You have to be obsessed

Wednesday, March 17, 2021

“Talent is cheap — you have to be obsessed, otherwise you are going to give up.”
—John Baldessari

This week I finished Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower, which is so prescient it feels like we’re living the prequel. 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.

At one point Lauren writes:

I’m trying to speak—to write—the truth. I’m trying to be clear. I’m not interested in being fancy, or even original. Clarity and truth will be plenty, if I can only achieve them.

Any 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 wonder how many people remember that 1984 begins when Winston Smith buys an illegal diary to write in.)

I was interested in Butler’s ideas about writing before I even read any of her work. (I’ve previously blogged about the positive affirmations she wrote in her commonplace books and her method of reading.)

After finishing Parable, I found a couple of her essays collected in Bloodchild and Other Stories, which are worth reading for any artist.

The first is called “Positive Obsession,” and it tells the story of how Butler became a writer. Obsession, she writes, is simply about not being able to stop. “Obsession can be a useful tool if it’s positive obsession.”

She took archery in high school, and saw positive obsession “as a way of aiming yourself, your life, at your chosen target. Decide what you want. Aim high. Go for it.”

There’s a similar emphasis on persistence in the second essay, “Furor Scribendi.” (A mania or rage for writing.)

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.

Persistence, she said, was her most important talent. Sticking with it.

What connects these two pieces, for me, is how much easier persistence is when there’s obsession behind it. (And likewise, discipline is much easier when it’s fueled by desire.)

But obsession, John Baldessari warned us, cannot be willed.

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. That’s your obsession. The thing you cannot will.

Obsession is a living thing. A kind of beast. 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.

What obsession looks like pic.twitter.com/p27pUQzX2P

— Austin Kleon (@austinkleon) July 23, 2017

All good things must begin

Tuesday, June 23, 2020

“All good things must begin.”
—Octavia Butler, journal entry

Here is the inside cover of one of Octavia E. Butler’s commonplace books, from around 1988. She wrote herself many of these motivational notes, which can found in her archives at The Huntington.

That encouragement was probably essential: Butler faced a lot of challenges. She grew up black and poor in Pasadena, Calif., when legal segregation was dead, but de facto segregation was very much alive… In several interviews Butler said she wrote because she had two choices: write, or die. “If I hadn’t written, I probably would have done something stupid that would have led to my death,” she said cheerfully.

Looking at Butler’s notes I was reminded of the notebooks of another fiction writer, James Salter, who wrote all his novels by hand, but would start his notebooks with advice to himself on the inside flap:

This flap, from his notebook for his 1967 novel A Sport and a Pastime, has advice from André Gide:

Write as if this were your only book, your last book. Into it put everything you were saving—everything precious, every scrap of capital, every penny as it were. Don’t be afraid of being left with nothing.

His notebook from Light Years has the same advice: “SAVE NOTHING.”

“As always, you try to put everything you have in a book,” he said. “That is, don’t save anything for the next one. (The book of his uncollected writings is titled, Don’t Save Anything.)

(These images are from his collection in the Ransom Center.)

I always take comfort in the fact that even the great writers needed to pump themselves up to get to work.

Even if you don’t believe it or feel it 100%, it can be of great help to write down the things you want to be true about your life and work. (If you believe otherwise, why write?)

“Creative work is very hard,” wrote Sidney Lumet, in Making Movies, “and some sort of self-deception is necessary simply in order to start.”

On reading more than one book at a time

Thursday, February 13, 2020

There are many different ways to read, and many different ways of reading that generate new writing. (For example, reading with a pencil.) One of my favorite ways is to have 3 or 4 books going at the same time and let them talk to each other.

Here’s Octavia Butler:

I generally have four or five books open around the house—I live alone; I can do this—and they are not books on the same subject. They don’t relate to each other in any particular way, and the ideas they present bounce off one another. And I like this effect. I also listen to audio-books, and I’ll go out for my morning walk with tapes from two very different audio-books, and let those ideas bounce off each other, simmer, reproduce in some odd way, so that I come up with ideas that I might not have come up with if I had simply stuck to one book until I was done with it and then gone and picked up another.

Here’s Richard Powers:

I like to keep one work of fiction and one of nonfiction going at once, and I’ll use them to triangulate against each other to conjure up some third space.

Reading this way is a form of input as collage.

Like walking through the city all day, you’re bombing your brain with lots of different inputs, recognizing patterns, and pulling a thread of meaning out of it all.

My kids do this naturally, by the way. They’re very promiscuous with their books, flitting from one to the next and sometimes back again. (I heard from one reader who said she was admonished in elementary school for reading this way. Her teacher told her parents she should have no more than two…)

This method is easily transferred to listening, watching, etc.

More: “Storing up images”

Arrows and targets

Monday, October 15, 2018

“Talent hits a target no one else can hit; genius hits a target no one else can see.”
—Arthur Schopenhauer

“Instead of shooting arrows at someone else’s target, which I’ve never been very good at, I make my own target around wherever my arrow happens to have landed. You shoot your arrow and then you paint your bulls eye around it, and therefore you have hit the target dead centre.”
—Brian Eno

Cover of *Brother Juniper Strikes Again* by Fred McCarthy

“In the long run, men hit only what they aim at.”
—Henry David Thoreau

* * *

PS. (2021/03/17):

I took archery in high school because it wasn’t a team sport. I liked some of the team sports, but No one else to blame. I wanted to see what I could do. I learned to aim high. Aim above the target. Aim just there! Relax. Let go. If you aimed right, you hit the bull’s-eye. I saw positive obsession as a way of aiming yourself, your life, at your chosen target. Decide what you want. Aim high. Go for it.

— Octavia Butler, “Positive Obsession,” Bloodchild and Other Stories