on making

I'm midway through reading Elizabeth Gilbert's book on creativity, Big Magic. Full review to come when I'm done, of course, but something I read tonight really struck me. 

Gilbert is talking about keeping your "day job" even when you start getting paid for your art, because it takes the pressure off creativity and inspiration. A chapter earlier she spoke about being devoted to your craft/art/chosen field of expression and creating every single day, which can be a challenge to do when you also have a day job, and presumably outside obligations of family, community, etc. 

In Love's Civil War Elizabeth Bowen never talks about working at her writing like a job, but that approach comes through in her letters, and sometimes in Charles Ritchie's diary entries complaining that she has work to do during his visits. 

The intersection of these two reads comes when Gilbert - giving examples of people working and making time/space for their art - writes, "People don't do this kind of thing because they have all kinds of extra time and energy for it; they do this kind of thing because their creativity matters to them enough that they are willing to make all kinds of extra sacrifices for it. Unless you come from landed gentry that's what everyone does." (First emphasis mine, later emphasis Gilbert's). 

The thing is, Elizabeth Bowen was, essentially, landed gentry. She inherited Bowen's Court - her family estate in Co. Cork - was raised alongside lords and ladies and Sackville-Wests, and she still struggled to live off her earnings as a writer. Her lifestyle wasn't exactly going to land her on People of Walmart, mind you, but she did whatever side writing she could - having a standing order for book reviews for magazines, teaching summer writing courses for adults, taking writer in residence gigs, and just barely being saved from writing a "gauche" interview with Princess Margaret about the princess' affair with Peter Townsend. Bowen was a well-known author of several novels, and she ground away at whatever paid writing she could get to keep body and soul together (eventually selling the family estate and taking up residence in an English cottage). I suppose real landed gentry would have an income from their estate, but my point remains (and this may be a news to no one but me):

1. Writing (or whatever form of creativity inspires and calls to you) must be given time and energy consistently over long periods of you're going to get any good at it. 

2. Almost no one can live off the profits of writing (or painting, or sculpting or dancing, or blacksmithing) alone. That's no reason not to go on creating.