Craft Advice with Elizabeth Gilbert, Part I
On writing in seasons, daily writing practice, hearing your own words, brutally honest feedback, the easy and hard parts of memoir and fiction, and balanced and fair writing.
Intimate conversations with our greatest heart-centered minds.
Lean, precise, elegant prose, each word carefully chosen to collectively convey the contents of her heart, mind—and, increasingly, cosmic connections. With both fiction and nonfiction, and now poetry, Liz knows how to keep the reader spellbound whilst grounded in truth
Her latest memoir, All The Way To The River: Love, Loss, and Liberation, tells the story of Liz’s friendship and then love affair with the wildly charismatic recovering drug addict, Rayya Elias. Mountains of tenderness and joy and trust and ecstatic pleasure abound until Rayya is diagnosed with incurable cancer and experiences tremendous pain for which the doctors prescribe morphine, which quickly relaunches Rayya’s addiction, and the two descend into a hell realm. It’s beautifully told, it’s gutting, it’s hopeful. It’s an Oprah Book Club pick, and has received starred reviews from both Publisher’s Weekly and Booklist.
Liz is the author of eleven books which altogether have sold over 25 million copies worldwide. It’s rare that Liz talks about her writing process, so it was a deep delight for me to get to ask her some questions! I learned a lot! I think you will, too!
In case you missed Part One and Part Two of our conversation, I’ve included the links.
We got on a roll, so for the first time ever, Craft Advice will appear in two parts. You’re reading Part One. Part Two will post tomorrow!
As always, let me know what you think in the comments!
xJane
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Where do you write?
I wrote most of the book at the church [Liz lives in a renovated church]. But when it got to the middle section, the going back into hell, I knew that I couldn't write that there. There are times where I have to go elsewhere. I had to go to a neutral place, I had to go be very alone, and I had to go someplace where I would be completely uninterrupted. I had to go to a place that held no memories. So I went to New Orleans. The incredible writer Sarah M. Broom is a friend of mine, and she Airbnb's the second floor of her house. She lives in this incredible New Orleans antebellum kind of collapsing and beautiful mansion in Treme.
I'd gone to visit her the year earlier, and she'd shown me the space, and I remember having this wave of, “I'm going to write a book in this space someday. There's something here for me.”
I think I stayed two and a half weeks. During that time, I was writing at this ferocious pace: wake up in the morning, go to one of my twelve-step meetings online, do some yoga, and then write and cry until noon, eat lunch, write and cry, take a bath, cry, eat dinner, walk around the neighborhood, cry, come back, write, cry, take another bath. There was a nine or ten day period where I didn't talk to anybody, except Rayya. That was the perfect, perfect space to do that in.
And then you went back home to finish the book?
Yes, I started it and finished it in the church.
Typically, how many hours a day do you write?
First of all, I want to say that I don't write every day. I did when I was a young, unpublished writer, and I think it's really important to write every day when you're trying to become a writer. But not only do I not write every day, I don't even write every year. I write in seasons, projects that are huge chunks; I'm not writing now, and I see no writing coming for the next year.
I write my Substack, but there’s not a book project at the moment. My books are so heavily researched that 90% of my work is usually before I start writing. The preparation to write takes years of research and note collecting but when I'm actually writing, when the season comes, which is once every three or four years, the actual number of hours probably starts at one or two hours a day. By the middle of the book, it's probably two or three hours a day. And when I get barn fever, like when a horse knows that the barn is in sight, then the last rush of the book is six, seven, eight hours a day.
That stretch is incredibly unhealthy. It’s not good for my posture, it's not good for my wrists, my eyes, but there's a momentum that's happening. It’s like I'm on a bobsled. The first part is carrying the bobsled up the hill, and then by the end, it's just, “whoa, now we're really going!”
When you're in one of the seasons of not writing how does that impact you? Do you feel like the same Liz?
No, there's a person I can only be when I'm actively writing, and it's an incredible experience to be her. But I can't be that person every day, because it's not sustainable; it requires so much preparation and upkeep. It’s a big thing to be her. I almost feel like all my other parts work for her. When the moment comes, when she gets called in, the most creative version of myself, all the other parts have to work as bodyguards, they have to keep everybody else away, they have to be cooks and personal assistants. They’re just here to serve her. And she's kind of amazing, that version of me, but I don't miss her when I'm not in it, because it's intense, and I couldn't be her 365 days a year.
But she's fearless. And she's deeply self-confident, deeply anchored, deeply mystical, and not really human. She's not who I am all the other days of the year, but when she gets called in, it's like, oh, shit.
How do you know when she's coming?