Two Sylvias' Weekly Muse: July 3, 2022

Issue 10

Hello Poets and Writers,

Welcome to July!

We are always on the lookout for good advice on living a creative life, being a creator, and how to avoid issues that having a creative mind can produce. There is a wonderful section in Elizabeth Gilbert’s book, Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear in which she talks about an interview she once conducted with singer and songwriter Tom Waits.

According to Gilbert, Waits began his songwriting career with an intense attitude that he had to be better than any other songwriting musician. He was incredibly competitive, and he drove himself into the ground trying to write the “best” songs, adopting the lifestyle of the “suffering artist,” in which he purposefully tormented himself until he began to hate his life. One day, while watching his children playing, he had an epiphany—he heard them making up little songs, singing them for a few minutes, and then moving on to something else while laughing and running around the yard. They exhibited neither str…