St. Ulphia's Dead

We were delighted to have a virtual sit down with Scott Lambridis, author of St. Ulphia’s Dead, to discuss his creative process, and to share his answers with you.

1. We’ve all heard the advice that authors should “write what they know.” But fiction emerges from imagination and creation of new worlds. Do you feel a tension between what you’ve experienced and what lives only in your mind?

Italo Calvino has a great line in an essay about how, when he encounters an idea he believes is “completely beyond his temperament and technical skills” to write, that’s when he sits down to write it. He knows that writing into the unknown, into discomfort, is the way to get at a richness you just can’t reach through situations, characters, voices, or ideas you’re already familiar with. Sure, familiarity and life experience help bring nuance and authenticity into work, but those are the blood of the work, not the body. I love Calvino’s quote, and try to follow it when I’m brave enough. I think more writers should write what they don’t know.

I don’t really experience that as being in tension with lived experience, though. Lived experience gives you the tangible details, the emotional truth, the contradiction and paradox that make something feel human, and fiction lets you bring order to that chaos and pressure it into asking larger questions. I’m a collector of scenes, moments, images, scraps from life that can be repurposed in fiction such that they carry the authenticity of life better than what can often be completely invented. 

I’m also just drawn to stories that are strange and outside my daily experience. A great many readers pick books they can relate to, and maybe that’s fine if you’re looking for consolation or validation, but I think it’s a trap. For me, the point of reading is to go into the unfamiliar. I avoid books that seem relatable. I want the ones that push my thinking, imagination, and empathy. What’s the point of stories if not to experience lives and situations and ideas beyond yourself?

So yes, there’s a tension, but it’s the productive tension fiction depends on.

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2. Has your education helped you become a better writer?

Absolutely, though maybe not in the obvious ways.

My neurobiology background gave me a deep and ongoing fascination with brain science, consciousness, perception, belief, and the unstable relationship between what we call reality and what we merely agree to call reality. That drives most of my writing, and clearly fed St. Ulphia’s Dead. One of the central tensions in that book is between science or medicine as one of our most secure stories of truth, and lived experience, which has a way of continually exceeding those categories. For example: we as a culture name conditions, and then rely on those names to explain our everyday experiences. When you type it out like that, it starts to sound questionable, doesn’t it? The more I learned, the less interested I became in certainty, and the more interested I became in where certainty breaks down—where naming something starts to feel like one story among several, rather than the final truth. Of course, having a background in neuroscience made it easier to pull in case studies for verisimilitude.

My MFA helped in a very different way. It taught me the old adage of writing a novel to learn how to write a novel. My first book, Hourglasses, was my MFA thesis, and even though I thought it was finished ten times over, it’s still unfinished. It wasn’t until I wrote St. Ulphia’s Dead that I understood why. Hourglasses had wonderful content and a big idea, but it never hung together because I never found the vision—or the way of telling it—that the book required. 

The MFA also forced me, because I wanted to really take advantage of it, to push beyond my comfort zone—new subjects, new voices, new structures, filling up the toolbelt. That ultimately gives you confidence for tackling what’s unfamiliar and uncomfortable. It also sharpens your editing eye. You learn what’s good, often by workshopping other people’s work first and helping them get closer to, as Truman Capote once described it, the orange: something complete, whole, and independent from its creator.

And then there are the little teachings you keep forever. My mentor Peter Orner once emphasized that good characters need to feel like they have blood pumping through their veins. I’ve never forgotten that. Education helped not because it gave me rules, but because it gave me better questions, better instincts, and the courage to write beyond what I thought I could manage.

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3. How do you develop characters?

As I mentioned above, voice comes first. If I don’t have it, I can’t write the story, no matter how well composed the characters or plot are. 

Contradiction, I realized some years ago, is essential for good characters, for two reasons. First, contradictions are memorable. They capture a nuance of character and personality, including worldview and personal aesthetic, that you can’t get any other way. Second, they’re more realistic. We are contradictory, and those contradictions not only make us human, they literally set characters alive, give them blood pumping through their veins, to borrow Peter Orner’s phrase. 

I also don’t tend to build characters abstractly. I start with what’s concrete: a line of dialogue, an article of clothing, a gesture, an awkward interaction, a room charged with pressure. Those are the things that carry life. Some years ago, after going through scattered notes and realizing I didn’t understand half of them, I stopped trusting ideas by themselves. I trust scenes now. “Capture the scene, not the idea” is my mantra. If something occurs to me, I start writing into it immediately and go as far as I can in that moment. Later, at the computer, I work that material—expand it, refine it, connect it, discover what belongs together. I can’t really sit down at a desk and write from nothing. 

A lot of character-building for me comes from collecting details: emotional truth and unique details anchored in truth. The pink fluff that so fascinates Jo throughout St. Ulphia’s Dead was something I found once in real life and described in my notebook exactly as it appears in the book. I still don’t know what it was and have never seen it again. Even something like the chiffchaff bird, which I discovered while researching flora and fauna for the island, felt immediately useful—not just because of its absurdly delightful name, but because of its cackling laughter and the way a detail like that can undercut a solemn scene and make it feel more real, tense, and contradictory. 

Once there’s a certain center of gravity to a character, those charged fragments start accreting, and character development starts to feel less like invention and more like uncovering, then creating situations that test them. After that, I let them go and write what seems most authentic to them. They already want to live; I just help them. 

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4. Do you come to your writing through a particular lens?

I definitely do, though it took me a while to recognize it. While doing my SANA series, I stumbled onto a kind of thematic rule that emerged as I went, which I then tried to adhere to: sweet, paradoxical, and full of vague menace. I think that describes pretty well the general aesthetic I tend to go for in most of my stories, even though the balance tips one way or another depending on the piece.

Absurdity is also central to the lens I come through. I think of absurdity as a mismatch of proportion: a mismatch between events and reaction. Humor in dark work is usually a question of proportion, of balancing tone, philosophy, and structure in a way that carries verisimilitude and gets to the emotional punch through disproportion. When the circumstances are extreme, but the human reactions are nuanced, downplayed, evasive, or awkward, that’s absurd dark comedy to me. In some way, I almost want you to feel bad about laughing. I want myself to feel bad about laughing too. It’s a strange paradox of permission.

That’s the same kind of approach at work in St. Ulphia’s Dead. The premise and tone have to work together to ask philosophical questions you can’t get at in quite the same way otherwise, because they come at you unexpectedly, and with a freshness that comes from being unmoored from their usual drapings.

I’m also motivated by inventiveness. I want to write the stories that don’t yet exist. So many of my stories were spawned by reading something I thought was going somewhere and then it didn’t, and even if where it went was satisfying, I still wanted to know the story I thought it was going to be. I’m always chasing that unrealized possibility—the weirder, more emotionally enticing version.

And of course, if you’re going to write—a generally thankless job—you have to write what’s fun to you. Or as Vonnegut said: first, entertain.

So yes, style matters enormously to me. But I don’t think of style as surface. Style is how a story discovers its logic, its emotional register, its philosophy, and even its characters.

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5. What do you wish people would ask you?

Ask me the question my wife often challenges me to answer: Why do you write fiction at all?

We have a family mantra, which she invented: “The purpose of life is to be moved and enchanted,” and that is essentially the point of fiction for me. If I’m successful, there’s a transformation that happens, for myself first, and hopefully some form of transformation to the reader, if only briefly.

It’s like magic: I want to cast an illusion of reality that is believable, which might also be true. Wouldn’t the limiting beliefs we all have—the ones that hold us back from a better world, or a better experience of our world—become slipperier and more suspect if we could believe the unbelievable more often? That’s what fiction can do. It can destabilize what seemed fixed. It can make us newly suspicious of the stories we’ve inherited about ourselves and others and reality itself.

Fiction does that in a way abstract thought cannot. It gives the mind and heart handholds. It lets you enter destabilizing questions—about love, death, belief, fear, consciousness—through experience rather than argument. It makes those questions concrete, and therefore moving. It lets you approach what ordinary life does not.

And on the most immediate level, I write because I have to. Because playing with stories is so naturally the one thing—save for being with my wife and child—that, when I’m doing it, I don’t think I should be doing anything else. If I’m not playing with stories, I don’t feel like I’m doing what I should be doing. I’ve always been this way. It’s less a choice than a compulsion, but luckily it’s also the most pleasurable and life-giving one I know. Fiction is where curiosity, obsession, compassion, intellect, and strangeness all get to meet.