Butler’s commonplace books, from around 1988. Here is the inside cover of one of Octavia E. When you find a positive obsession, an obsession that seems like it can take you somewhere good, you keep feeding it, and you ride the beast until it’s dead. So, in some way, the question to ask yourself isn’t just what you want or need to be doing, but what you can’t stop doing or can’t stop thinking about. (And likewise, discipline is much easier when it’s fueled by desire.)īut obsession, John Baldessari warned us, cannot be willed. What connects these two pieces, for me, is how much easier persistence is when there’s obsession behind it. Persistence , she said, was her most important talent. As habit is more dependable than inspiration, continued learning is more dependable than talent. There’s a similar emphasis on persistence in the second essay, “Furor Scribendi.” (A mania or rage for writing.)įorget talent. She took archery in high school, and saw positive obsession “as a way of aiming yourself, your life, at your chosen target. “Obsession can be a useful tool if it’s positive obsession.” Obsession, she writes, is simply about not being able to stop. The first is called “ Positive Obsession,” and it tells the story of how Butler became a writer. (I’ve previously blogged about the positive affirmations she wrote in her commonplace books and her method of reading.)Īfter finishing Parable, I found a couple of her essays collected in Bloodchild and Other Stories, which are worth reading for any artist. I was interested in Butler’s ideas about writing before I even read any of her work. (I wonder how many people remember that 1984 begins when Winston Smith buys an illegal diary to write in.) Clarity and truth will be plenty, if I can only achieve them.Īny time a character writes things down the story in some ways becomes a story about writing and what the act of writing can do for a human being. I’m not interested in being fancy, or even original. The main character, Lauren, is a young writer who keeps a diary and invents a new religion called “Earthseed” while surviving in an America that has collapsed due to climate change. Butler’s Parable of the Sower, which is so prescient it feels like we’re living the prequel. “Talent is cheap - you have to be obsessed, otherwise you are going to give up.”
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