Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love, recently gave a talk on the pressures she’s experienced with the success of her popular memoir. A common question many people ask her is how she’s going to deal with expectations that she go beyond her current phenomenal success by writing something even better and more successful.
Under such intense pressure to perform, Gilbert began to examine how writers have dealt with expectations for increasing levels of creative performance in the past. She discovered that during the Renaissance it was generally believed that the “divine” force of creativity resided in the individual. This being the case, she realized, there is no help from the Renaissance perspective to ease the monumental burden on her own, or any writer’s, fragile human ego.
She finally discovered a viable perspective to resolve the writers dilemma of “great expectations”, in the beliefs of the Greeks and Romans. The Greeks believed that a living spirit called a daemon (the Romans called it a genius) was the force behind any creative act. The essence of their belief was that this spirit lent it’s power to an artist or writer, enabling that person to go beyond human limitations and channel Spirit’s inspiration into their art.
With this orientation, a writer (or any creative person) can withstand impossible expectations that are put upon them for either success or failure, because the creative spirit is the agent. The writer can just do their job, free from both the hubris stemming from great success or the humiliation that often accompanies failure.