Does Your Work Love You?

Elizabeth Gilbert suggests creativity wants to play with us. Here's what happened when I asked my violin for help.

I was driving down I-84 recently when I heard something that nearly made me swerve off the road. On my car stereo, Elizabeth Gilbert was reading her audiobook “Big Magic,” a deceptively light-footed guide to creative living. In it, she relates a typical conversation she has with aspiring writers.

“Do you love writing?” I ask.

Of course they do. Duh.

Then I ask: “Do you believe that writing loves you in return?”

They look at me like I should be institutionalized.

“Of course not,” they say. Most of them report that writing is totally indifferent to them. And if they do happen to feel a reciprocal relationship with their creativity, it is usually a deeply sick relationship. In many cases, these young writers claim that writing flat-out hates them. Writing messes with their heads. Writing torments them and hides from them. Writing punishes them. Writing destroys them. Writing kicks their asses, ten ways to Sunday.

Damn, I thought. I felt busted, and not only as a writer. I’m known to go on about how hard good writing is — I always insert that word “good,” as if less exulted writers found it easy to write their benighted prose. And I never tire of complaining about how the perfect phrase vanishes the instant I try to pin down a thought that just stood Klieg-lit in my mind. Even the other day, I enthusiastically quoted a line from the comedian Hallie Cantor that compares writing to being enclosed in a burning cage.

But the real gut punch came from realizing how long I have framed my relationship to my violin in such toxic terms. I approach practicing like a battered spouse, never knowing from one day to the next whether the notes will fall in my hand agreeably or mock my movements with out-of-tune squawks. To ward off the shame, I remind myself that my chosen instrument is especially fickle, difficult, temperamental.

If you heard a friend describe her crush that way, wouldn’t you cut in and ask: “And you love him because…?”

As it happens, I’m at work on a book that is in part about my love for the violin. I examine the baggage that relationship accumulated due to trauma and stage fright, and how meaningful it has been to to pick up the instrument again in middle age. I was three when I announced my desire to play the violin, almost seven when I began lessons. It never came easily, but I made steady enough progress into my late teens, when I studied the kinds of advanced pieces, like Lalo’s Symphonie Espagnole and Shostakovich’s Violin Concerto No. 1, that others might take as proof of mastery. For me, the struggle they cost me only proved that I had no future as a performer.

Running alongside this battle was a completely different relationship with the piano, on which I took sporadic lessons, supplemented with half-assed attempts to read through pieces my sister had learned. In my first year of college, when piano lessons were mandatory for music majors, I was taken aback when my teacher assigned me a Debussy Prelude. With no personal ambitions tied to the instrument, I gave it a go and didn’t descend into self-flagellation when its difficulties ensnared me. In my current draft of the chapter, I reflect:

The piano felt like a second-choice friend, dependable, square, and almost pathetically responsive to the most glancing attention. The notes were right there in plain view, evenly spaced and in tune, whether you were an expert or just running a dust cloth over its keys. There were times when I was bored by my piano studies, but I don’t recall ever being frustrated by the instrument, whereas the violin could be endlessly cruel with its demand for microscopic precision in return for a single clean note. It would be decades before I began to think of the violin as a friend; back then the relationship was closer to unrequited passion for someone moody and difficult who was way out of my league.

Is every instrument the personification of an internal psychodrama? Probably not. But just to show how entrenched the habit is — and how gendered with cultural assumptions about who gets to play with, seduce or master a violin — here is the introduction by Yehudi Menuhin, one of my early idols, to a book from 1976. Someone gave it to me for Christmas when I was 14.

Its shape is in fact inspired by and symbolic of the most beautiful human object, the woman’s body….The varnish of a Stradivarius or Guarnerius evokes the sun caught in the silken texture of human skin. And like the female human voice, the violin combines the entire soprano and contralto range. I have often wondered whether psychologically there is a basic difference between the woman’s relationship to the violin and the man’s… Does the woman violinist consider the violin more as her own voice than the voice of one she loves? Is there an element of narcissism in the woman’s relation to the violin..?

That passage infuriated me even then. I suspected that Menuhin wanted to insinuate that what girls playing string instruments were really doing was a form of masturbation. Either way, he seemed to be warning, my interactions with the violin could never rely on “natural” instincts.

But as I listened to Gilbert make the case for a more reciprocal emotional relationship with our creative pursuits, it occurred to me that my willingness to project negative character traits on the violin had closed off the channel by which it might help me to make music with it. Gilbert sees creativity as a sentient force that wants to work with us—not against us—because it desires to be brought into being. I was just driving back from the Omega Institute, where I had attended a course in Shadow Work. If you read my Substack post about that, you’ll know that I was already quite comfortable conversing with invisible beings.

The next time I practiced the violin, I ran into a familiar technical issue with my bowing. I was working on a brisk passage in Beethoven that required bouncy, crisp bow strokes that somehow also needed to ring out with juicy tone. I noticed the old frustration rise in my mind — why was this always my weakness? Suddenly, I heard myself ask my bow: How do you want to be held? In that instant, I felt my right elbow lift. With the large muscles of the arm taking on more of the bow’s weight, my finger joints softened. The sound came out sweeter, the articulation more even.

I don’t want to overstate this—my bow didn’t whisper a set of instructions. But the moment I stopped treating it like a misbehaving tool and approached it as a partner, something shifted. I made room for dialogue instead of domination. What if that’s what Gilbert meant all along?

You don’t need to be a musician to try this. Maybe you’ve been grinding your teeth at a work project, or resenting your own body when it doesn’t perform the way it used to. Maybe you fall short of your expectations in cooking, or — who doesn’t? — in raising your children. What would happen if you started asking: How do you want to be held? What do you want to try next? What if, instead of treating the practice like a battleground, you invited it into a relationship?

This isn’t about pretending your Excel spreadsheet has a soul. It’s about softening the loop of self-blame and control. It’s about replacing the question “Why can’t I get this right?” with “What do you want to show me?”

It may sound absurd. It might even sound ickily like self-help. But then again, what is creative practice if not a conversation—with the world, with the materials, with the parts of ourselves we’re only just starting to trust?

So go ahead. Ask the thing you love that frustrates you: Do you love me back?

And then listen as if you might learn something.