The wall next to my desk is covered in signs and maps. They almost have to.”īutler was also informed by books on craft, and counted The Art of Dramatic Writing by Lajos Egri among her favorites. I think that’s what most fiction writers do. I was going to have to do a somewhat cleaned-up version of slavery, or no one would be willing to read it. As a matter of fact, one of the things I realized when I was reading the slave narrative-I think I had gotten to one by a man who was explaining how he had been sold to a doctor who used him for medical experiments-was that I was not going to be able to come anywhere near presenting slavery as it was. In 1990 , she said of a book thought to be Slave Life in Georgia: A Narrative of the Life, Sufferings, and Escape of John Brown, “It’s not pleasure reading. Sometimes, Butler’s research involved reading primary historical texts, as was the case when working on her 1979 novel Kindred, for which she explored many narratives of slavery. Gradually I learned that that wasn't the way I wanted to write.”
I didn't know what good writing was frankly, and I didn't have any particular talent for writing so I copied a lot of the old pulp writers in the way I told a story.
They were people who impressed me with their ideas. She explained in a 1990 interview, “ I guess the people that I learned the most from were not necessarily the best writers (although Theodore Sturgeon was one of them and I think he was definitely one of the best writers). Some of Butler’s biggest influences in her youth included Ray Bradbury, Theodore Sturgeon, and Robert Heinlein. As she said in a 1996 interview, “I read a lot of science fiction with absolutely no discrimination when I was growing up-I mean, good, bad, or awful.” In notes written in 2001 in preparation for a speech, Butler revealed that her early literary loves were horse stories and fairy tales. She was nurtured by days spent “being read to by my mother and the women at the library-being introduced to reading as fun, not as nasty, but necessary medicine that will make you better someday.”īutler, who said she was inspired to try her own hand at writing sci-fi stories after watching the film Devil Girl from Mars and determining she could craft something better, went on to devour the works of SFF authors. 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.”įrom her appearances, interviews, and archives we know that the below stories and authors shaped different chapters of Butler’s evolution. They don't relate to each other in any particular way, and the ideas they present bounce off one another. Delany at MIT, “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. But she read purely for pleasure as well.Īs she said in 1998 during a discussion with Samuel R. Often, her reading was geared around research for her novels, or for personal projects such as her volunteer work as a literacy tutor. The award-winning writer, who passed away abruptly 16 years ago on February 24, 2006, devoured fiction and nonfiction alike. Butler organized her life around books-and not just her own.
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