“You don’t start out writing good stuff. You start out writing crap and thinking it’s good stuff, and then gradually you get better at it.”

These words by Octavia E. Butler might provide us with a window into how she reshaped science fiction—because she gave it guts, brains, and a spine that stood upright in the face of the demanding publishing world, especially for a Black woman writing speculative fiction in the 1970s and 1980s.

While her novels crackle with imagination—time travel, telepathy, post-apocalyptic survival—her advice to writers was the opposite of dreamy.

No mysticism. No waiting for the muse. Butler was ruthlessly practical. While her stories could stretch the bounds of reality, her writing habits were firmly grounded. So when one of the most prolific sci-fi minds offers advice, you pay attention.

This article unpacks her habits, her headspace, and her hard-won hacks. All this in the hope that you stop romanticizing writing and start doing it.

1. Butt in Chair, Hands on Keyboard

“Forget talent. If you have it, fine. Use it. If you don’t have it, it doesn’t matter. As habit is more dependable than inspiration, continued learning is more dependable than talent,” Butler said.

She wrote every day, usually in the early morning, long before distractions could talk her out of it. Her journals show she aimed for a minimum of four hours daily, treating it like a shift at work. Sometimes she wrote before her day job. Sometimes after. No excuses.

This wasn’t about magical productivity hacks. It was survival. She believed inspiration was a luxury and discipline was oxygen.

For Butler, showing up was the talent. The words might be bad at first. That wasn’t the point. She kept sitting down, kept hammering keys, knowing that consistency, not genius, was what finished books.

2. Writing Through Resistance

If you’ve ever felt like a fraud while writing, congratulations—you and Octavia Butler have something in common.

Her journals, now archived at the Huntington Library, are riddled with affirmations like “I write bestselling novels,” repeated different ways, often in shaky, uncertain handwriting.

She wasn’t born fearless. She built that mindset one repetition at a time.

Butler got rejection letters by the fistful. Editors didn’t know what to do with her blend of race, gender politics, and speculative fiction. Still, she pressed on.

She acknowledged persistence as her talent, not just an accessory to it. It is the thing itself. Writing while discouraged, writing through failure—that’s where the work happened.

3. Sci-Fi as a Mirror to Reality

One might think Butler’s motive behind writing about aliens was to escape the real world. But no, it was to call it out. Her books are layered with urgent social commentary.

Kindred drags a modern Black woman into slavery-era Maryland—not for time travel thrills, but to explore generational trauma. The Parable of the Sower warns of climate collapse, economic ruin, and cultish politics years before those issues became headlines.

Much like her contemporary Toni Morrison, she didn’t write to impress readers. She intended to provoke them. Maybe that’s why, in Butler’s hands, sci-fi stopped being fantasy and started becoming prophecy.

4. “Write Yourself In”

Butler often said she wrote because she didn’t see people like herself in the stories she loved. So she fixed it. Her protagonists were Black, often female, sometimes queer, and almost always complex.

They replaced polished heroes with survivors, tough, curious, and real.

She didn’t do this to create a brand. It was a necessity. She once said in an interview, “You’ve got to make your own worlds. You’ve got to write yourself in.”

She used her characters to challenge the tropes.

If you’re writing today, take note: representation isn’t about inclusion for its own sake. It’s about truth. And the truth, Butler knew, includes everyone.

5. Embrace the Hustle

Before Kindred put her on the map, Butler juggled a hectic schedule that included waking up at 2 in the morning to write and then taking on a series of odd jobs, such as telemarketer, potato chip inspector, dishwasher, and warehouse worker. She must have known the bills wouldn’t stop just because she had a story to tell. She wrote in scraps of free time, sometimes in bus stations or borrowed spaces. She lived modestly, saved fiercely, and built a writing life that wasn’t romantic but was sustainable.

Financial planning wasn’t extra; it was part of her writing strategy. Butler treated her budget like a second manuscript.

Writers need room to create, and that sometimes means spreadsheets before sentences.

6. Rejection Can Fuel You

Butler submitted short stories for years before she finally published her first novel, Patternmaster. She felt like she had found her stride. And yet, the success she deserved eluded her—maybe in part because her writing slowed down. Her reputation, however, was silently growing, resulting in her receiving the prestigious MacArthur grant in 1995.

Her approach towards rejection is quite interesting. She wrote in an essay called “Positive Obsession”: “When I was older, I decided that getting a rejection slip was like being told your child was ugly. You got mad and didn’t believe a word of it. Besides, look at all the really ugly literary children out there in the world being published and doing fine!” Quite a robust attitude to not let you shrink your voice.

In fact, Butler turned rejection into a rehearsal for the next pitch, the next draft, the next breakthrough.

7. Don’t Prettify Your First Draft

If you’re waiting to write until your sentences sparkle, you’re already doing it wrong. Butler’s early drafts were notoriously chaotic—handwritten pages stacked with edits, arrows, strike-throughs, and margin notes. She didn’t worry about sounding brilliant. She aimed to be done.

To her, the first draft wasn’t art. It was a raw material dump. Only after that could real craft begin. She followed what they call “vomit drafting.”

8. Reading Outside of Your Comfort Zone

Butler’s reading habits would confuse an algorithm. She devoured books on anthropology, genetics, world history, evolution, and chaos theory. Yes, she read fiction, too, but her creative engine ran on wild inputs. It’s how her stories ended up feeling more like forecasts than fantasies.

Her advice? Reading outside of your comfort zone. Reading genres that you don’t usually read. If you’re writing romance, crack open a book on ancient warfare. If you’re writing horror, read about pandemics. Creativity thrives where categories collapse.

In Parable of the Talents, a demagogue runs on the slogan “Make America Great Again.” Butler wrote that line in 1998. Her work forecasted climate disaster, wealth gaps, and state collapse, not because she was psychic, but because she was always learning.

How to Write Like Butler Without Imitating Her

Butler’s advice was more a mindset than a style guide. She wanted brave writers. Writers who challenge norms. Writers who show up even when the ideas don’t. You can borrow her discipline, sure. But your voice is yours to build.

Want a place to start? Try this: Write a protagonist no one would expect to lead. Set your story in a future you fear. Remove the safety net and see what happens. That’s the Butler spirit.

Her literary legacy is quite political. It’s also philosophical. It’s a call to write stories that matter, stories that warn, stories that offer new ways to live.

“The only lasting truth is change,” she wrote.

Butler’s formula wasn’t a secret. It took discipline, imagination, and resilience. See where it takes you.