(2021-08-24) Octavia Estelle Butler Notetaking As Science Fiction

Tiago Forte: Octavia Estelle Butler: Notetaking as Science Fiction. ...winning multiple Hugo and Nebula awards and in 1995 becoming the first sci-fi writer to receive a MacArthur Fellowship.

the Octavia Butler Archives, a collection of 9,062 items filling 386 boxes that was donated to the Huntington Library in San Marino, CA after Butler’s death. It contains her journals, commonplace books, speeches, library call slips, essay and story drafts, school notes, calendars, and datebooks as well as assorted odds and ends like school progress reports, bus passes, yearbooks, and contracts.

A new book by Lynell George, A Handful of Earth, A Handful of Sky: The World of Octavia Butler (from which all the pictures and quotations in this article are drawn), tells the story of how Estelle’s notes played a crucial part in her journey.

She said, “Until I began writing my own stories, I never found quite what I was looking for…In desperation, I made up my own.” She continues, “I made a universe in it. There I could be a magic horse, a Martian, a telepath. There I could be anywhere but here, any time but now, with any people but these.”

As the possibility of becoming a professional writer slowly dawned on her, Estelle began her transformation into “Octavia,” her powerful, assertive alter-ego.

The emerging Octavia made three rules for herself:
Don’t leave your home without a notebook, paper scraps, something to write with.
Don’t walk into the world without your eyes and ears focused and open.
Don’t make excuses about what you don’t have or what you would do if you did, use that energy to “find a way, make a way.”

She would scrape together twenty-five cents to buy small Mead memo pads, and in those pages took notes on every aspect of her life: grocery and clothes shopping lists, last-minute to-do’s, wishes and intentions, calculations of her remaining funds for rent, food, and utilities. She meticulously tracked her productivity and writing progress: daily goals and page counts, lists of her failings and desired personal qualities, her wishes and dreams for the future, and contracts she would sign with herself each day for how many words she would complete.

And of course, Butler gathered material for her fantastical stories: lyrics to songs she’d heard on the radio, an idea for a character’s name or motivation, a new topic to research, details of news stories – everything she needed to build the worlds her characters would inhabit.

She was a pioneer of Afrofuturism, a genre that cast African-Americans as protagonists who embrace radical change in order to survive.

One of Butler’s novels, The Parable of the Sower, hit the New York Times Bestseller list for the first time in 2020, fulfilling one of Butler’s life goals 14 years after her death.

Butler knew that science-fiction was more than entertainment. It was a transformative way of viewing the world. Science-fiction removes barriers and constraints on what we allow ourselves to envision. Anything is possible in the future, so why not fill it with the people, the stories, the places, and the events that you most want to see?

She used her notes and her writing to confront the demons of self-doubt within her: “The biggest obstacle I had to overcome was my own fear and self doubt

The myth of the writer sitting down before a completely blank page, or the artist at a completely blank canvas, is just that – a myth. Prolific creatives depend on prolific notes.