HANCEVILLE, Ala. – Best-selling author Shelby Van Pelt visited Wallace State Community College on Thursday, Sept. 24. Earlier this year her debut novel, “Remarkably Bright Creatures” was adapted into a Netflix exclusive film starring Sally Field, Lewis Pullman and Alfred Molina.
“Remarkably Bright Creatures” was published in 2022, and became a New York Times bestseller soon after.
Van Pelt said she finished her book around 2020, but progress slowed due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
She also noted that in 2020, the melodrama and documentary “My Octopus Teacher” was released, raising concerns about whether publishing the book would be wise. One of the main characters in “Remarkably Bridge Creatures” is a Giant Pacific octopus named Marcellus. But after her novel was published, it gained immense popularity – Van Pelt’s publisher described it as “lightning strike luck.”
Van Pelt and her husband moved to Atlanta in the early 2010s when she began to show interest in creative writing.
She said she thought to herself, “I’ve always kind of liked writing. I’ve always been sort of good at writing. Even in the spreadsheet job the part that I was good at was writing up the report – the narrative that went with the model.”
Being fond of fiction, she said, the idea of creating stories for a living, “felt like a life hack.” Then emphasized, “Spoiler alert – it’s actually kind of hard.”
Van Pelt wrote in various coffee shops in Atlanta, writing stories about the people she saw and creating narratives based on them.
“I did a lot of eavesdropping,” she mused. As names were called to retrieve food and beverages, Van Pelt made note of them for possible stories.
One day in 2012 she found herself in a coffee shop watching YouTube, which somehow led to her watching videos of octopuses.
“Some of the videos were of octopuses behaving badly,” she recalled, “Blowing out the light fixtures, escaping their tank and throwing rocks at the glass. And just really having these incredibly complex personalities and doing all these things that seemed larger than life.”
She didn’t know how influential this would be until later, but expressed this was the moment she knew she wanted to write a character that was “larger than life,” just as she was watching on the screen.
Once she and her husband moved into their apartment they still received mail from the previous owners. One day, Van Pelt recalled, she received a catalog from Emory University Continuing Education. The classes were four to six weeks, and one of them was creative writing.
Van Pelt signed up for the class and recalled that on the first day, they were assigned a warm up to ease into the creative mindset.
“Our prompt, our assignment, was to write from an unusual point of view,” she explained. “I thought immediately of this octopus idea I had.”
She said all the students shared their pieces, and the other writers wrote from the perspective of toasters and even mailboxes.
After sharing her story, she said, her instructor told her, “I really liked that. I think you should keep going with that.”
Said Van Pelt, “I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that I wouldn’t be standing up here today had she not said that to me. It was two sentences that changed my life.”
With that, she began drafting what would become “Remarkably Bright Creatures” in 2013. She ended up writing over 300,000 words, which were narrowed down to about 100,000.
The opinionated Octopus Marcellus was born – and the story begins in his diary.
Van Pelt noted that she wanted to consider the perspective and dialog of a unique creature, bored behind glass. “He had no shortage of opinions – almost anything you could think of. If you could imagine yourself trapped behind glass and you’re very bored, very smart, with your only entertainment being the humans going by in front of you – he just had a lot of opinions about human beings.”
Van Pelt put herself in his place while also forming a touching story with main characters Tova and Cameron.
“You can watch the movie!” she exclaimed.
Find out more at https://shelbyvanpelt.com.
