waits told her during an interview she conducted for GQ in 2002.
To catch inspiration before it flees, said Gilbert, “you must pay attention to your intuition.” This awareness is one of the most important muscles for a writer to flex, she asserted. “You start with your intuition and then you back it up with everything you’ve got,” she said told the audience. The key to getting an editor’s attention, she said, is to let your passion for writing fuel your work. “Give somebody something that reminds them why they love words,” and they’re bound to pay attention, said Gilbert.