Octavia Butler's Writing Routine

Octavia Butler's writing routine is the one I think about when I start whining about not having enough time. For most of the years she was writing the books that made her name, she was also working warehouse jobs, washing dishes, sorting potato chips on an assembly line, and taking telemarketing shifts that ended whenever the manager decided they ended. She wrote the books anyway. She wrote them at 2 a.m. and 3 a.m., before she had to catch the bus to whatever day job was paying that month's rent, in a small apartment in Pasadena, on a typewriter she'd bought used.

The routine matters because Butler is the clearest example we have of a writer who built a career without any of the conditions people say you need. No trust fund. No writer's colony. No partner with a steady job covering the bills. She had a library card, a typewriter, an alarm clock set for the middle of the night, and an enormous stubbornness about who she intended to become. She wrote down the career she wanted in a notebook, and then she lived long enough to watch the notebook come true.

The 2 AM Hour

Butler's working life before the MacArthur Fellowship was an unbroken stretch of low-wage jobs. Warehouses, dishwashing, telemarketing, inventory at a potato chip plant, shifts she picked up wherever she could find them. In her interviews she's matter-of-fact about it, and she's matter-of-fact about the solution she landed on. If the daytime belonged to other people, the night belonged to her. She set an alarm for 2 a.m. and she got up and wrote until it was time to go to work.

There's a temptation, when you read this, to make it into inspiration porn. Butler didn't talk about the 2 a.m. hour as a feat of willpower or a triumph over circumstance. She talked about it as the only option a serious writer in her situation had. The day jobs were going to take the day. The only thing left was the hour when everyone in the building was asleep and no one was making demands of her. So that's the hour she took. The alarm clock and the lamp and the typewriter and the thermos of coffee were her entire writing practice for years.

What this teaches, if you let it, is that the romantic conditions people insist on for a writing life are usually optional. A quiet house, a dedicated office, a block of protected time, a supportive income from somewhere. These are nice when you can get them. Butler got none of them until she was already famous, which means none of them were actually necessary for the work she did. The work was done at 2 a.m. on a used typewriter by a woman who had to catch the 6 a.m. bus. If she could write Kindred under those conditions, your own excuses are probably worth a second look.

The Commonplace Books

The most famous page in Butler's archive at the Huntington Library is a single sheet from one of her commonplace books, dated around 1988, where she wrote out in block letters what her career was going to become. "I shall be a bestseller." "My books will be read by millions of people." "I will find the way to do this." "So be it. See to it." Readers who see it for the first time tend to react the same way, which is a kind of chill, because she did see to it, and the notebook is now on display in a library that houses her papers as a treasure of American literature.

The commonplace books weren't a quirk. She kept them for decades. They're filled with research notes, character sketches, reading lists, science clippings, and page after page of direct instructions to herself about what she was going to accomplish and how. She used the notebooks as a tool for building a self that could do the work she wanted to do, which is something quite different from therapeutic journaling. The affirmations are load-bearing pieces of the architecture, not decoration.

"First forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable. Habit will sustain you whether you're inspired or not."

This is the part of Butler's practice that I think writers ignore most, and it's the part worth stealing hardest. She didn't believe in waiting to feel like a writer before she acted like one. She wrote the identity down on paper first. Bestseller. Teacher. Genius. The words were instructions to her future self, and her future self took the instructions literally. When the MacArthur came in 1995 and the New York Times bestseller list finally put her on it years later, the line from the commonplace book to the reality was so direct that it felt staged. It wasn't. She had just done what she wrote down, for twenty-plus years, one 2 a.m. at a time.

The Day Job

Butler is blunt in her interviews about how much of her life was taken up by work that had nothing to do with writing. She sorted potato chips on a conveyor belt. She cleaned floors. She spent years as a telemarketer. She worked in warehouses lifting heavy boxes. There was no teaching gig, no writing fellowship, no wealthy family underwriting her rent. She had shifts, and she scheduled her novels around the shifts.

What's striking about the way she talks about the day jobs is that she doesn't frame them as wasted time. In a Believer profile and in the interviews collected in Conversations with Octavia Butler, she describes the jobs as a kind of research. She watched how people talked when they were exhausted, who had power in a given room and who got told what to do, what the small exchanges of dignity looked like on an assembly line. Every one of those observations ended up in the novels, because the novels are about exactly those things. The Patternist books, Kindred, the Parable novels, Bloodchild. They're all stories about labor, power, and who has to survive by watching carefully. Butler spent her twenties doing precisely that watching, by necessity.

The lesson here is harder than the 2 a.m. one, because it asks you to stop treating your day job as the enemy of your writing. For most working writers, the day job is the writing, or at least its raw material. Butler didn't resent the potato chip plant. She used it. The novels she wrote in the small hours were paid for, in a sense, by the observations she collected during the day.

Persistence

Butler's most quoted line about the craft is the one about habit and inspiration. "First forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable. Habit will sustain you whether you're inspired or not, whether it's raining or not." She said a version of this in almost every interview she gave, and she said it because she meant it, and she said it because she had lived the proof of it for twenty years before anyone was listening.

What's useful about Butler's version of this advice is that she wasn't speaking from a comfortable chair when she gave it. Most writers who preach habit over inspiration are doing so after the habit has paid off. Butler was saying it while she still had to set an alarm for 2 a.m. and catch a bus. The reliability of habit was the only thing standing between her and giving up. When you're that tired and that broke and still have to produce pages, inspiration is a luxury you can't afford to wait for. Habit is what shows up when nothing else will.

This is why her routine, stripped of all the romance, is maybe the most important one in the archive for working writers to study. The other famous routines come with conditions most people can't replicate. Hemingway's Finca. King's house in Maine. Morrison's mornings before the kids woke up in her big Hudson Valley house. Butler's routine is the one that works when you have nothing. Set an alarm. Get up. Write for a couple of hours. Go to your day job. Come home. Sleep. Repeat. The books accumulate behind you whether you feel good about the work or not, and the accumulation is the career.