Bestselling author Shelby Van Pelt, whose novel Remarkably Bright Creatures has captivated readers around the world and is now a Netflix film, spoke with WBOI's Brianna Barrow about her writing process, what the movie got right about Marcellus the octopus, and why she believes books are a magical shortcut to deeper friendships.
Brianna Datta-Barrow: Today we are joined by best-selling author Shelby Van Pelt, whose debut novel, Remarkably Bright Creatures, captured readers' hearts with its unforgettable characters, its humor, and its humanity. Shelby, thank you so much for being here.
Shelby Van Pelt: My pleasure. Thanks for having me.
Brianna Datta-Barrow: Yeah, it's great to have you with us. So, what brings you to the Hoosier State?
Shelby Van Pelt: Well, I am doing a book talk today up in Kendallville, and it's actually, I've been doing a lot of these this spring. I've been doing a lot of events promoting the film that just came out, and this is like my last book event for the next few months, so it's kind of like it's a little bittersweet. I love doing these things, but yeah, it's going to be really good,
Brianna Datta-Barrow: I'm sure. It's a little kind of, maybe weird is maybe the wrong word, but it's probably pretty cool to have something that was just an idea in your mind now being widely consumed by readers and getting to connect with them at events like the luncheon that you're doing in Kendallville today. What's that like?
Shelby Van Pelt: Oh, it's absolutely weird. Yeah, I mean, you know, I can pinpoint specific scenes that I wrote. It's like I remember I was sitting at my kitchen table when I wrote that, you know. And then to see it on the page published is one thing, and you know, go to all these events around the country and talk about it, but then it's like another level when it comes out as a film and you see it on screen,
Brianna Datta-Barrow: Which I did just watch last night, and it did bring me to tears, which, you know, it's like fun when you turn on a movie, you're not really expecting a movie about an octopus to bring you to tears, and it did. It was amazing. And so, what are the major differences between the movie and the book for you?
Shelby Van Pelt: Well, so I feel like the movie did a really good job of, like, sticking to the major plot points. There's not a lot of big plot difference between the book and the movie, but I think where they diverge is that there's just a lot more detail in the book, so there's a lot more like backstory on the characters, and a lot of that is like streamlined in the movie, which it kind of has to be to fit in, you know, an hour and 45 minutes.
Brianna Datta-Barrow: Is there anything that the movie really got right that you were like, yes, like that you just saw it really come to life out of the page on screen?
Shelby Van Pelt: Well, they got the characters right, definitely, and that was so much more important to me than you know. Is this scene for scene the same as the book? You know, they can have a lot of leeway, I think, with some of those minor plot points, if they get the characters right, and they absolutely did.
Brianna Datta-Barrow: I loved Marcellus' character. What was it like to write from the perspective of an animal narrator?
Shelby Van Pelt: Well, Marcellus is so fun because he contains multitudes. He really does, you know. He, on the one hand, is this classic curmudgeon, you know, he's a giant Pacific octopus who's in captivity, sort of against his will, so in his mind he's like in prison, you know, this is just, and he's counting down the days until the end of his quote unquote sentence, which in his mind will be like his death, he's an old octopus, so he's sort of at the end of his lifespan, and he knows that, and so he kind of has this like a grumpy old man thing going on, where he's just has an opinion about everything, and you know this is his life. He just observes the humans that go by on the other side of the glass, and kind of, you know, sits there and makes these snarky comments about them.
But the other thing that I think is so fascinating about, like, writing that character is that he's also very bored, and he's very curious. He almost can't help but be a little bit curious about these humans that are coming by his tank and are interacting with him, and so there's something almost childlike, I feel like, about him, where he just wants to understand what makes these human beings tick. I think a lot of that came from when I was writing a lot of this book, I had young kids at home, and I had a toddler who was a Y kid wanted to know why this and that and everything, and why do you say this phrase when it's not what you actually mean, and I think I put some of that into this grumpy old man octopus that I was writing, and it gave him, I think, just this kind of depth of, of character, of curiosity that I think is a really wonderful mix.
Brianna Datta-Barrow: It was, and I loved the relationship between him and Tova. I just loved it, and like the little scene where he's pulling his, what are they called, not fins-
Shelby Van Pelt: Arms.
Brianna Datta-Barrow: Arms, yeah, arms into hers in the movie. I was just like; this is so sweet. The scene where she's taking him in the bucket to the ocean last night, I was watching that, and I was just in tears. I was like, oh my gosh, how amazing was Sally Field in that role too? I don't think I had seen her in a movie in a minute, and so yeah, she just knocked it out of the park, as did Cameron, the actor who played Cameron…
Shelby Van Pelt: Yeah, Lewis Pullman.
Brianna Datta-Barrow: Okay, yes, he was fantastic, and yeah, just a great movie, great book. What is your writing process like? That's something that I always find really interesting, because it obviously varies author to author, depending on the story they're telling. But what's yours like?
Shelby Van Pelt: Well, I think it varies author to author. For me, it sort of has its continuing to vary from like project to project. I feel like I'm still sort of learning what my process is, you know.
Remarkably Bright Creatures was my first book, that was really my first attempt to write fiction. Writing fiction is something that I taught myself how to do, for the most part, and so my process is kind of a mess. I would like it to be less of a mess.
I'm trying to actively work on it being a little bit more streamlined, one might say, but in the writing world, sometimes we talk about like plotters versus pantsers, which is an oversimplification, but you know the plotters are the people who have the outline and like the note cards and like they know what their story is going to be before they sit down to write it, they figure that out in advance, and then the pantsers are the people that go by the seat of their pants, and I am much more on the pantser side of that spectrum, not necessarily because I want to be, but because I think that's just how my brain works, so much of the fun and the joy in writing for me is discovering what the story is.
And you know, when I sat down to write Remarkably Bright Creatures, well, I guess when I sat down to write it, I didn't know that I was writing a novel, I was just writing, but when I figured out, okay, I think I want this to be a longer, a longer work, maybe a novel, the only thing that I really knew was that Marcellus was going to get out of that tank and find his home again, find the sea, and I didn't really know anything else about how the plot would work, and I figured it out along the way, and that's really fun.
The downside is that for me, I make a lot of wrong turns, so there's a lot of material on the cutting room floor, metaphorically, that you know, where I went down some thread plot wise, and then realized, hey, this doesn't work, so you know, I, I try to do less of that as I grow as a writer, but I still, you know, even on the writing that I'm doing now, I find myself just drawn to these almost like rabbit holes in my manuscript, and sometimes they really do work out, and that ends up being the story, and sometimes they don't, and it ends up going in, you know, the recycling bin. But yeah, so my process is a little all over the place. It's not very organized, but it is what it is.
Brianna Datta-Barrow: And I imagine that's hard too, because when you're really diving into a rabbit hole, and then you just are like, you have to– I remember my professor used the term "kill your darlings.
Shelby Van Pelt: Yeah, I think a lot of times "kill your darlings" is used on like a sentence level, which absolutely is true, like sometimes you write these really beautiful, like a sentence or a paragraph, and you know, you just, it doesn't fit, it doesn't work, but on like a more macro level, I also sort of feel that phenomenon happen quite a bit, where it's like, yeah, you go down some thread and you just like, oh, I love it here, but it doesn't fit with the plot of the thing that you're trying to write, and sometimes I will work really hard to try to make it fit, and sometimes that works, and sometimes it doesn't.
Brianna Datta-Barrow: And so, you said, with this story specifically, I mean, for one, if I haven't said it already, congratulations on the incredible success. It seems like every writer's dream come true, you know, not only the book being published, but then being made into this incredible film adaptation, and it being your first book, that's pretty incredible.
But you said your writing process started with you only knowing that Marcellus was going to make it back to the ocean at the end, so you didn't have any kind of idea about the family connection that was going to happen between Tova and Cameron when you were writing it. How did that come about?
Shelby Van Pelt: Well, it came about because, well, I knew that I was going to have this friendship between Tova and Marcellus, so Tova is this woman in her 70s who takes a job cleaning at this small town aquarium because she just needs something to do. She has lost her husband, so she's living alone. She had one son who had died many, many years earlier, and that grief sort of is something that she has carried with her for a long time, and she just can't stand to be alone in her house, so she goes and says, "I'm going to go mop the floors at the local aquarium down the street.
And I really based that on my grandmother, my grandma Anna, who I lived next door to growing up. I was very close to her, she was this tiny little Swedish woman that was so sweet, but just so tough and so busy all the time, you know. She wasn't a person who really let you know what she was feeling, like she was not very emotional in that way. She was very stoic. So I kind of based the character of Tova on my grandmother, who my grandmother would go clean church basements, because she couldn't stand to be in her house by herself, so she just had to keep busy, and sometimes she would take me with her when I was a kid, and you know, teach me how to, like, do the baseboards.
So, I knew that that character was going to be in the book, was going to make friends with Marcellus the octopus, because here they are at this aquarium at. At night, when no one else is there, it was like a special time for them, you know, when they could both kind of let their guard down a little bit, you know. Now that all of the hustle and bustle and people are gone.
I think the other storyline that comes in is this young man named Cameron, who's thirty, but he is sort of like a young thirty, you know, he, he hasn't quite figured out how to be a grown-up yet, and he's had a lot of loss in his life as well, and he's, you know, looking for a man who he thinks is his father, who he's never known, and you know, the connection between them is really sort of the quote unquote mystery of the story, both in the book and the film that came about really because I just needed, I think, I started writing this other character, this Cameron character, because I was just like, I need more characters, and then, like, I just figured out, okay, well, these people are going to be connected, how are they going to be connected? And yeah, I really, it was a character-driven process, rather than like a plot-driven process.
Brianna Datta-Barrow: You wrote grief so beautifully and so accurately, and especially for being your first book, I just thought you were so… just so real, while also letting there be some really beautiful moments in there. So, I just loved it.
You mentioned in another article with the Chicago Tribune that one of the things about this whole experience and all your success that has been life changing for you, the one thing you like to do is travel nowadays. Where has been your favorite place to go?
Shelby Van Pelt: Oh my gosh, probably… gosh, New Zealand was pretty cool.
Brianna Datta-Barrow: Okay!
Shelby Van Pelt: We did a trip there, we took our kids, and we did sort of the classic like South Island New Zealand road trip. There are so many more sheep than people in New Zealand, which I love. Yeah, it's just.. it's funny, because you know, we thought that this was like a bucket list trip for me and for my husband, and you know, our kids were probably what they would have been like eight and 10 when we did this. We would be driving by like this majestic glacier, and they're in the back seat, being like, can I hotspot your phone to play my Roblox game?
Like, no, like, come on, like, this is like the most rugged, like untouched, just beautiful coastline, countryside, mountains, sea, like everything, but I'm a big, I'm a big mountain person, and I love it when the mountains and the ocean are like right together, because that's kind of where I grew up, like in Washington State, and I just loved it there so much. I like dream of writing for a season in a little cottage there someday.
Brianna Datta-Barrow: That’s cool though! How else has this whole success with everything, How else has it impacted or changed you?
Shelby Van Pelt: I mean, it has, and it hasn't. I feel like it is. It has changed some of the like nuts and bolts of our daily life.
Obviously, I am spending a lot of time traveling for book events, you know, particularly this. This past spring was very travel intense, with all the movie promo, and my husband has kind of stepped into the role of like being the primary parent, you know, I kind of used to be before all this happened, so we swapped places a little bit, which I think has been really good for both of us. It was kind of entertaining, like just watching him be like, "Oh, dinner, like I have to cook dinner again. I'm like, "Yeah, every night it keeps coming and coming.”
Brianna Datta-Barrow: And never stops.
Shelby Van Pelt: Never stops! But so, you know, it has sort of rearranged our household in some of those ways, but you know, at the same time, I'm just like, I don't know, I'm still doing the same things that I was before, I'm still sitting down at my computer every day, and having good writing days and bad writing days, and eating too much junk food while I write, and it's kind of the same as it was.
Brianna Datta-Barrow: What's your go-to writing snack?
Shelby Van Pelt: I actually, I really have to moderate myself when I get into a zone when I'm writing. I almost don't realize what's going on around me, and so I have like sat and ate an entire like bag of potato chips or like Pirate's Booty, because they're very satisfying to crunch, so I'll be writing, writing, writing, and like chips, chips, chips, and then I look over and the bag is empty, and I'm like, when did that happen? So, I have put it in a bowl now. So, otherwise trying to be more mindful there, but yeah, anything that's crunchy and salty.
Brianna Datta-Barrow: Yeah, whatever sparks the imagination, yeah, whatever gets you going, you know? What is one random fact about an octopus that the average person would not know?
Shelby Van Pelt: Oh, well, there are so many, and I have collected so many of them over the years. One of my favorite things is I'm now part of sort of like the octopus cult, which is really fun, and people online are super into octopuses.
There's like, you know, whole fandoms on Instagram and social media of people that follow octopuses, and people will send me little clips whenever, you know, most recently there was a new octopus that was discovered in South America. A little blue golf ball-sized octopus, and probably 20 people have sent me this article about this, but I love it, because it's like I don't even have to go look for the fun facts, they just kind of come to me now.
But yeah, my favorite one probably is around the way that they are neurologically set up, so you know, you think of all of the intelligent, you know, mammals and vertebrates tend to have, like, a brain, like a big brain, that's what distinguishes them. Octopuses actually do not have, like, one big brain, they actually don't have a central brain, really, at all. Their brain, quote unquote, is spread out among their arms and their whole body, and so, like, each arm kind of has its own little neural system, which means that each arm can specialize and have its own personality.
And there's a really fun meme that gets put on T-shirts and coffee mugs of, like, the multitasking octopus. You might have seen sometimes the octopus is reading eight different books, or like the octopuses in the kitchen, you know, stirring the pasta with one hand and pouring the wine with another hand, and you know, setting the table with another hand, like the things that we dream that we wish we could do, you know, if you had like eight arms.
My favorite part about that meme is that it's actually kind of true, because octopuses do do that, they specialize with their different arms, they can have one arm over here doing one thing and the other arm is over here doing something totally different, and I just think it's cool that I, the people that like originated that meme, I don't know if they knew that or not, but I just think it's very cool that it, it's rooted in fact.
Brianna Datta-Barrow: I never knew that. I knew they were very intelligent creatures, but–
Shelby Van Pelt: Remarkably bright!
Brianna Datta-Barrow: Remarkably bright!
Shelby Van Pelt: They're very, very smart. They have excellent memories. They, you know, recognize people, they make relationships with people, they like some people, they don't like some people. I think if you talk to folks who work in aquariums with octopuses, like, they all have a story about, like, yeah, and this one octopus liked me, and the other one just didn't, and you know, they, they kind of like hold those, those personalities or those opinions over time, for sure.
Brianna Datta-Barrow: Who did voice Marcellus?
Shelby Van Pelt: Alfred Molina.
Brianna Datta-Barrow: And just because I'm curious, because I did a little bit of time with film school stuff, so, how did you guys shoot this? Like, how did you do this? I don't know if you were on set for everything or what your experience with the film was like, but how did they do the scenes with Marcellus?
Shelby Van Pelt: So, I was on set for about a week, which was really fun. So, the Marcellus scenes are a combination, actually, of a real octopus who was at the Vancouver Aquarium. The whole movie was shot up in Vancouver, British Columbia, and they took a lot of footage of an octopus, a giant Pacific octopus named Agnetha, who was living there at the time, and you know, they just kind of had a camera trained on her, try to interact with her, but then just also capture a lot of her like natural movements.
And so Agnetha is in the movie, but as, as I think the producers very quickly learned, you know, you're not going to be able to train an octopus to act for you, so a lot of the Marcellus that's in the movie is CG, but the standard that they held themselves to was they wanted it to look real, they wanted you to not be able to tell the difference between the computer-generated octopus and the actual octopus in the movie, and I have to tell you, I cannot tell the difference, like it's that good, everything that Marcellus is doing in the movie physically are emotions that an octopus actually could make, and they went to, like, the frame by frame level with that. When the visual effects people would, you know, present a scene, they would have, like, backup of, like, okay, well, here's a video of an octopus doing this same thing, so that it would feel real, you know.
Obviously, the narration is sort of the fantasy part, but, you know, the physical movements are all possible, and that's sort of the same standard that I had when I was writing the book. I wanted everything that Marcellus was doing with his physical world to be like something that an octopus could actually do, so it's not, you know, this fantasy in a way of, like, oh, he's, you know, a flying octopus or a talking octopus or anything really, the only suspension of disbelief or of reality is just the internal monologue.
Brianna Datta-Barrow: I guess we'll never really know, because he, you know, who really knows?
Shelby Van Pelt: You don't, you know, it's true. And this is why I feel like an octopus was such a great animal to be this type of character, because there is so much that's not known about them. So, you know, in, in the book, and in the movie, it's like Marcellus can read. I don't know, could an octopus read? We don't know, don't know, we don't know, maybe they can.
Brianna Datta-Barrow: Yeah, and I wanted to know, because it did look so real. I was like, okay, is this CGI? Or am I like... I was just blown away by it.
Shelby Van Pelt: I never know which is what.
Brianna Datta-Barrow: Yeah, is there anything else that you want to talk about? That no one has asked you yet?
Shelby Van Pelt: Oh my gosh, I mean, I'm just so... this is truly my dream job. I feel so grateful to be able to, you know, not only, you know, write a book and have it published, but to be able to like go out into the world and do events like, like the one up in Kendallville today, where I get to meet people and hear some of their stories, and just like watching a community sort of come together around a book is such a special thing, and I feel like I kind of didn't really appreciate that before I got to be sort of on the other side of it, you know?
Just seeing even like to the level of like your local book club, like I think that's such a special thing when people can come together over a book, and I think that books kind of have a magical way of almost being like a, like a shortcut to like deeper friendships, and I know I experienced this with my book club.
It's like we talk about things that never would come up among this particular group of people if we didn't have a book or a story to talk about, and you know, I think in the way that our world is, where it's like, you know, we're sort of disconnected, and everyone's online, and there's like a friendship crisis and a loneliness crisis. I feel like book clubs and community reading events are sort of like the bright spot, the antithesis to that, where it's like, no, people are coming together, they are having these real like vulnerable I amazing, deep interactions, and I think that's my favorite part of this journey, really, has been being able to be a part of so many of those.
Brianna Datta-Barrow: Yeah, I bet that's an incredible feeling to kind of be the spark behind all these connections across the country, like you said, you've been traveling, and I just think that's incredible. And congratulations on everything.
Shelby Van Pelt: Thank you.
Brianna Datta-Barrow: Yeah, I'm like, I want to start a book club this summer now with friends, and guess what we're reading first?
I don't want to pressure you– but I mean, you've already kind of experienced every writer's dream, but no pressure, what is next for you? What are you working on?
Shelby Van Pelt: Yeah, I mean, I'm working on a second book, it's not quite done yet, it's getting there, but it's been such a different process, you know?
When I was writing Remarkably Bright Creatures, I truly never thought anyone was going to read it, and that's not just me being like trying to be humble, like I, you know, the odds in publishing are just like not in your favor for a debut novelist. There are so many great books that get written that sort of… languish because the person can't find an agent, or even if they do find an agent, the dies on submission, they can't find a publisher, and so it's a steep road that you're looking to climb when you're undertaking this, this, this process.
And so, I remember I would just kind of tell myself that when I was sitting there, and I would be stuck, and I'm like, okay, well, this is ridiculous, like this octopus is like doing this thing, and oh, this is so, this is so silly. I'm like, whatever, no one's ever going to read it, Shelby, just write it. And now I can't really say that to myself, because people are going to read it whenever this next book comes out, like I'm sure people will read it, and so I have to really kind of get out of my own way when I sit down to write and stop thinking about what are people going to think about it and just try to write the story that I want to write, and that can be in some ways more challenging than it was the first time around. I think there's a freedom in that, not knowing how the whole of this works.
Brianna Datta-Barrow: You know, I've never really thought about it like that, because it's just so vulnerable, you know what I mean? Just putting your work out there, and then after you had all this acclaim, now people have these expectations that your're kind of going against, and so, yeah, I imagine that's pretty, pretty difficult, but I know whatever you put out next will be incredible.
Shelby Van Pelt: Yeah, I mean, I really like the story, it's... I've had a few false starts, but you know, the book that I'm working on now, I really like it. It's a Midwest book, which I'm super excited about, because, you know, I live, obviously, in Illinois now. I spent a few years in my 20s living in Ohio, so some of these places are, you know, Remarkably Bright Creatures was sort of written about the place where I grew up, my sort of my always home, like that will always be home, home, but I've lived a lot of different places, and I'm excited to bring some of those experiences into future books.
Brianna Datta-Barrow: Well, we can't wait to see what you have in store. Thank you so much for being so generous with your time today. We appreciate it.
Shelby Van Pelt: Always happy to support Public Radio.
Learn more about the book, Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt, which is available on Amazon and in select bookstores.
The film adaptation of Remarkably Bright Creatures is available on Netflix.
