Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life, and it is the main obstacle between you and a shitty first draft. I think perfectionism is based on the obsessive belief that if you run carefully enough, hitting each stepping-stone just right, you won’t have to die. The truth is that you will die anyway and that a lot of people who aren’t even looking at their feet are going to do a whole lot better than you.

Nothing is original. The writer Jonathan Lethem has said that when people call something ‘original,’ nine out of ten times they just don’t know the references or the original sources involved. What a good artist understands is that nothing comes from nowhere. All creative work builds on what came before. Every new idea is just a mashup or a remix of one or more previous ideas. You are, in fact, a mashup of what you choose to let into your life. You are the sum of your influences.

Most of us have no idea of our real creative height. We are much more gifted than we know. My tools are simple. The time commitment is small. The results, in my experience, are large. The morning pages mapped in this book are the primary tool for the creative recovery. Every day, set your clock one-half hour early; then get up and write three pages of longhand, stream-of-consciousness morning writing. There is no wrong way to do morning pages. These daily morning meanderings are not meant to be art.

The universe buries strange jewels deep within us all, and then stands back to see if we can find them. The hunt to discover 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. The often surprising results of that hunt—that’s what I call Big Magic. And Big Magic is not just my choice of a subject for this book; it’s my choice of a life.

Writing isn’t about making money, getting famous, getting dates, getting laid, or making friends. In the end, it’s about enriching the lives of those who will read your work, and enriching your own life, as well. It’s about getting up, getting well, and getting over. Getting happy, okay? Getting happy. Some of this book—perhaps too much—has been about how I learned to do it. Much of it has been about how you can do it better.