Zitat des Tages von Octavia E. Butler:
I have a huge and savage conscience that won't let me get away with things.
I began reading science fiction before I was 12 and started writing science fiction around the same time.
No... a novel is a long business. I'm a slow writer, even when I'm doing very well I write slowly.
I wanted to write a novel that would make others feel the history: the pain and fear that black people have had to live through in order to endure.
A workshop is a way of renting an audience, and making sure you're communicating what you think you're communicating. It's so easy as a young writer to think you're been very clear when in fact you haven't.
Fantasy is totally wide open; all you really have to do is follow the rules you've set. But if you're writing about science, you have to first learn what you're writing about.
Religion is everywhere. There are no human societies without it, whether they acknowledge it as a religion or not.
Writing has been as difficult for me as for people who don't like to write and as little fun.
I took classes taught by an elderly woman who wrote children's stories. She was polite about the science fiction and fantasy that I kept handing in, but she finally asked in exasperation, 'Can't you write anything normal?'
People have the right to call themselves whatever they like. That doesn't bother me. It's other people doing the calling that bothers me.
With a disaster like global warming, it's too late to worry about when it's looming except to figure out how to adapt to it.
I recognize we will pay more attention when we have different leadership.
The norm is white, apparently, in the view of people who see things in that way. For them, the only reason you would introduce a black character is to introduce this kind of abnormality. Usually, it's because you're telling a story about racism or at least about race.
Writing is one of the few professions in which you can psychoanalyse yourself, get rid of hostilities and frustrations in public, and get paid for it.
Religion kept some of my relatives alive, because it was all they had. If they hadn't had some hope of heaven, some companionship in Jesus, they probably would have committed suicide, their lives were so hellish.
I had a long period of writing what I think of as 'save the world' novels. 'Fledgling' was a chance to play.
Getting your writing criticized can be a lot like getting skinned, and you respond to it just as enthusiastically.
What I'm working on now - I'm back to fantasy, although considering that it's me, I'm turning it into a kind of science fantasy. It's a vampire story - but my vampires are biological vampires. They didn't become vampires because someone bit them; they were born that way.
I wasn't trying to work out my own ancestry. I was trying to get people to feel slavery. I was trying to get across the kind of emotional and psychological stones that slavery threw at people.
The lovely thing about writing is, well, two things. One, writing fiction allows us to bring an order to our lives that doesn't exist in real life. And two, it allows us to create human characters that we know better than we will ever know anyone in real life.
Third, for people who aren't doing it already, take classes - they're worthwhile. Workshops or classes - a workshop is where you do actually get feedback on your work, not just something where you go and sit for a day.
Most of us don't have to worry about being shot if we poke our noses outside. So we are comfortable, but the people I'm writing about are definitely not comfortable, and being shot while they're still inside is a good possibility.
No, I think the future of humanity will be like the past, we'll do what we've always done and there will still be human beings. Granted, there will always be people doing something different and there are a lot of possibilities.
Most vampires I have discovered are men for some reason. I guess it's because of Dracula; people are kind of feeding off that.
I was attracted to science fiction because it was so wide open. I was able to do anything and there were no walls to hem you in and there was no human condition that you were stopped from examining.
Science fiction let me do both. It let me look into science and stick my nose in everywhere.
Science fiction frees you to go anyplace and examine anything.
Simple peck-order bullying is only the beginning of the kind of hierarchical behavior that can lead to racism, sexism, ethnocentrism, classism, and all the other 'isms' that cause so much suffering in the world.
So fantasy was fine early on, and when I discovered science fiction, I was very happy with it, because my first interest in science fiction came with an interest in astronomy.
I was raised Baptist, and I like the fact that I got my conscience installed early.
I just knew there were stories I wanted to tell.
Well, writing was what I wanted to do, it was always what I wanted to do. I had novels to write so I wrote them.
Once you grow past Mommy and Daddy coming running when you're hurt, you're really on your own. You're alone, and there's no one to help you.
The thing about science fiction is that it's totally wide open. But it's wide open in a conditional way.
When I was between 2 and 3 years old, I got to know my first non-human being. The non-human was a cocker spaniel named Baba. We weren't friends, Baba and I, nor enemies. He wasn't my dog. He belonged to the people my mother worked for, and he lived in the house with them and us.
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. That's why I say one of the most valuable traits is persistence.