Ellis Scott on using overpowering images to shape his writing

Author Ellis Scott

Ellis Scott was born in the U.K. and grew up in Canada. He has published nine stories in literary journals, including The Iowa Review, Yolk, and The Fiddlehead. His first short story was nominated for a 2020 Pushcart Prize. Night Terminus is his first novel. Here's Ellis Scott on using overpowering images to shape his writing, and the authors who have influenced him over the years.

Night Terminus relies on Ellis' experiences as a survivor of the AIDS crisis

OCW: What life experiences have shaped your writing style?

ES: I started writing short stories at 55, and wrote my first novel at 62, so life experience definitely shaped my writing style. My novel, Night Terminus, relies on my experiences as a survivor of the AIDS crisis. Though fictional, the characters are amalgams of people I have met or inspired by the unique stories I have heard over the decades. Time moves differently and folds in on itself when one is elderly and when grief strikes so young. One realizes that in writing about catastrophe, it is best to do it indirectly and dispassionately — to circle around it. Coincidence, repetition, and the unseen shape one’s writing. Contiguity becomes more important than chronology.

Night Terminus by Ellis Scott

OCW: Can you trace any common themes across your writing?

ES: The themes in all my work — the universal search for meaning and purpose, the existential role of art, statelessness and belonging, and agency over one’s body and choices, are shaped by my experience as someone who has lived with illness most of my adult life.

OCW: Which authors and/or types of books do you like to read?

ES: I love European literature and was affected by the modernists from an early age. Friends and teachers introduced me to the work of Hermann Hesse and Thomas Mann as an adolescent, then James Joyce and Virginia Woolf as a young man. I was drawn to the romantic and metaphysical in the writing, and their imminent collapse. The stylists of the 1970s were huge influences, such as Michael Ondaatje, Alan Hollinghurst, and Edmund White. This century, the work I am most drawn to includes W. G. Sebald, Mathias Énard, Teju Cole, Jenny Erpenbeck, and Sjón.

Ellis Scott on using overpowering images to shape his writing

OCW: Are you a plotter or a pantser? (For writers or short stories and novels).

ES: Definitely a pantser. As in quantum physics, the proof of a neutrino is implied or discovered tangentially from observing something else that indicates its existence.

I start with an initial image that overpowers my imagination and allow myself to see where that image takes me after putting to paper a brief plot summary. One of my favourite artists, Tacita Dean, uses something she calls “Objective Chance” (Editor's note: The term is borrowed from the French ‘hasard objectif’ coined by French surrealist poet André Breton), where one wanders on tangents and sees what emerges, seemingly at random, that leads to a connective subject of interest. It’s about exploring a labyrinth with many routes and points of escape, and you can take from those what you will. I venture down rabbit holes, and my writing involves a lot of research.

OCW: What advice/guidance would you give to writers?

ES: Be curious. Read books that have nothing to do with literature and don’t limit yourself to literary fiction. Read nonfiction, memoirs, horror, science fiction, mythology, and poetry. Pay attention to each genre’s craft. It will make you a more well-rounded person and expand your worldview, which will inevitably make you a better fiction writer.