Elizabeth Gilbert on Nurturing Creativity

There’s a picture of me from last year (Mcleod Ganj, India) holding up a copy of Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love. It’s been my Facebook profile picture for a while now, and at least a dozen of my friends have asked me what I thought of the book.

Truth? I can understand why it appealed to so many people, but it fell a little flat for me. Maybe because I’m not into that kind of spirituality or maybe simply because having come from a very different background, I couldn’t quite identify with the author’s struggle.

HOWEVER. Elizabeth Gilbert herself seems like a charming, honest author, who isn’t afraid to share her real experiences and talk about her strengths and weaknesses. Now that, I admire.

I came across this video recently, and found myself laughing and nodding along so many times. Definitely worth a watch for all the creatives reading this.

Hop on Over to the Urban Muse. . .

. . . where I’m guest-blogging today.

Three Times Lucky or Three Times Stupid?

Before You Speak, Shut Up and Listen

For Valentine’s Day, my friends and I went to my favorite Indian restaurant in Berkeley, and of course, no one was surprised when asked how spicy I wanted my food, I replied, “As spicy as is humanly possible.”

Even by Indian standards, my tolerance for spicy food is very high. When I was in school, my mother used to make potato chips at home. While everyone else simply wanted salt on theirs, mine were always covered with red chilly powder. My friends were equally fond of the stuff. We’d often eat out, getting the spiciest food available in the Indian cuisine, and then gulp it down with bottles of water. It was our version of fun.

This, of course, did mean that every time the three of us got together, we also got sick. Sore throats, stomach aches, and eventually, orders from each of our doctors to cut down.

Our mothers would stare at us in fascination. My mother often wondered about the sanity of eating something so spicy that you needed two glasses of water to wash it down, but she wasn’t surprised. I am my father’s daughter– a man who eats raw green chilli (the very hot kind), because… well, because it’s tasty. Don’t look at me. I just inherited the weirdness.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been missing India so much it’s almost a physical pain. Which is funny, because I actually do love my life here in America.

For several days though, there’s been a lot of India going on in my world. I’m working on a presentation for Thursday on women and sexuality in India. I finally saw Slumdog Millionaire and just finished writing about it. And I had to refrain from getting into a verbal war with journalists who managed to, despite their best intentions, completely offend me with their comments about India.

That’s probably the one thing that has surprised me most about America. I have on several occasions now been asked questions like, “China’s not a democracy?” and my personal favorite, “Is Delhi cleaner than Berkeley?”

Funny as these statements are, they become downright painful when someone proclaims, after returning from India, that they’d watched Slumdog Millionaire before leaving, but Oh. My. God. they were not prepared for the poverty in India. Maybe, oh I don’t know, because poverty isn’t glamourous in real life and doesn’t end after two hours?

It offends me greatly when after spending two weeks in a tourist part of town, people paint all Indians as lying, cheating scumbags. And that they’re shameless enough to actually say it to my face.

A Chinese-American friend says she no longer views it as ignorance, but as a refusal to see that what works in one culture or country, may or may not work in another.

Like most people, my views on Chinese policies and government are based on Indian, American and British media’s portrayal of it. Because I have been researching Chinese politics for almost two years (I hope to live there someday), I was very excited to see many Chinese-American students and five Visiting Scholars from China at Berkeley.

One said to me the other day that if significant changes were made to the human rights conditions and freedom of speech, she’d actually prefer the current system to a democracy. But that she will probably never say this to anyone here except me because she’s afraid of people jumping down her throat, telling her how wrong she is, and then assuming that she doesn’t know what she’s talking about.

And I will never forget how two people personally thanked me after a presentation in the J-school, in which I was the only person in the entire session who made a case for why a boycott of the Chinese Olympics would have been a mistake. It was a surprise to most in that room when I said having the Olympics in China was, in my opinion, a “good idea.” The Chinese students thanked me because until then, they had only seen me as a journalist who was a vocal critic of China and wrote about Tibet.

It is the same appreciation I feel when journalists come to India, and instead of applying Western ideals to the culture, sit back and try to understand it first. It’s what I did when I first arrived here. I didn’t feel comfortable reporting, so until December, I continued writing about India, and just assimilated. Now I’m writing about the Bay Area for American readers, and I feel confident in my ability to not offend.

There are a lot of things I have learned and continue to learn in Berkeley, but the most important one is this: Before you speak, shut up and listen.

Overheard in the Newsroom

My new favorite website: http://overheardinthenewsroom.com/

I’ve heard these or versions of these before:

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Editor-in-Chief: “You know, I always hated it when the media sensationalized deaths, but now that I have a death story, I so want to do it!”

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Photographer: “Can we find someone who’s unemployed and follow them?”
Business reporter: “I don’t know, there’s not that many.”

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Reporter to another reporter: “The young girl’s mother is a stripper? She didn’t tell ME that when I spoke to her.”

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“We’ll still be able to do good work for at least a few more months.”

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“Now that I threw up I should be fine.”

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“The journalist in me loves you for doing stuff like this. But the boss in me wants to choke the crap out of you.”

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My newspaper-editor roommate leaving the house: “I’m going to Starbucks. I mean work.”

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Editor to reporter:
“Let’s move voodoo dolls higher… because you just can’t go wrong with voodoo dolls.”

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Editor 1: “Grammar Nazi.”
Editor 2: “I’m not a grammar Nazi. That’s the point. I’m a grammar enthusiast.”

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Reporter: It’s raining.
Designer: Where?
Reporter: Outside.

**

I may have said some of them too.

Of Ideas and Markets

I finally broke down and asked Sam what he thought of a book idea I’ve been thinking about. Sam is the most market-savvy person I know– a marketing God. It’s what he does for a living. He looks at a piece of writing and tells you in five seconds flat whether or not it has any selling potential and how much money you might be able to make from it.

Talent, that.

Fortunately for me, he thought my idea has huge sales potential. This is new to me. Usually, my book ideas fall flat, because even I know, deep down, that they’re not going to appeal to a mass audience.

The reason I’ve been resistant to books so far, is that I haven’t been able to find something that I would want to write AND that would sell. I’ve come up with a lot of book ideas that I’d love to write, but I’m not the writer who wants to write for an intellectual audience or a feminist audience. I want these issues to be presented in a format that appeals to a mass audience.

One of my friends has a fascinating life story. He’s been asked several times by several big publishers to write it. He’s resisted so far, because he’s uncomfortable sharing his deepest thoughts with the world. I explained to him how his book was going to bring the issues of his country to light, how it would give other people who’re struggling and hopeless, strength. I think it was the first time he’d thought of it in that way. If it was going to help and inspire others, then maybe it wasn’t such a bad idea to do it.

He came over yesterday and we got to talking about our writing careers. He said I should consider writing a book about a certain topic I’m interested in.

“Who would read that?” I asked.

“Well, maybe it won’t be on the NY Times bestseller list,” he said, “But it will be read.”

And that’s my problem, I guess. I can’t go in already knowing that it’s not going to appeal to a mass audience. What’s the point of talking about things that matter with people who already know they matter? Feminists talking to feminists. Human rights activists telling other human rights activists what’s going on. What’s the point? What’s that going to achieve?

Instead, now I’m thinking of this new idea, this new book that I could write. It’s something that I’ve always been interested in talking about, and something that, if done well, could certainly be widely read.

Now if only I could sit down and write it.

I’ll find you, my love

“It is obvious why you can’t take any time off– you were born to this work.”
- E-mail from a reader.

In romance movies, often the protagonist will search high and low for the love of her life, and towards the end, she’ll find that she’s been looking in vain. He’s been there all along. The guy next door. The best friend. She was looking for love in all the wrong places, while he was right in front of her.

Over the last several months, I’ve tried several new things, creatively speaking. I tried video and photography. I tried audio and script. I tried multimedia and new technologies. But my love, my true love, has been right in front of me all along.

When it comes down to it, when given a choice, when everything is stripped away but the core, there’s only one thing I am and one thing I love.

I’m a writer. Maybe it’s time I stopped trying to change that.