In their last episode of Season 3, Alicia and Sarah use Elizabeth Gilbert’s book Big Magic to discuss the creative processes on display in the television series, Daisy Jones and the Six, based on the novel by the same name. They apply Gilbert’s five step process to analyze the fictional creative process of the characters in the television show. At the end of this week’s discussion, they talk about the things they've been reading, watching, and analyzing outside of the classroom.
Literary terms of the week: Courage, Enchantment, Permission, Persistence, and Trust
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Music by Craig Harmann
Cover art by Matt Holman
Show notes:
30-second summary
Amazon Prime
Literary terms of the week:
Elizabeth Gilbert’s 5 steps of Big Magic
Courage: “The universe buries strange jewels deep within us all, and then stands back to see if we can find them. The hunt to uncover those jewels - that’s creative living. The courage to go on that hunt in the first place - that’s what separates a mundane existence from a more enchanted one” (8).
Enchantment: “I believe that inspiration will always try its best to work with you - but if you are not ready or available, it may indeed choose to leave you and to search for a different human collaborator” (58).
Permission: “You do not need anybody’s permission to live a creative life….The earliest evidence of recognizable human art is forty thousand years old. The earliest evidence of human agriculture, by contrast, is only ten thousand years old. Which means that somewhere in our collective evolutionary story, we decided it was way more important to make attractive, superfluous items than it was to learn how to regularly feed ourselves” (86-87).
Persistence: “When I was sixteen years old, I took vows to become a writer….I simply vowed to the universe that I would write forever, regardless of the result” (139-140).
Trust: “My desire to work - my desire to engage with my creativity as intimately and as freely as possible - is my strongest personal incentive to fight back against pain, by any means necessary, and to fashion a life for myself that is as sane and healthy and stable as it can possibly be. But that’s only because of what I have chosen to trust, which is quite simply: love. Love over suffering, always” (215).
What are we enjoying right now?
Alicia: Up Here! (TV on Hulu), The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo (Taylor Jenkins Reid)
Sarah: American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang (book), Ted Lasso Season 3 (movie)
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Chapter 3.16 - Big Magic and the Six