The first time I saw the page from Octavia Butler’s 1988 commonplace book, I had to put the book down. It is one of the most direct pieces of journaling I have seen from a serious writer. No hedging. No “maybe someday.” Just a list of futures in her own hand, with two short sentences at the bottom that read like a vow.
My books will be read by millions of people! So be it! See to it!
Source: Octavia E. Butler papers, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California – handwritten notes in one of Butler’s commonplace books, 1988. Reproduced in Lynell George, A Handful of Earth, A Handful of Sky: The World of Octavia E. Butler (Angel City Press, 2020).
Butler (1947-2006) was a Black woman writing science fiction in a genre that had almost no Black women in it. She grew up poor in Pasadena, the daughter of a shoe-shiner and a maid. She did not have an MFA or a benefactor or a viral following. What she had was a habit of opening notebooks and writing future-tense sentences as if she were dictating instructions to her own life.
She kept notebooks for more than forty years. After her death they went to the Huntington Library, which now holds the Octavia E. Butler Papers: 10,853 catalogued items across 398 boxes, including manuscripts, research notes, correspondence, and the loose paper she scribbled affirmations on while still riding the bus to her day job. The commonplace books alone are a series of 207, with dates running from 1960 to 2005. What keeps pulling me back is how plainly they declare a future Butler had no rational reason to expect.
What follows are eight lessons I pulled from her journals. They sit comfortably alongside the journaling habits of successful people I keep coming back to, and they sit especially close to one other writer on that list.
1. Use the Notebook to Declare Your Future Self
The 1988 entry is not a wish. Read it slowly. Butler is not asking. She is announcing.
The page sets out, line after line, that her books will be on the bestseller lists – the New York Times, the L.A. Times, the Washington Post, Publishers Weekly. Her books will earn her enough that she does not need another job. Then, at the bottom, in larger handwriting: “So be it! See to it!”
When Butler wrote that, none of it was true. Kindred had sold modestly. Dawn was out but not breaking through. She was still scraping by. The line “So be it! See to it!” was not a victory lap. It was a command issued in the dark.
Most journal writing is past-tense – what happened today, how I felt, what I noticed. Butler shows the other half of the practice. The notebook can be used to declare. Not to predict, not to fantasize, but to put a sentence on paper that the future will have to either match or refute.
I want to be careful here, because this is where writing about Butler usually goes wrong. The page did not cause the career. She wrote it in the middle of years of drafts, research, early-morning writing before paid work, and a great deal of rejection. What the page records is direction. The labour is what moved her.
Try this tonight: open your notebook and write one sentence about your life one year from now in present tense, as if it has already arrived. Sign it. Date it. That is the start.
2. Write Affirmations in First-Person Command Form
Butler did not write “I hope to finish my novel.” She wrote in the imperative.
In one widely reproduced affirmation page, she wrote: “I am a bestselling writer.” “I write bestselling books.” “Every day in every way I am researching and writing my award-winning books and short stories.”
The form matters. First-person, present-tense, declarative. Not “I want to be” but “I am.” Not “Someday I will” but “I write.” The sentence stops being a hope and starts being a description you either live up to or do not.
If this sounds familiar, it should. The pattern resembles the affirmation cards Bruce Lee carried with him, where he wrote out a future of fame and wealth in the same first-person command form a decade before any of it happened. Two very different writers, on opposite coasts, in different decades, reaching for the same grammatical trick. I would not claim they learned it from a common source, because I have no evidence for that. The similarity is still worth noticing.
Try this tonight: take one of your goals and rewrite it three ways. First as a wish (“I hope to…”), then as a plan (“I will…”), then as a declaration (“I am…”). Notice which one your body resists most.
3. Combine the Vision With a Schedule
What separates Butler’s notebooks from a vision board is that the ambition sits next to the work.
Her papers are not only affirmations. The Huntington’s finding aid describes commonplace books that mix working notes, research, journal entries, and notes about daily life. The declaration and the ordinary business of being a working writer share the same books. She kept records, the way most working writers do.
I want to flag what I cannot tell you, because other accounts state it confidently and I could not verify it. I have seen no item-level evidence for a fixed daily quota, a set number of writing hours, or a daybook where she ticked off whether she hit a target. Those specifics get repeated online. I am leaving them out rather than pass them on.
What the archive does support is simpler and, I think, more useful: the ambition and the daily work were kept in the same place, not in separate compartments.
This is the same pattern I keep seeing in Benjamin Franklin’s daily virtue chart – a future self at the top of the page, a row of small daily checks underneath. Different centuries, similar instinct.
Try this tonight: under your present-tense declaration from Lesson 1, write the smallest unit of action it would take to make that sentence true this week. Three submissions. Two hundred words. One phone call.
4. Write Through the Wall of Other People’s Doubts
Butler started writing science fiction in the early 1970s. The genre at that point was almost entirely written by white men, for white men, about white men in space. There were no obvious models for a Black woman writing speculative fiction with Black protagonists. She got rejection slips. She got told her work would not sell. She kept notebooks anyway.
In her essay “Positive Obsession,” published in the 1995 collection Bloodchild and Other Stories, Butler is direct about what this took:
So why aren’t there more Black science fiction writers? Where are they? Why don’t they exist? Why are there so few? … Because such literature seems lacking in incentives. Because Black people don’t read science fiction. (Aren’t we all supposed to read only certain things?) Because there are no Black science fiction writers. (None? Have any of these gatekeepers ever read Samuel R. Delany? Steven Barnes?) Because, because, because.
Source: Octavia E. Butler, “Positive Obsession,” in Bloodchild and Other Stories (Four Walls Eight Windows, 1995).
The notebooks are where she answered those “becauses.” The structural barriers were not in her head. They were real. The agents, editors, and gatekeepers were real. What the notebook gave her was a page where the answer was already settled. On the page, she was a bestselling writer. On the page, she belonged in the genre. The notebook did not change the world for her. It held a steady picture of the future while she went out and did the work.
I do not think Butler was using the notebook to deny reality. She was using it to outlast reality.
Try this tonight: name one external “no” you are absorbing right now – one rejection, one gatekeeper, one cultural message that says this is not for you. Write the opposite sentence in present tense in your notebook. You do not have to believe it. You just have to write it.
5. Repetition Is the Practice, Not the Magic
Butler came back to the same ideas more than once. The Huntington’s exhibition notes that she frequently wrote motivational notes to herself, and the 1988 page is the displayed example.
Here is where I have to be honest about the limits of what I found. It is often said that she copied the same affirmations across many notebooks, five or ten times a page, over many years, in pen and pencil and coloured marker. I could not confirm that at item level. Recurrence in an archive is not the same as a documented ritual, and I am not going to build a method out of a detail I cannot source.
What I take from it is smaller and still worth having. There is a temptation, when we journal, to write a thing once and feel the writing of it has done the work. Returning to the same sentence is how it stays live. That is the practice, and it is the unglamorous half.
Try this tonight: pick one of your declarations and write it out again on a fresh page, without looking at the first one. Notice what you changed.
6. Use the Notebook to Hold Both Discipline and Fear
What I like most about Butler’s notebooks is that the ambition sits alongside the worry. She is not performing confidence on the page. Future-tense declarations share the books with the ordinary anxieties of a working writer’s life. The notebook holds both.
Her most quoted line on this comes not from the notebooks but from an essay of advice she wrote for other writers:
First forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable. Habit will sustain you whether you’re inspired or not.
Source: Octavia E. Butler, “Furor Scribendi,” in Bloodchild and Other Stories (Four Walls Eight Windows, 1995), p. 141.
I find it telling that she chose to say this in public. The advice she gave other writers describes the same negotiation the notebooks show her having privately: write the ambition, then the thing in the way, then the next step. The page absorbed both registers without forcing her to pick one.
This is, I think, the strongest answer to the cynical reading of affirmation journaling. The cynical reading says it is delusion – pretending things are good when they are not. Butler’s notebooks suggest something less tidy. She wrote the declaration and she wrote the difficulty, and she kept working. I cannot tell you the two things balance each other, or that one makes the other effective. I can tell you she did not need to choose between them.
Try this tonight: on the same page as your declaration, write one sentence about what you are afraid will get in the way. Do not solve it. Just put it next to the declaration. Let the two sentences share a page.
7. Put the Declaration Where You Will See It
Butler’s best-known declarations are not tidy documents filed away somewhere. The Huntington’s own teaching material describes her affirmations as often written on scrap paper, or on the back of notebooks, following the loose organisational structure characteristic of her notes.
I originally read this as a deliberate system – the important sentences placed on the covers by design, where the eye lands every time. I do not think the evidence supports that reading. It looks more like a working writer putting the sentence wherever it would be in front of her, on whatever was to hand.
That is arguably the more useful lesson. The declaration is not a keepsake to be beautifully placed. It is a working note, and a working note earns its keep by being seen. Scrap paper counts.
Try this tonight: write one present-tense sentence and put it where you will actually run into it – the first page of your notebook, a card in your wallet, taped inside a cupboard door. Somewhere you have not chosen for how it looks.
8. What Butler’s Notebooks Are Good For
I am not a novelist. I am not going to be on the New York Times bestseller list. But reading Butler changed what I think a journal is for, in the same way Feynman’s “Things I Don’t Know About” habit did.
Three things seem worth borrowing, and none of them requires believing that a sentence can bend the world.
The first is the declaration itself. Writing a future in present tense is uncomfortable in a way that writing a goal is not, and the discomfort is the point. It commits you to something specific enough to be wrong about.
The second is keeping the ambition in the same book as the ordinary work. Separating them turns one into fantasy and the other into a chore.
The third is writing the difficulty down next to the ambition instead of underneath it. Butler’s pages do not read as though she had talked herself out of knowing how hard it was.
What I want to resist is the version of this story where the notebook is a machine and the output is fame. Butler wrote a future on a page in 1988, and then wrote twelve novels, and won a MacArthur, and had a Mars landing site named after her fifteen years after she died. The page is the smallest part of that. It is also the part anyone can copy, which is probably why it travels so well and why it gets overclaimed so often.
The instinct underneath it is simple enough: a notebook is not only a record of who you have been. It can also be a place to say who you intend to be, and then get on with the work.
Butler said it more plainly than I ever could. So be it. See to it.
If you want somewhere to start, my journal prompts and the guide to what to write in a journal will give you a first page.
For another verified affirmation tradition on paper, see Bruce Lee’s affirmations. Identity letters live in future-self journaling; a weekly virtue grid is in the Benjamin Franklin habit tracker.
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Featured image: Octavia E. Butler signing copies of Fledgling, October 2005. Photo by Nikolas Coukouma, CC BY 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons.
