a chinwag with ellena savage about humour and heaviness
The top-notch writer offers us a peek behind the curtains of her debut novel, 'The Ruiners'.
What happens when a writer turns the lens inside out? When you’re a force as prolific as Ellena Savage, what happens is The Ruiners. After the writer’s debut essay collection Blueberries bowled readers over in 2020, Ellena’s brand-spanking-new novel (and her first) is ready to take you by storm all over again. We caught up with the writer to chat about The Ruiners, where the story came from, and where she’s heading next.
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Tell us a bit about the moment you realised that The Ruiners was a story you had to write. I’d been working on another novel for some time but I couldn’t get it to come to life. I took a break from it, went on vacation with my ex, and one morning while I was wasting time in bed, I started writing in the first voice, the voice of Pip. It was so fun that I spent the rest of the holiday on my laptop (sorry, ex-husband). I’m drawn to heavy topics, but you can’t write about them honestly without at least some humour and playfulness coming in. So when I realised I wanted the novel to be about serious things (inheritance, legacy, waste crime, microplastics), I sauced it with kitsch and camp, and this made it possible to see the process through.
Blueberries was an exploration of the body and the experience of living in one as much as it was grounded in a collection of places and the memories attached to them. How much of those ideas did you bring into the writing of The Ruiners? I’ve always been interested in how people are conditioned by the political economy, but I’m increasingly more interested in how discourse presents rationalisations and seeming inevitabilities about ‘who we are’ or might be. The main three characters in The Ruiners are all stuck in their personal family stories. I wanted the action of the novel to shake them out of themselves and face the real world, the impersonal world, which is right in front of them, and I wanted them to learn to act beyond themselves.
There’s a common idea that writing a second book can be harder than the first, thanks to the pressures of expectations and the finding of new ideas. Did you feel much second-book pressure when you were writing The Ruiners? I feel a lot of pressure in general as a writer, so yes, second book pressure was real. The only way I’ve found to temper self-imposed (largely neurotic) writing anxiety is to follow the instinct that leads towards pleasure in the work, so that at least sometimes I can enjoy the process.
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What was your writing process like? How long did the book take you to finish? How many drafts did you do? Interminable! Four years, so many drafts I don’t recall. I wrote most days. I rewrote and rewrote. One must never give up.
How does the experience of writing nonfiction essays compare to writing a fictional story? I’ve been writing fiction as long as nonfiction, though I’ve only published short stories before now, and not very many. I enjoy the freedom of fiction, but it comes with the challenge of having to make everything up; whereas in nonfiction there’s a given object to describe. So in nonfiction, all your creative energy is consumed by selecting and formalising the object, whereas in fiction you’re formalising an object that you’re also in the process of constructing. Both forms come with their own pleasures, but I think I’ll be working with fiction for the time being – it’s a more sensible route if I want to protect my privacy.
You’ve travelled all over the world through your writing so far – from Melbourne/Naarm to Portugal to the islands of Greece. Where would you like your next writing project to take you? The novel I’m working on now is set in New York City – another novel I’d one day like to write is set between the UK and The Hague. I don’t know yet if either of these projects will turn out the way I want them to – probably not – but in general I find that being in new places is generative for my writing, and writing is a good way of inhabiting new places. In a place I don’t know well, my attention is externally focused, and I’m constantly receiving new information that challenges my perspective.
Get your mitts on The Ruiners this-a-way. For more rad chats, take a gander at our chinwag with performer Kala Gare or have a squiz at our chat with writer and actor Megan Wilding. Plus, sign up to our newsletter to stay in the loop.
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