Overcoming creative fear: a bestseller’s guide

Best-selling author Elizabeth Gilbert took aim at the often-paralysing traits of fear and perfectionism in her talk on "How to be creative" at the All About Women festival this week.
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Image: A different kind of Art

Speaking at the sold-out session at the Sydney Opera House, the author of Eat Pray Love, Committed and The Signature of All Things, urged women to get past their need to produce perfect work before letting it loose on the world. ‘If you want to live a creative life somehow you have to take on your perfectionism,’ she said, adding that it was a particularly huge issue for women who often held themselves back from fear of failure or judgement whereas men would jump in.

‘There are so many things your creative work doesn’t have to be,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t have to be good; it doesn’t have to be important; it doesn’t have to be world-changing; it doesn’t have to be marketable. It just has to be done.’

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Christine Long
About the Author
Christine Long is a Sydney freelance journalist.