Remarkably Bright Creatures
Remarkably Bright Creatures
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Summaries & Analyses
Author Insights
NEWQuizzes
NEWReading Tools
Shelby Van Pelt on Remarkably Bright Creatures
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A video, a classroom, and a character who wouldn’t waitThe whole book traces back to a single clip watched online. Van Pelt had only just begun trying to write fiction when she stumbled on footage of a giant Pacific octopus attempting a daytime escape in full view of visitors, and the image of an animal that smart trapped in that situation lodged itself immediately as a character problem worth solving.
The idea of a snarky octopus came to me after seeing a video on the internet of a giant Pacific octopus trying to escape its tank – right there, in broad daylight, with tons of people around. This was a few years ago, when I was just starting to write fiction, and I thought, wow, that octopus must be so frustrated with its human ‘captors.’ What a fun character that would make.
The octopus became a real character in a real class before it became a novel. When an instructor in her first-ever writing course asked the group to write from an unusual point of view, Van Pelt put down the pages that would eventually anchor the book’s opening chapter. She had no plan for a novel at that point, only a voice.
The paragraphs I scrawled out in that classroom eventually became the first chapter of RBC.
Years passed between that first classroom draft and a finished manuscript. When she finally committed to completing the book around 2019, the motivation was less about publication than about proving something to herself, at a moment when she needed the proof.
It was at a time where I just felt like I needed to write it. I needed to say like, I’ve finished a book, even if it goes in a drawer. [paraphrased from audio]
How she wrote it
Eight years, one accountability partner, and a timeline that fought backThe book’s long gestation came down to a trap Van Pelt describes as characteristic of inexperienced writers: she polished the opening chapters endlessly instead of pressing forward into the story she didn’t yet know how to tell. The bulk of the novel was finally drafted in about nine months after she made a weekly page-exchange pact with a writing partner in 2019.
By one measure, it took about eight years: way back then, I had the idea, wrote some scenes. But then, like the rookie that I was, I spent the next several years repeatedly revising those first few chapters.
Marcellus’s chapters are headed with his day count in captivity, a structural device that turned into the book’s most technically punishing problem. Every time Van Pelt moved a scene, the count broke, and the repair work spiraled.
Managing the timeline made me want to pull my hair out. I’m sure my editor was exasperated with me by the end, as well. I kept tinkering, moving things around, and throwing off the day count. I don’t think I’ll ever write another novel built around a format of specific days or dates!
Writing Marcellus required two separate research tracks running simultaneously. Van Pelt drew on Sy Montgomery’s nature writing and direct aquarium observation to make his physical behavior accurate, then consulted marine biology contacts to catch her mistakes. Once his body was grounded in fact, she gave herself full creative latitude for everything inside his head.
I took kind of two different tracks with it. I wanted to make sure that all of his physical actions were extremely believable. And then the sort of interior monologue is really where I let my imagination run with it and had a lot of fun coming up with the voice. [paraphrased from audio]
Tova, the novel’s other anchor, resists looking backward, and that temperament ruled out an obvious structural tool. Van Pelt could not rely on flashbacks to deliver the history of Tova’s losses, because the character herself simply would not stop to indulge them.
Tova, frankly, is just not a person who’s going to spend a lot of time sitting around, ruminating about the past, even in her own internal monologue. So that was definitely a challenge to figure out how do I impart this information...without having to do the flashbacks. [paraphrased from audio]
Earlier drafts tried to solve the story’s quietness with external incident: fires, car crashes, a stretch that played as a murder mystery. Van Pelt eventually diagnosed what those additions actually signaled about the manuscript’s real weakness.
I found the urge to put something like that in when it felt like we needed more drama. But what I needed to do was go back and make the emotional stakes higher rather than adding a car crash.
The personal thread
A grandmother she never said goodbye toTova Sullivan, the novel’s seventy-year-old protagonist who cleans an aquarium alone each night, was drawn from life. Van Pelt’s late grandmother supplied not only the temperament but the specific quality of self-sufficiency that makes Tova both admirable and sealed off from the people around her.
Tova is loosely based on my late grandmother. Like Tova, she was a tiny Swedish woman who was as sweet as she was stoic. Emotionally inscrutable. Everything was always just fine. She kept herself busy, always.
The novel’s central emotional argument, that it is possible to wait too long to let people in, was not abstract for Van Pelt. Her grandmother died in 2015, while the book was still unfinished, and the distance between them in her final years became material the fiction could not sidestep.
My grandmother, the one who inspired my main character, Tova…I never actually said goodbye to her. My failure to take time from my busy twenty-something life to spend more time with her before it was too late is a regret I’ll always live with.
Writing Tova through years of revision had an unexpected side effect. Van Pelt found herself composing arguments for why the character needed to open up, and then recognizing that the same arguments applied to herself.
I think one thing that I realized about myself when I was writing the book was that I’m also a little bit like her in that...I find it difficult to sometimes just share pieces of myself or be vulnerable and authentic with people. [paraphrased from audio]
On craft choices
One-way missives and the limits of a photocopierMarcellus’s chapters take the form of journal entries addressed outward, a device that Van Pelt arrived at after trying other approaches that gave him too much social company. The final format required her to cut off any possibility of reply, because the point was the sending, not the receiving.
I realized I needed his communications to flow one way to reflect his loneliness.
The one-way format had a literary model. Van Pelt conceived Marcellus’s missives against the backdrop of a science fiction archetype, which gave the device an emotional logic beyond simple diary-keeping.
a lone figure on a faraway planet, sending missives to whoever might be able to receive them, just hoping to connect on some level.
Van Pelt gave Marcellus considerable physical agency in the novel, letting him slip out of his tank and move through the aquarium after hours. She tested the limits of that premise carefully, and when she considered a scene involving office equipment, she found the natural stopping point.
That was too far — He wouldn’t be able to clear a paper jam.
What she wants us to sit with
Stuck is not the same as finishedThe three characters at the center of the novel, Tova, Cameron, and Marcellus, inhabit entirely different circumstances and generations, but Van Pelt built the book around the idea that they share an identical condition. That parallel was the organizing principle she returned to when talking about what the book is for.
The struggles that they’re going through are so similar, even though they’re in different generations and very different life circumstances, and even different species if we’re talking about, you know, Tova and Cameron and Marcellus, all kind of being on the same journey, even though it looks very different at first blush. [paraphrased from audio]
Van Pelt was deliberate about which phase of grief the book inhabits. Tova’s son Erik drowned thirty years before the novel opens, and her losses have long since calcified into the structure of her daily life. That distinction, between raw grief and grief that has become a person’s entire architecture, was the emotional territory Van Pelt set out to map.
I wanted to write about what it’s like to live with grief — not what it’s like when it’s fresh.
Marcellus begins the novel with frank contempt for the humans around him and ends it having genuinely invested in their fates. That arc was the one Van Pelt found most freeing to write, because stepping outside a human perspective let her say things about human behavior that a human narrator could not deliver with the same force.
There’s something really freeing about sort of shedding the human perspective. Once you step outside of humanity, you can comment on humanity a little bit more thoughtfully, which is exactly what Marcellus does. In the story, he almost holds the humans to a higher standard than we hold ourselves to.
The book’s hopeful ending was not a commercial calculation. Van Pelt wrote the final half of the novel during the first months of the COVID-19 lockdowns, cut off from her home state of Washington and from family. The story’s warmth was partly how she survived the period.
I wrote much of the book, particularly the last half, during the early months of the pandemic and, well…I’m not sure I ever considered it ending any other way. Some of my pre-pandemic short fiction is darker, but RBC couldn’t have been a dark story. It had to be happy and hopeful.
The message she wants readers to carry out is also the one she needed to write her way into. Change is available, she argues through all three characters, even after decades of the same pattern. Readers have written to tell her the book opened conversations they had been unable to have before, which is about as close as a novel can get to proving its own thesis.