Octavia Butler [From Wikipedia]
She was also dyslexic.
As a child, she was daydreaming constantly and not able to finish work. Reading was effortful and she struggled with grammar and spelling.
She had what she referred to later as an almost paralyzing shyness. But what Octavia seemed to excel at were “what if’s” and seeing a science fiction movie fired up her imagination in the future as well as alternative worlds. The books in Octavia’s classrooms held little interest for her, but she discovered her public library had them and she begged her mother for a library card. She would later say that reading was important for writing – and fortunately by not giving up, she was able to discover and play around with ideas in her mind that were years beyond her age.
You don’t start out writing good stuff. You start out writing (rubbish) and thinking it’s good stuff, and then gradually you get better at it. That’s why I say one of the most valuable traits is persistence.
– Octavia Butler
At MIT, Octavia made the following remarks about how she came to write science fiction:
“It’s impossible to begin to talk about myself and the media without going back to how I wound up writing science fiction and that is by watching a terrible movie. (Laughter) The movie was called, “Devil Girl from Mars,” and I saw it when I was about l2 years old, and it changed my life. (Laughter) It was one of those old 1950s movies in which the beautiful Martian woman arrives on earth to announce that all the Martian men have died off and there are a bunch of man-hungry women up there.
And the earth men don’t want to go. As I was watching this film, I had a series of revelations. The first was that “Geez, I can write a better story than that.” And then I thought, “Gee, anybody can write a better story than that.”
(Laughter/Applause) And my third thought was the clincher:
“Somebody got paid for writing that awful story.” (Applause) So I was off and writing, and a year later I was busy submitting terrible pieces of fiction to innocent magazines.”
In her elementary school years, she would write in a pink notebook, but by the time she was in junior high, she gathered up the courage to ask her science teacher to submit one of her stories to a science fiction magazine.
After graduating high school, Octavia took a series of “lots of horrible jobs” while she would complete a community college degree at night and write science fiction. Some of these horrible jobs included washing dishes, inspecting potato chips, and working the phones as a telemarketer.
She woke up every day at 2 am so that she could write before she went to work. She wasn’t able to give up those jobs and live off of her writing until she was 30 and she received her first book advance (read more here).
Besides not giving up, Octavia was also constantly writing self-affirmations and goals.
One of her goals, to make it on the New York Times Bestseller’s list, was finally reached in 2020, 14 years after her death.
From the MIT lecture, some other excerpts which reveal the tough grind of being rejected and her interesting thoughts that resulted in her stories:
“I wrote and wrote and sent things out and collected rejection slips until I realized that collecting rejection slips was masochistic. And I took the drawer and threw them all out. And then when I was 23 and attending Clarion Science Fiction Writers Workshop, I wrote a story called, “Child Finder.” In “Child Finder,” I had a lot of telepaths fighting like crazy with one another. If you wonder where this story is and why you haven’t seen it, this is a kind of lesson in writing that I got early. This story was never published. It was paid for but the anthology was never published.
Anyway, this was about a bunch of telepaths who were fighting because they knew one another far too well. They were fighting because they understood each other. You know, we always feel that if we could just understand each other, we’d be fine. But the problem here was they couldn’t conceal their disagreements and animosities and contempt, and they were killing each other.
Years later I wrote a story called, “Speech Sounds,” in which everyone on earth was suddenly afflicted by something like a small, very specific stroke. Everyone acquired some kind of communications deficit: They couldn’t read or write or whatever. And they had to deal with it, and a lot of them died, of course. A lot of them were no longer able to function. A lot of them no longer wanted to function. And I look at these two stories as the borders of where humanity is.”
“Every story I create, creates me. I write to create myself.” – Octavia Butler
