Episode 14: Elyse Russell Interview

November 27, 2021

The Writers Triangle

00:00 / 00:41:28

Hello Cinnabar Moths or any kind of moth you’d like to be. Today we are here with Elyse Russell, author of the comic Sentience and the short stories Pan and Prism, both of which are included in our winter anthology, A Cold Christmas and the Darkest of Winters. Elyse, welcome to the writers triangle. It’s a pleasure to have you today. How are you doing?

Great. How are you?

I’m doing quite well. I’m excited to be interviewing you today.

Thanks. I’m excited, too.

Happy to have you. And so today, what we’re going to be talking about is a topic that I find very interesting. And I hope our listeners find it interesting as well, is the concept of show and don’t tell. It’s something that’s talked about a lot, but is rarely truly explained in writing. And so we asked at least to join us today, because it’s something that we feel that she does masterfully, and I’d like to demonstrate that with just reading a line from the short story Prisms as an example. So, here it is. Ren rang the doorbell again, and listen to echo through the 100 year old house. So this one line for me, it transports me to an old decrepit building, it’s empty, and the doorbell ringing echoes throughout the entire house. And for me, this is an example of the showing and not telling by not telling me how to feel or think about the house or even creating all the imagery for it and leaving room for me to explore it myself. That to me is kind of the essence of show not tell. For you, Elyse, what would you say is the essence of show not tell? And how do you do it so well?

Well, I mean, it’s one of the first things they tell you in any writing class. But to me, show don’t tell is more about feeling. Writing teaches empathy. I say that frequently. But it’s about showing what you’re feeling. Tell me what you’re feeling so that I can feel it too. So it’s, it’s really about what, why do we tell stories? We tell stories to have someone feel something they’ve never felt before. So you can pretend, pretend you’re trying to describe an emotion that someone’s never heard of, never felt. And if you just tell them, I’m sad, it’s not going to make an impact. You have to lead them to it and make them feel it themselves. So that that line… I’ve always been very interested in having surroundings, architecture reflect the inner state of the characters. Ever since I read The Fall of the House of Usher, Edgar Allan Poe, and it’s the decay in the house is crumbling around them as the family falls apart, and that the character that’s inside the house is as empty as the house at that moment. If that makes sense?

Yeah, that does make sense. And so for you, you kind of use the the setting – or you attempt to use the settings and enjoy using the settings to represent emotional states as well as the characters themselves.

Yes.

Would you say this process of empathy and showing and leading and kind of breaking down emotion to somebody that they might not have experienced before – would you say came naturally? Or did you have to work at it? What’s kind of that process for you?

I learned it as I grew older. I mean, I definitely did a lot more telling in my high school writing. But I think as you as you grow up, and you experience more things, it becomes easier to describe them to others. Empathy is learned. It’s not – I mean, you can have an inherent tendency toward empathy, but it’s definitely a learned skill.

Yeah. And so you’d say for you the, your capacity for being able to do this has improved, based off of the life experience that you’ve gained and the experiences of dealing with different people, different situations and repeatedly experiencing certain emotions as well as kind of increase the depth of your empathy and your ability to express in your writing.

Definitely, yeah, Once you, when you see someone going through something, and you’re paying attention, and you see the physical tells… you remember that as, as a writer who is detail oriented. And you can, you can then use that to describe characters. Like if someone’s, if someone’s going through depression, and you know, they just are in a state of not caring, they, they might have greasy hair because they haven’t showered because they’re in a, in a void. Or if someone’s angry, they might accidently break something or I don’t know. But it’s – things they do, and the things around them that can really show that to a reader, I think.

And so a key part of that is conveying the not just the the characters, but the world around them to the readers. And that’s something that I personally have actually struggled with, with conveying the world of my book Pixies in the Mist to the readers is this big thing in the in the book called the mist, and I struggled to really get that across for a while, and I end up having to resort to the four senses as – inviting my character’s sensory experiences as the only method I could really figure out for myself. I feel like your writing is a lot more nuanced in that you don’t just write the sensory experience when showing you’re not tying the also create these very good, expressive emotional spaces and emotional scenes with them that feel authentic, and show the reader how a character’s feeling without saying it expressly. And, and something I want – and as example, I want to draw from Prisms, again, is the line, “she let out a shuddering breath and ran her hand over her face”, which I think ties into what you’re just talking about with the kind of physical cues of emotion. And so I wanted ask you, how do you think of these moments? Or how do you create them? Is it purely from just drawing from experience what you’ve seen? Or are there other methods that you do that use?

Um, well, there’s, I don’t think there’s anything wrong, by the way, with the drawing from the senses to show not tell Everybody’s got their own methods. And it’s what makes it fun to read stories from different people, for me. I’m sorry, could you ask the question again?

Oh, yeah, no problem. So you write these very great emotional scenes where you show a character feeling things and use these physical cues and such. And so I was wondering, how do you think of creating these moments? Or how do you approach creating them? And what’s kind of your process for that?

Well, what’s fun about writing is I can control all of it. So the whole the whole world, I can bend it to… what I want to show with the character with responses to things, there’s a little bit of acting, I guess, in writing sometimes, where you have to get into character, you have to think about how a different personality would approach something like that might not be how I would react, but this person with these traits would definitely react this way. And it can be even just different aspects of yourself. So like, a part of me is really snarky. So if I take that part of me and exaggerate it into a character, snarky me would say something that more reserved me would not say.

Right. Okay, and so for you, it’s, it’s a matter of, you take certain attributes, and you use those as the kind of a cornerstone for a character’s concept?

Yeah. And they can be an amalgamation of just people I’ve known combined with me and… just random events to create something new.

Okay. And so, for that process, you you draw from the people you’ve known the people you’ve met yourself and things you’ve witnessed. And all of that to kind of combine into creating these characters and creating these moments. And how would you, if you were to give advice to our listeners as a sort of crafting tip for this, about accessing these emotional spaces when doing the acting for them, and convene them? Do you have any tips to be able to kind of get into that mental mode, so to speak?

Don’t feel like you have to do it all at once. You can come back to the story when you’re in a different mood, if you want to. And you can have different thoughts. And sometimes just, you get random ideas throughout the day, you write them down, and you can work on them later. It doesn’t have to just be sit down and you tell the story. The story forms in your head, as you’re living, I guess.

Okay, so it’s good advices to let people not kind of lock – don’t lock yourself into thinking the story has to be all one way exactly how you thought of it that one time, rather let it be a bit more flexible and live with you. And live with the new ideas and new headspaces that you end up being in as you go through your day and go through your life.

Yes, you put it far more succinctly than I did. Thank you.

I think that’s a that’s a helpful tip. And there’s something that I’ve didn’t think of but I have done myself is coming back to my writing and being like, you know what? This character makes sense to me with how I’m feeling right now. I totally understand how I can write this characters interaction, because I’m in just a different mood, and how I’m looking at the world’s just that little bit different that kind of unlocks it for me.

Yeah.

So I definitely, you brought to mind something that I realized I was doing that I didn’t realize I was doing so yeah, I definitely do agree that taking some space can often help with remembering your story, in a sense.

Yeah. Yeah, it’s less like if you sit down and you’re like, I have to write this whole story, rightt now. It’s gonna come out a little bit more robotic, maybe not, maybe that’s your process. But for me, it’s not going to feel as real as if I’m, you know, I’ve got a random idea for a blog, well, I’m doing the dishes or whatever. So I’ll write it down. And then I’m really mad. So I come back, and I write a really angry character.

Sounds like it’s kind of a throughout the day process for you writing style.

I’m always thinking about it. I lay down at night, and as soon as I close my eyes, I’m like, oh, I’ve got an idea. So I keep this notebook next to my nightstand and I just reach over and I just write on it without turning the light on. And then I just have to decipher it in the morning. It’s just everwhere all over itself. So yeah, it’s all the time.

Okay. And so you’re always in that kind of writer’s headspace so to speak.

Yeah, I, I can’t help. It’s just how my brains wired. I was. I’m an only child, I was always alone with books and telling stories to myself since I was a little kid, so

I think it’s definitely can turned out wonderfully because I for one, at least, I’m a big fan of your work. And we at Cinnabar Moth are fans of your work. And part of what we’re a fan of is the – what’s that?

That’s really weird to hear. I’m still new to this.

Well, hopefully you’ll be able to experience this more and more and become more comfortable with having people with fancy work as you get people reading it.

And I have a hard time accepting compliments and just kind of like the oh, shucks kind of shuffle your feet around round and mumbled something I don’t know how to handle this. Hopefully I get a little less awkward with that.

Well, don’t worry about it. If you feel a little bit awkward. That’s fine. You know, everybody has to go through their own process with just like with writing, right? You have to go through your process of discovering how you want to deal with or what your processes for dealing with compliments. I personally tend to go with the thank you to the person’s face. And then in my head, I think I’m not really that great. So I totally understand not being good at receiving compliments in a way. But going back to the writing thing of, you know, when you’re younger, you end up having to kind of create your own worlds. And you did a lot of storytelling into yourself and that kind of imagination, and exploring your imagination. And you mentioned earlier about the world being completely under your control, you know, you control every aspect of it. And I want to kind of delve into that concept of creating atmosphere. And I want to take an excerpt from Pan, the other short story in the winter anthology. And use it as a reference point when talking about atmosphere. So the line is, “I love cities all you can eat finger licking good to think some of my kind of scared of the cities”. Now without doing any spoilers for the story itself, you can already tell it this has character kind of has a more predatory feel to it maybe a little bit creepy, and creates this atmosphere for talking about that character with that. And when you start to write a scene, do you know what the atmosphere you want to be is before you go into it? Or is it something that you end up having to kind of revisit over time and your living story process you just kind of come back to over and over? What’s your process with creating atmosphere?

Mmm. Well, that story in particular was a bit odd because it was a writing exercise that I created for myself where I was like, let’s see how many different points of view I can have in one story, and how different I can make them. So I wanted to have very distinct voices. So I would, that was actually the very first sentence I thought of not the first sentence of the story at all. But that paragraph was the first paragraph I wrote, because that’s the first character that came to me. And I was like, oh, that’s – that’s interesting. But I think I’m gonna roll with it. I like creepy stuff. Reading atmospheres. It comes in bits and pieces, and it folds around each character. Like I said, I like to have the setting reflect the interstates of each character. And I use, I use color a lot in my stories as well, to represent different things.

Yeah. And so for you for atmosphere, it’s very much rather than atmosphere identity being an informant for itself or the world, you’d rather have the world kind of be shaped around the characters in order to have a more kind of character focused and character driven writing style, would you say?

Yeah, definitely. I mean, there’s there’s the synopsis. And then there’s what the story is really about. And there’s a rare story that I write where I have no underlying message, and I just write it because I think it sounds creepy. But most of them, I have something in mind that I want to convey to a reader. And to make it more understandable, you have to exaggerate it.

Okay, so you go into writing each of these stories with a message of sorts that you want to convey to people. And then you go from there to create the characters that can represent aspects of this message. And then from they go into the atmosphere that shapes around the characters. Would that be accurate?

Yeah, yeah, like a BB in a tuna can. Popcorn.

Okay. And so for that, you have to also express – the characters’ personalities is going to be a major part of that then. And with that comes writing dialogue, right. And so with writing dialogue, it’s very important to be able to clearly understand a character from very little dialogue, because oftentimes, we don’t get to have long backs and forth in writing without kind of bogging readers down. In certain cases. Obviously, there’s cases where that’s not the case. But on average, particularly short stories, you kind of have to cut it a bit shorter, and create that oomph very quickly. And so on to an example from Pam, that I feel, really shows that, and it’s this little bit of dialogue that I that I personally found in enjoyable, and it’s, “Well damn kid. Granny”s got way better shit to do in heaven. Why would she hang around this hellhole to haunt your scrawny myopic ass. Sorry, I’m working on the politeness thing.” And this right away conveys to me a very blunt character who’s kind of naturally rough around the edges maybe doesn’t really respects the person they’re talking to very much. But… do you map out this kind of dialogue? Do you – how – do you like speak to the characters in your mind? What’s your process for creating this dialogue for these characters?

There’s some characters that will say, what I’m actually thinking, you know, there’s there’s… there’s – in every situation, you react to people as politely as you can, usually, but you’re really thinking something else sometimes.

Yeah.

That character was… my inner monologue. Which sounds terrible. I know, you’re gonna read that and think I messed up. But, yeah. Each each character is a different way of reacting to a different situation. And it’s not always obviously, me. Like, there’s, there’s like you said some predatory characters. I’m not thinking that… the city is finger looking good.

Right.

It’s fun to pretend to look at the world in a different way like that sometimes.

Yeah. And explore those different perspectives on the world.

Yeah.

And so for you, when you do these dialogues, you, you kind of choose what filter through which you’re viewing the world as your basis for creating them. Would that be correct?

Yeah, I mean, dialogue is my favorite. I love dialogue. I like challenges where you have to write you know, just a 100 word story, only dialogue. That’s fun. When I’m watching TV shows, I’m not really – explosions are cool, but I’m really paying attention to the moments where it’s just two characters sitting and talking. And then the subtext to what they’re saying. Dialogue is fascinating to me.

So you’d say dialogue is, like far and away your favorite part of the writing process?

Yeah. Yeah, I think the things people say are, I mean, I wrote a story where the the concept was, the world is in darkness, you can’t see anything, lights don’t work anymore. What would people say to each other in the dark? And what people say and what they really mean? unreliable narrators, that kind of thing. It’s just words have always had power. To me as cheesy as it sounds.

I know, I totally understand that. Especially if you spent a lot of your life reading. I think if reading and you know, words have been part of your life your entire time, it’s really easy to feel that connection to how much the way something is said, or the way something isn’t said can influence your perspectives on the world, your perspectives on how other people’s perspectives on the world are, right?

Yeah.

And so that’s kind of like one of the must haves in in thinking about characters and who they are is not only what they say in dialogue to each other, but also what they don’t say, in order to create this kind of more natural flow and dialogue in a – in a story. And so I wanted to ask you, what’s your go to method when trying to decide on this natural form of dialogue for each character?

Oh I suppose I just picture I mean, I take away the entire setting. I pictured them just sitting in a room together. Like a blank, white room and what are they saying? And then you can add in everything else around it, but the words are the most important part.

So your process is strip everything there. Ignore all the other context for now and just think about Face to Face. Okay.

And when people aren’t, when someone’s not saying something, then the setting can come in and fill in for you.

Right. And that the way you do like physical actions or parts of the environment can fill that in for you. But or just when they’re speaking, it’s very direct for you.

Yes. For prose. For comic writing, it’s another story because you have to think about the imagery along with it. But for prose, yes.

And so you have a completely different process for comment writing.

Yeah.

Okay. And so for any writers out there who might be struggling with writing prose dialogue, or even perhaps comic writing dialogue, if you’d like to go into that a little bit, do you have any advice that you’d like to give?

Read it out loud. You would be surprised how many people you find mistakes as soon as you read it out loud. And I do this. Every story, I read it out loud. Quietly, because I’ve never want my children to hear what I’m writing. Yeah, you can find really clunky dialogue like, oh, that sounds funny. When you say it out loud. It sounded okay in my head. But no one would say that. So reading it out loud. Putting it away and coming back to it later. Yeah, those would probably be the two quickest tips. Not that I’m like a professional master of writing or something. I’m not exactly Margaret Atwood here. But

No, no, I think I think the reading out loud tip is a really, really good one that other authors that I know who I have had the fortune of talking to also agree that reading out loud is probably one of the best ways of figuring things out. And I personally have found that when I don’t read things out loud, and I read back over my work it there’s always something a little bit uncomfortable sometimes. And then it’s hard for me to really pinpoint what that thing is until I’ve kind of vocalized it and realized, hey, wait a minute, this is where I start catching on trying to express myself when just trying to read the story to myself. And so I definitely, I do feel that reading out loud and coming back to things can help. Like you mentioned before, like, if you’re in a different mood, you can see things in a different way.

Yes. I would imagine having someone else read your story to you would probably be helpful as well. I don’t, I don’t – noone in my life reads my writing or anything, just online. Um, so I don’t know what that would be like. But I also, since you guys do audiobooks, I would assume that going through and reading your stories and kind of feeling the cadence to each sentence would probably be helpful to whoever’s going to be doing the audio as well, that you kind of think of that.

It would be it is helpful when audio or when the writing is smooth for the narrators. But we work with some very talented narrators for are able to gently speaking catch a flow for themselves, even if some of the writing may be a little bit unusual for them. Like I wouldn’t say that anyone’s writing is necessarily awkward per se, right. But maybe out of the norm for how we might speak for ourselves, right? Even when writing characters, we have characters that totally communicate in different ways, from how we would naturally want to communicate, or think to communicate, and catching that flow and be able to keep up with that as one of the things that we’re really proud to have narrators that we trust and work with that can do that very reliably, even if it’s not their natural communication pattern, right.

Yeah. I apologize to whoever has to read Pan and do that. I’m sorry, but I’m also I’m sure they can do it. knocking her down or anything but I did a lot of voices tend to do.

It’s a lot of characters, but I think the it’ll be a fun project for them. I hope so not not that any spoilers out there on who’s doing anything but yeah, I don’t worry about it. Yeah, I want you to be excited about the results. But I’m not I’m gonna say much more because we don’t do spoilers on the podcast. And instead I want to talk about a little bit with talking about the process of showing and telling when setting the scene and kind of bring things back around a little bit to your advice when it comes to scene setting rather than dialogue, but setting the scene and the show not to process for that.

Well, like I said, it’s, it’s your world, you’re creating it. So everything you choose to put in there can have meaning if you want it to. Um, don’t I don’t like to just throw in descriptions of the landscape if it’s not gonna. If it’s not pelvic characters, because I don’t want to lose anybody. I’d say yeah, I’d like to keep details of setting to St.

Sarah, advice to listeners would be, keep it more focused on. Okay, here’s what I’m going to include and why rather than just including things for the sake of including them?

Yeah, I mean, I’m not gonna knock anyone’s process, take it with a grain of salt. But

When it comes to your process, and how you do it, this would be your method of going about it.

Yes. Every word counts. Make every word count. It doesn’t have to just be filled. That was something, when I was editing, like peer editing, other people’s stories in college. And actually something that my – one of my professors told me was, okay, great story. Now cut it in half. out and I’m like, You’re kidding, right? And then they go and then hybridize the two versions. I’m like, Oh, I can do that. So you have the the ramblings, flowery, whatever you started with, and then you’ve got the bare bones, cut it in half. And you find a happy medium, so that it’s descriptive and fun to read. But it’s also not just a ton of descriptors.

Okay, yeah, that I had never thought of that concept before of cutting it in half, basically make yet stripping it down to the skeleton of sorts. And then, okay, build it back together, but with slightly less.

Yeah, there’s a lot of professors that would say, just cut in half. Like, I don’t like I don’t want to. I don’t want all of this here. But that one, professor. I liked that advice.

Yeah, that resonates with me as well. I have had the experience that you mentioned that the whole Yeah, just cut in half. This is too much. Just take it all away. Like but I’ve worked so hard for this. There’s so much to share. I think that was one of my least favorite things when I was doing writing back in school was the “there’s too much”. I was like, but I wrote – this is so nice. There’s so much to share. There’s so much of the world that I haven’t even explored. And you’re telling me to do less?

Yeah.

And that kind of self restraint. It’s really hard for me on the first draft of anything that I write, and I always have to go back there and be like, Okay, do I really need to go into this now?

You don’t have to have restraint for the first draft anyway.

Yeah, yeah. But then going back, it’s it’s still so it’s so painful for me.

It is it is. I have a story right now that I’m trying to to cut down I have to get rid of 1000 words. So I got to take it out back with a shotgun.

So you said that you’ve been writing for a long time, or you’ve been reading for a long time and telling yourself stories, how long you’ve been writing for, and how long have you been developing or when do you start feeling like you have some confidence about showing not telling see you mentioned before that it’s not something he had a knack for? It’s a learned skill. When you say you started feeling a bit confident about the skill that you’ve learned?

Confident?

Are you saying you’re not confident yet?

I, I suppose I suppose I’m confident about some of my writing skills. Yeah. Um, I have been writing since I was like seven, maybe. And my first story will never ever see the light of day. But I didn’t, I really got into writing when I was in middle school in high school. And I never shared it with anyone. But I just, I had this suitcase, and I would print off everything and just stuff it in the suitcase. And just story after poem after book, cram it in the suitcase. And then I took it to college with me. And when I had to write stories, sometimes I would go back and be like, Oh, I think I can pluck this from here and this from here. So it helped me as like a launchpad as opposed. But, I mean, I wrote my first book, quote, unquote, when I was 16. Because that was my idea of a fun time. Who goes to the beach? Sit in the den with a cat that I wrote before college. And I always thought that when I grew up, I would be, I would be an author. So I, yeah, always been a part of me. And I didn’t actually start pursuing trying to get published until this year.

And so – so for you, it’s, it’s been a long process to kind of get comfortable to try and attempt to be polished and to pursue this sort of lifelong dream of yours.

Yes, definitely. Okay, I don’t know what the catalyst was. But I guess the fear I had just this moment where I was like, You know what, that’s it. I’m gonna, I’m gonna give it I’m gonna give it a go. I’m gonna actually try to submit to places and see what people what people think. And maybe do this. I have little kids. So I didn’t think of it before this, because I think I was just in a state of constant exhaustion. Like the age now where they’re mostly sleeping through the night. So that’s my time to write. I can actually right now. And it’s I’m glad that I made the leap that I have no idea why I did just this year.

Well, we’re certainly glad that you did because we at Cinnabar Moth are enjoying your work, as evidenced by the fact we’re publishing but even aside from that, we’ve been absolutely loving it. And as a thank you for coming on the Writers Triangle. I am aware that you are currently working on a comic series. And so thank you, I was just wondering if you could tell us a bit about it. The the name if you’re querying it, what type of press you’re hoping to find for that type of thing.

Um, I have a couple projects, but the first one is a is a graphic novella. Like a long one shot basically and it has already been accepted with Vanguard. And it will be published sometime in spring called the Fel Witch. And the – creepy. so I’m very excited about that. I’m working with Dani Rivera. She’s the artist. And Miranda Leysin is doing colors and letters, and Nicole D’Andrea is the editor. It’s my Dream Team of ladies. And I’m very much looking forward to seeing that story come to life.

We’re certainly very excited to see more of your stories come to light as they are revealed to the world and come to life in the form of comics with comics that you just was once you decide our comic stories and the ones that you write for that. And for now, though, I like to thank you at least for talking with us. Today and being on the Writers Triangle. And I’d like to thank all of our beautiful mosths for listening. Elyse, could you tell the people where they could find you, and where they could find the Fel Witch, and social media links, and the sort.

Um, follow me on Twitter @bandofbards. So I am Elyse Russell13 on Twitter, bravelittleteapotthoughts, and then there’s band of bards. And they will be putting out announcements on their website, I’m going to be doing another project with them Sentience that you mentioned at the beginning. So those would be the two places to look. I’m going to be putting together a website at some point, but it’s on the list.

Okay. And so, in that case, thank you for coming on today. And be sure for everyone at home to check out these links and visit cinnabarmoth.com to check out the transcripts and we will also have the links to band of the bards as well as to Eyse’s Twitter page for you to find there. For now, though, Elyse it’s been a pleasure talking with you.

Thank you so much.

And I hope that you have a wonderful rest of your day. Bye bye.

You too. Bye.