JAD ABUMRAD: Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT KRULWICH: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab, and today ...

ROBERT: Today we are trying to figure out how to make a deal with yourself when most of you doesn't want to do what the rest of you wants to do.

JAD: Right, and we've talked about these kinds of deals when it comes to avoiding the sirens, quitting smoking ...

ROBERT: Figuring out what to do with the balance of your life.

JAD: Now we're gonna change things a bit.

ROBERT: Let's say instead of being an addict, let's say you're just ...

JAD: A writer.

ROBERT: Yeah, and you want to be inspired. You want the words to come, and this is a very typical situation.

JAD: They're not coming.

ROBERT: No.

JAD: No words. So the question is in that kind of situation what kind of deals could you make with yourself to get the words out?

OLIVER SACKS: This is—this is fanciful.

ROBERT: My friend Oliver Sacks the neurologist and the writer, he made a deal which frankly, I find this kind of astonishing.

OLIVER SACKS: A bargain with creativity. I will tell you, although I probably shouldn't. The first book I wrote, Migraine, was very obstructed.

ROBERT: By obstructed he means he just got stuck.

OLIVER SACKS: Yes.

ROBERT: Day after day he tried to write something down and it just didn't come.

OLIVER SACKS:  And I was just getting desperate on the matter, and finally on September the 1st of 1968 I said to myself, "You have 10 days to write this book. If it is not done then, you commit suicide."

JAD: Wow!

OLIVER SACKS: And under the imagined threat, which seemed to terrorize me in a way ...

ROBERT: Because you're—you're—what, the other half of you thought that the first half of you meant it?

OLIVER SACKS: Yes.

ROBERT: Did the first half of you mean it?

OLIVER SACKS: I don't know. But the result of this was after months of stewing and not doing anything I started work, and what started as a fearful task soon became a joyful task, with its own momentum.

ROBERT:  And suddenly he had this feeling that there was something inside him.

OLIVER SACKS: Some engine inside me. A wonderful, associative engine, which—which—which weaves thoughts together, brings unexpected things into apposition ...

ROBERT: It has kicked into gear, and was kind of pulling things out of him and putting them right there onto the page.

OLIVER SACKS: I felt the book was being dictated to me.

ROBERT: Really?

OLIVER SACKS: I—I—I was passive, I was the bridge, I was the transmitter, and in fact, I finished the book a day early.

ROBERT: [laughs] That's a strange way to kick yourself in the pants, I have to say.

OLIVER SACKS: Yes. Yeah well, for me a deadline is sometimes felt almost literally as such.

ROBERT: This is not an easy way to go to work every day, I would think.

OLIVER SACKS: I don't think one can make bargains like that.

JAD: Definitely not too often.

OLIVER SACKS: And it will have a cost.

ROBERT: Oliver, of course, did that only once. But the story he told got us thinking: is there a bargain that you can make with yourself ...

JAD: The creative self ...

ROBERT: ... that somehow avoids this terrible cost.

JAD: Yeah.

ROBERT: That led me ...

LIZ GILBERT: Okay.

ROBERT: ... to a ...

LIZ GILBERT: Okay.

ROBERT: ... woman who just does it differently.

LIZ GILBERT: Well, I have this fascination with trying to figure out how you can live a lifetime of creativity without cutting your ear off.

ROBERT: [laughs]

LIZ GILBERT: You know what I mean?

JAD: And who is—who is that?

LIZ GILBERT: Oh, I'm Liz Gilbert.

ROBERT: And, well, just something a little bit more.

LIZ GILBERT: Okay. [laughs]

ROBERT: Which Liz Gilbert are you?

LIZ GILBERT: I am—I'm the Liz Gilbert who wrote the book called Eat, Pray, Love. I guess that's the way I should describe myself because that's how my obituary will read.

ROBERT: Eat, Pray, Love in case you were born under a rock ...

JAD: Or raised by wolves.

ROBERT: Is one of the most popular books ever, ever, ever in the world, it became even more popular when the book became a movie, and guess who played Liz?

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Julia Roberts: Liz Gilbert is remarkable ...]

VOICE: Julia ...

ROBERT: Roberts.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Julia Roberts: Her courage, and the way ...]

JAD: America's sweetheart.

ROBERT: And the success was great, but she says, you know, it was also kind of frightening because there she was back at home.

JAD: In front of the same old blank page.

ROBERT: With a new question.

LIZ GILBERT: How will you ever outdo what you did last time?

ROBERT: Suddenly she's back where Oliver was.

OLIVER SACKS: Obstructed.

ROBERT: She didn't think that the success was gonna be there last time so was the last time a fluke, do I even have another big book in me?

LIZ GILBERT: Dangerous recipe for madness.

JAD: Madness!

ROBERT: But then she thought back to a conversation that she once had with ...

JAD: Who? Who?

ROBERT: Tom Waits.

JAD: Ah! Tom Waits.

ROBERT: That Tom Waits.

LIZ GILBERT: That's sort of where this all began is that I was a—I was a journalist for GQ and I did an interview with him, and he spoke about the creative process I think more articulately than anybody I have ever heard. And he was talking about how every song has a distinctive identity that it comes into the world with, and it needs to be taken in different ways, and he said, "You know, there are songs that you have to sneak up on like you're hunting for a rare bird, and there are songs that come fully intact like a dream taken through a straw, and there are songs that you find little bits of like pieces of gum under the desk and you scrape them off and you put them together and you make something out of it." And he said there are songs that need to be bullied, where he said he's been in the studio working on a song, and the whole album is done, and this one song won't give itself over. And he said, you know, everyone's gotten used to seeing him do stuff like this, he'll march around the studio talking to the song, saying, "The rest of the family's in the car, we're all going on vacation, you're coming along or not? You got 10 minutes or else you're getting left behind," you know? And he's like, you gotta shake it down sometimes.

ROBERT: Liz says that interview was maybe the first time that she thought of inspiration as—as—as an ...

LIZ GILBERT: It. I remember feeling my own center of gravity shift, and thinking wait, you're allowed to talk to this thing?

ROBERT: If the source of her ideas was outside her then she could get some distance from it, maybe negotiate with it, even fight with it, instead of beating herself up all the time.

LIZ GILBERT: Right, and the—the story that I loved that he told me about where his artistic anxiety ended and his sort of new artistic liberation began is when he's driving along the freeway in Los Angeles in like eight lanes of traffic one day and this little fragment of a beautiful song comes into his head.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Tom Waits: [singing] Sun come up it was blue and gold ...]

LIZ GILBERT: And he has no way to record it. He's got no pencil, he's got no tape recorder, and he's in eight lanes of stressful traffic.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Tom Waits: [singing] Sun come up it was blue and gold ...]

LIZ GILBERT: And he immediately starts to feel all the old pressure that he's felt all his life of I'm not good enough, I—you know, all the old artistic struggle, right? I can't do it, I'm not good enough, I'm gonna lose it, it'll haunt me forever. And then he just backed off from it, and instead he established that negotiating distance between him and the melody and he looked up in the sky and said, "Excuse me, can you not see that I am driving? If you're serious about wanting to exist I spend eight hours a day in the studio, you're welcome to come and visit me while I'm sitting at the piano, otherwise just leave me alone and go bother Leonard Cohen."

ROBERT: Oh, that's very bold.

LIZ GILBERT: It is. I think that's what she wants. She wants you to push back and she wants you to set some terms and some boundaries. She doesn't want you ...

ROBERT: Until you go to the Leonard Cohen concert two years later and there it [bleep] is.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Leonard Cohen: So very kind of you to come to this.]

ROBERT: Now this idea that somehow the creative act comes from outside you. You get a visit from a somebody. This isn't a new idea, this is a very old idea.

LIZ GILBERT: You know, the Greeks would call it a Muse, the Romans called it the Ingenium, the Genius. Which was an interesting idea because it's not the way we use genius today, right. Today we say a person is a genius and back then they would have said that a person had one. And again, it's this separation so that the creative person has this externalized collaborator.

ROBERT: So this is a Tinkerbell-y kind of a thing? It sprinkles you. It has little wings and it flies away?

LIZ GILBERT: I think it depends—I think it depends on the process, I mean, it's got a lot of names because it takes a lot of forms, right? And—and we're talking about all this as though these are—I actually kind of believe this, because I don't think it would work otherwise, but I kind of do believe that the world is being constantly circled as though by gulf stream forces, ideas and creativity that want to be made manifest, and they're looking for portals to come through in people. And if you don't do it they'll go find someone else, you know? And—and so you have to convince it you're serious, and—and you have to show it respect and you have to talk to it and let it know you're there. Like, for the last few years there's been a novel that has been sort of stirring in me and I haven't had time to give it the attention it wants me to give it, but every day I talk to it and I have a little conversation with it and I say "Listen, I'm—in April I will be with you. I want you to stay. Don't let me wake up and read in the New York Times that someone else wrote you. Stay here with me, I'm coming.

ROBERT: This sounds like it's a golden retriever or something. You have to keep petting it.

LIZ GILBERT: Actually, that's probably as good a metaphor for me as any because I would relate to that, being half golden retriever myself and liking dogs, that's great.

PAT WALTERS: And when you say you talk to it in its golden retriever form ...

ROBERT: That's our producer Pat Walters.

PAT: Like do you actually talk to it?

LIZ GILBERT: Yeah. [laughing]

PAT: Out loud?

LIZ GILBERT: I do. I talk—that's why I have to work alone in a quiet room, because I talk to it all the time. And I ask it questions, I say, "What do you—what is it you want me—what is it that you want me to be doing here, because you seem to be resistant to what I'm trying to do here." Like, show me, give me a clue. Like I—the title of Eat, Pray, Love was the last thing that came of that book, and—and the book was about to be published, and it had any number of ridiculous, stupid titles that—that I'm not going to tell you because they're so embarrassing and they're so not what that book was meant to be titled, and I ended up writing an email to all my friends and saying, the subject heading was title search, and I said my [bleep] book won't tell me it's name and can—can all of you help me, and a friend of mine wrote back and said, "Um, if you're going to talk to it like that it's not going to tell you anything." My [bleep] book, right? So I really did that night.

ROBERT: So you sweet talked it back into ...

LIZ GILBERT: Sweetheart, listen. I respect you, I love you, I honor you, I have defended you these last few years, I want to bring you into the world but you have to tell me your name. And the next day. Eat, Pray, Love.

ROBERT: Just like that.

LIZ GILBERT: And you know it because it's—I know the difference between something I thought of and something I was given. I can—I can tell the difference.

ROBERT: Hmm.

ROBERT: She says sometimes it's the whole scene, sometimes it's just a word, maybe a phrase.

LIZ GILBERT: And then you have the job to make it into something.

ROBERT: Wait, but if I—if I say to you two roads diverged in a yellow wood.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Two roads diverged in a yellow wood ...]

ROBERT: So you can write that down, two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and you're done.

LIZ GILBERT: Do you know how that poem got written?

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Two roads ...]

LIZ GILBERT: So he was working for—I may be exaggerating this because I tend to, but I'm going to tell it my way—how I heard it.

ROBERT: Okay. [laughs]

LIZ GILBERT: He was working for months and months on a—on what was going to be the greatest epic poem of his life. It was the biggest challenge he was taking on—he was going to be up there with the masters with this.

ROBERT: You should name the person we're talking about.

LIZ GILBERT: Yes, this would be Mr. Frost.

ROBERT: Robert Frost.

LIZ GILBERT: And—and—and he worked on it for, you know, for ever and ever. I mean, perspiration, perspiration, perspiration, right? And it was 20, 30 pages long, and I don't know what the meter was, whatever it was it was the most ambitious thing he'd ever done, and it was arduous and it probably had sweat all over it. Put it down, went to sleep, woke up, sat down and wrote two—two roads in—all of this in one setting this tiny, perfect immaculate thing was created that had nothing to do with what he had just done. He earned it. I think the angels reward people who are at their desk at six o'clock in the morning working, and he earned it by showing his—his intent to be a great poet, and they said okay cool, you showed your intent, that thing you just wrote was crap, I'm gonna give you this one, here's your reward, so then I ...

ROBERT: What evidence do you have for this?

LIZ GILBERT: None.

ROBERT:  ...of justice?

LIZ GILBERT: None. None, except for that it's a great story, and I like the idea and I feel like—I really do feel like when they see me working they take pity on me, and they say look, you're showing a real commitment to this, you've been up at 5:00 every morning for the last year working on this novel I'm just gonna give you the ending you know, or I'm, I'm gonna spare you from that really bad idea you just had. And, you know, I always think of it like Henry Ford's famous line about how creativity is 99 percent perspiration and one percent inspiration, which is a very mechanical way to divide it up, but it also assumes that those two things have equal weight, that they're the same quality, right? I agree with 99 percent perspiration one percent inspiration, but it's 99 percent oyster, one percent pearl. You can't even compare the matter. Like, it's a bargain to get one percent inspiration, you know, it's a miracle.

JAD: I could get with the muses.

ROBERT: Mm-hmm.

JAD: Sort of.

ROBERT: What do you mean?

JAD: Well I think it's interesting that you can hear at one point she says that she believes it.

LIZ GILBERT: I just kind of believe it.

JAD: And at another point she says it just makes a good story.

LIZ GILBERT: It's a great story, and I like the idea ...

JAD: So you can hear her negotiating with the idea.

ROBERT: Yeah, of course. She's a little bit between the two thoughts.

JAD: Which is interesting ...

ROBERT: I mean, you know—you know a serious neuroscientist would tell you ...

JAD: That it's all in your unconscious ...

ROBERT: It's all you all the time. But another way to think of it is to—is to say that you got a gift and—and therefore it's not all about you and it's bad, and it's still about you when it's good, but it's not all about you, it's just this business of all.

JAD: All right. Okay.

ROBERT: This is a form of well-organized modesty.

JAD: It's a nice phrase I'm just gonna—just gonna go with that.

ROBERT: Yay!

JAD: It's time for us and our fairies to go to break.

ROBERT: [laughs]

[LIZ GILBERT: Hi, this is Liz Gilbert. Support for NPR comes from NPR stations and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.]

[ZELDA GAMSON: Helping NPR advance journalistic excellence in the digital age.]

[DAVID EAGLEMAN: Metlife Foundation, committed to promoting healthy families and good nutrition. On the web at Metlife.org.]

[LIZ GILBERT: And the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, supporting unconventional approaches to transform health and healthcare.]

[ZELDA GAMSON: At RWJF.org/pioneer.]

[LIZ GILBERT: This is NPR. Thanks. Bye, everybody!]

 

-30-

 

Copyright © 2024 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

 

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of programming is the audio record.