Your Effort is Required

So be it! See to it!

“I shall be a bestselling writer.” An image of the inside cover of Octavia Butler’s spiral-bound notebook, circa 1988, circulated through the digital ecosystem of Substack Notes for several weeks earlier this summer. Covering the Manila yellow cardstock is a manifestation in Butler’s scrawl, announcing to herself (and now — thanks to the trifecta of hindsight, an archive, and digital dissemination — to millions of posthumous onlookers) that this is her life: writing bestselling books. Two-thirds of the way down the page, stacked atop each other, centered and underlined, two phrases leap to the fore: “So be it!” “See to it!”

The notebook of Octavia E. Butler, notes on writing, “I am a bestselling writer … ” 1988. Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens. © Estate of Octavia E. Butler.

Getting an intimate glimpse of an artist’s unmoderated yearning for success is entrancing on its own, but these two lines, working in collaboration with each other, set Butler’s manifestation ringing across the decades. The first line acts as a prayer, an invocation of fate. And with the second line, Butler reminds herself (and shows us) that your effort is required to turn your dreams into a reality.

But how to do it?

One of the most astounding myths of modernity is that success comes from doing everything, everywhere, all at once. But truly successful stories come from doing one thing at a time. Aesop’s most well-known fable teaches this: Slow and steady wins the race. I’ve learned this myself over the past year. You can triage; you must plan ahead, but ultimately, you can prioritize only one thing at a time. After all, that’s what a priority is: the single most important thing at a given time; priority does not share space and ought not to be pluralized.

Consistent readers of Scremes Report may have noticed that I have been writing more minimally in this newsletter over the past few months — your weekly Datebook and monthly Syllabus Scremes, but not much more. There’s a very good and very simple reason for that: my priority has been elsewhere. I’ve alluded to this once or twice since starting this newsletter, but now feels as good a time as any to officially announce that I’ve been writing a novel. Between the summer of 2023 and the end of 2024, my progress was haphazard and incremental. But one Sunday morning in early November last year, upstate with my best friend, walking in the cold winter light of the Berkshires, I realized that I was a frequent visitor in the world of my fiction, but I needed to be an inhabitant.

My friend turned to me and asked me to imagine my life a year from that day. All those things that feed your ego have been stripped away, she suggested, but you’ve achieved one goal. What is it?

I hope everyone gets to experience the bodily thrill that comes with a question like this when the answer is known immediately and intuitively. The question seems to — like an electrical current traversing its prescribed circuit — zip from the hard cranial upper through the ribs to the lower soft body, where the synapses of the gut flash to life, thrilling at being asked to decide, and back to the brain. That’s how I imagine intuition anyway.

I said without hesitation, “I’ll have sold my book.”

Highly recommended locale for a life-altering revelation.

And so within six weeks, I systematically closed the loop on all of my responsibilities that were pulling focus from the one true priority I wanted to place above all: writing. The movers came and took away the furniture and objects that were mine to some warehouse in New Jersey that I’ll never be able to visit and which I pay $163 a month for. I gave up Nowadays and Hart Bar and Clando and traded them for winter walks through adolescent streets.

I learned to say no. By which I mean, I learned to ask again and again: does this serve my ambition? To do one thing at a time. And I was tested. Vague opportunities that might have generated some future potential for partnership or equity that I previously would have entertained even to their likely conclusion of fizzling out, I turned down. Nights out, happy hours, weekends away — no, no, and no. Instead, I set about employing my effort in service to my chosen priority.

Yes, of course, I still have to work, but by taking the leap backwards from what many people do and ending (for now) a 5-year-run of working freelance, I managed to win time for myself. I traded invoicing and self-employment taxes for a time clock and free vision & dental. More importantly, I traded in the reply for “what do you do?” from a vague amalgam of digital economy buzzwords (“brand strategy,” “creative consulting,” “experiential marketing”) to the concreteness of “I’m writing a book, and I’m selling wine.” As winter turned to spring, I began to see the effects of my effort; where I had pruned, something was unfurling into bloom.

Following the year and a half of haphazard progress on the novel leading up to that fateful walk upstate, I managed to produce a full first draft with five more months of dedicated effort. I walked daily, taking myself and my laptop often to the coffee shop 12 blocks away to write. I installed Opal and blocked Instagram. I deleted my Facebook entirely and deactivated Twitter. Very few people were emailing me. I finished up a couple of design projects for existing clients quickly and took on no new work. As another brilliant writer, Virginia Woolf, wrote in her diary a hundred years ago, “how entirely I live[d] in my imagination; how completely depend[ed] upon spurts of thought, coming as I walk, as I sit; things churning up in my mind and so making a perpetual pageant, which is to be my happiness.” Nothing is won without sacrifice — of this, I have become entirely certain. To gain the thing you most want, you must give up distractions, even those you enjoy. You must trade in (at least for a time) circumstantial happiness for generative happiness — that abiding pleasure won by one’s own creative output.

In her spiral-bound notebook, Butler’s personal manifestation records in detail what she wanted from her writing career: This is my life. I write bestselling novels. My novels go onto the bestseller lists on or shortly after publication. My novels each travel up to the top of the bestseller lists and they reach the top and they stay on top for months (at least two). Each of my novels does this.

Every guide to spiritual manifestation will recommend articulating your desire with this level of specificity. The spiritual element of the manifestation is Butler’s “So be it!” The intentional element is “See to it!” Sandwiched between that first instance of “So be it! See to it!” and its first repetition, she writes: “I will find the way to do this.” For Butler, ‘this’ = writing novels that top the bestseller lists and stay on top for weeks on end. For me, ‘this’ = selling my first novel the year I’m 29. I argue that the way to do ‘this’ (whatever your ‘this’ is) is by doing one thing at a time.

It can be easy for creative people of all stripes to continually dream up new ideas, both for creative projects as well as for the life outcomes the success of those projects could engineer. I suspect (and hope) that as one’s creative career develops, it becomes easier to stack projects atop each other. But in the early stages, ask yourself what my best friend asked me on that winter morning walk: “If, a year from now, all of the trappings of your life — all the ego, the aesthetics, the social sparkle — are gone, but you’ve achieved one thing, what would that be?” I believe that sometimes what it takes to get to a place of clarity in focus is that level of rigor. To focus not on a dozen goals, not on five, not even on two. One thing at a time.

We have the benefit of hindsight to know that Octavia Butler did indeed become a bestselling writer (albeit posthumously). The very next book she published after Imago was The Parable of the Sower, which became Butler’s bestselling and most widely discussed book, even outside of speculative fiction circles. Whether she would say doing one thing at a time was the key or not is out of reach for us to know now, as Butler passed in 2006, but I am grateful for that trifecta of hindsight, an archive, and digital dissemination for bringing me face-to-face with Butler’s words. They’ve become a mantra for me, and I hope they will for you too. Whatever it is you’re dreaming of achieving: So be it! See to it!

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Coda of acknowledgement: I think I do nothing alone. This essay is no exception. Thank you to Jane Drinkard, for her thoughtful edits. Subscribe to Jane at Saturn Returning.