An Interview with M. Lalli Lassegard

What inspired you to become an author?

The inspiration came to me in hindsight.

I’ve always been a writer, even in my earliest years. For most of my childhood, I was left alone and didn’t have many friends, so I invented imaginary ones of my own. Once I hit my teen years, I managed to meet a few artistic friends who would sit and draw characters with me. We started writing stories about all of our characters together, which sometimes dipped into fan-fiction or doujin territory. During that time, I didn’t care if the art was perfect nor if the stories made sense. It was just a lot of fun to write and draw with reckless freedom!

Years later, I was fortunate enough to be invited to a Dungeons and Dragons campaign, and that spiraled into a mountain of fanart, one-shots, and loads of roleplay forum posting. As I portrayed more characters through games, roleplay, and character doodling, I grew more independently driven. I wanted to create stories of my own that didn’t need to rely on a community to foster them. I still wanted to write and share stories with my friends too, but I also wanted to write on my own from my soul. I wanted to write the things that I wanted to see in fiction, but very rarely did.

The choice to become an author was never a conscious one, not directly, but it was always there in my bones. Writing has simply always been there for me in many shapes and forms throughout the years. All I needed was confidence and a healthy dose of support from my peers to pursue it professionally.

Who were your early influences?

Video games were the earliest storytelling influences on me. They still often are my biggest influence. Video games are a collaborative effort as an art form, so I struggle to point to any one writer in particular, but the games with stories that have stuck with me and influenced me the most are Silent Hill 2, Drakengard, Galerians, and Majora’s Mask.

I read a lot of books in my childhood too, but these consisted almost entirely of books that belonged to my parents. They owned a lot of Dean Koontz and Stephen King, some fantasy staples like The Lord of the Rings and a bunch of books by Glen Cook.

As a teen, I watched a lot of movies with friends, and my favorites of those films continue to influence me to this day. In particular, I’d say A Serious Man, Cube, Saw, and American History X still occupy a large corner of my mind.

How did you develop your writing style?

It was a lot of trial and error throughout the years. There was a time when I really liked being detail-rich and describing, to the last detail, what a particular part of the scenery looked like. I don’t care for details like that anymore and would rather trust the reader to picture their own setting through their own imagination, but it does pain me on occasion that I can’t beam images directly into everyone else’s brain as I see them.

Right now, I feel I’ve grown to respect minimalism more and more in terms of writing. Economy of word choice and the ability to not waste the reader’s time are the traits I’m honing as an author.

I’m still developing and will continue to develop as I go, but for the most part, I can say that I tried a lot of different things and plundered the traits that I liked from my favorite authors and stories. I tell the stories that I would like to read, and I develop my style based on the styles I like reading. Basically, I read a bunch and then write a bunch after.

Where do you find inspiration for your stories?

I’m often inspired by the disgusting and the absurd. I’ve always been a fan of compellingly ambiguous characters that err on the side of being uncomfortably human rather than tragic villain characters. It’s tricky to explain because, to me, there is a particular flavor I prefer when latching onto the things that inspire me. Being jarring for the sake of being jarring isn’t necessarily my favorite, but the things that inspire me are usually jarring and uncomfortable to the extreme.

I find that reprehensibility and grotesque personality traits are far more interesting in relationship-oriented stories than the sterilized heartwarming coming together of hearts. I like writing about strange crusty folks doing strange crusty things while navigating both the good and bad sides of life. To that end, paraphilia, mental conditions, and everyday experiences and conversations are huge sources of inspiration to me. As a person that struggles with mental health and has made morally questionable decisions throughout life, these topics in particular are interesting to me. I find that these things are usually taboo and are written in a way that leaves me wanting for better.

I want to take the taboo and make it visible. I want to make characters that are neither wholly good nor wholly bad and simply toss them into a pot to simmer with other characters as they live their absurd, disgusting lives. Daydreaming about throwing weird characters into weird situations is an excellent resource that I wish I had more time to tap into, but it’s a huge source of inspiration for me.

Can you describe your writing process, from idea generation to final revisions?

The process always starts with the creation of one character. I make a character based on a few generating questions and through this I try to make a person that is both unique and familiar. I aspire to give the character either an abundance of a negative trait, or a lack in their life that leads to either a deficit in a positive trait or a poor relationship with their sense of self. Memory and self-hood tend to be strong themes in the characters I make, regardless of whatever base-level traits I give them.

After I make the character, I usually stew with them for as long as it takes for me to like them. I really get to know them down to their smallest habits and take my time until they feel human enough to be believable. Then I build another character and repeat the process.

Sometimes, it takes a few characters before I see the potential for connections. I like writing romantic elements into my stories, each with their own quirks or grotesqueries, so I like balancing my characters out with each other, either by filling in the deficits or abundances or by finding a way to upturn one of the character’s lives through the lens of the other. Everything I write hinges on interactions and relationships with other people and the world surrounding the characters, so the synthesis of two character stories interacting is important to my writing.

After I think of a suitable ending to how their interactions may go, I start writing notes and scenes. If I’m lucky, the scenes will roll into each other as I write towards the final goal, but sometimes I need to stop and think about how exactly I want to proceed.

Characters often choose their own lives and paths. I’m just a conduit for whatever shenanigans they get up to. In that way, drawing really helps me brainstorm and get out little ideas that can snowball into bigger ones. When I’m alone,  I say the dialogue and little scenes as I draw and envision them. Speaking and hearing the conversations is a monumental help to my process.

Once the story is completely written from beginning to end, I go through and edit. I add in more scenes, delete scenes, or tweak dialogue. I do this two or three times before I fully get into revising grammar and fixing typos. This process is very lonesome and difficult for me, because I become excited to share my funky fellas with the rest of the world, but they aren’t yet ripe enough. When they are ripe enough, then I need help editing. I need fresh eyes and different perspectives to make sure sentences read well and characters feel consistent.

It’s difficult to say how long the editing goes, because it’s such a back and forth process, but as long as I get the core of the story complete, it all gets wrangled into place eventually.

What was the initial spark or idea behind your book?

I like reading stories about people living their daily lives, whether or not the story has a major arc or satisfying conclusion. I think relationships are an important aspect of life, but a lot of the books I read don’t fall properly into the category of daily life shenanigans mixed with realistic relationships.

Romance as a genre is far from my favorite and it often feels suitable for only a specific demographic. There’s nothing wrong with writing passionate whirlwind affairs, but it’s not the sort of romance or intimacy I’m interested in as a writer. I prefer writing and reading about the intimacy of mundane life. Since I can’t often find books that satisfy this craving, I simply find the time to write my own stories.

Therefore, the initial idea for Eth in particular was to write the sort of romance slice-of-life novel that I’d be interested in reading. That is, a book that is somehow neither romance nor slice-of-life, and yet…

What themes or messages did you want to convey?

Above all, in everything that I write, I want to resonate with others. Eth shares elements of both abusive and healthy relationships. I want to shed light on both. I want to write stories that draw from outside and inside sources of both experience and inspiration so that those who read Eth and any future books may feel some sense of connection. I want to write about life and offer kinship to anyone who may find it within the pages of a book.

There aren’t any special messages or direct themes that I wanted to convey specifically, but it would be nice if I wrote something that comforted someone who needed it. It would be nice if I inspired someone else to create whatever they want to create.

Life is messy and there is always a hint of moral ambiguity in everyday choices. As much as you can love someone, you can easily make choices that hurt them. You can make choices that hurt yourself. Memories can be lovely or bittersweet. I just want to share overlooked moments of mundanity and expose average mental health struggles through stories about relationships and strange characters making poor life choices.

How did you develop the characters and their relationships?

I draw a lot of self-indulgent art and as a result, I have a lot of time to stare at these characters and invent stories for them as I draw. I think about the lives of my characters as much as I think about my own life, and drawing them into existence really helps me focus on what’s important for them.

From the outset, I’ve always drawn Viktor to be a lot more intimidating of a person than he is. I think it’s because of this that I’ve ended up drawing Niði to be so meek and delicate. As a result, their personalities shaped themselves as I leaned more and more into the designs I drew. It goes back to my old doujin fanart days: I see an intimidating character, and I immediately fall for the trope of attaching a gentle character to him.

After I got through a bunch of self-made fanart, I dove into jotting little notes about their lives. I wrote more and more notes until a story unfolded itself. From there, all it took was a lot of editing until the book was fully written.

What was your approach to creating the world or setting?

It was an obvious choice for me to choose Norway as a setting. Viktor was Icelandic from his inception, and Niði was Norwegian. The setting made clear sense to me, because when I was creating the characters, I had always envisioned Viktor’s family uprooting to move to Norway. It was a plot point in his backstory that existed from the outset.

It is always important for me to know from where a character originates because their language identity is the most important factor for me when starting the creation process. I needed these two characters to speak these two languages, so Norway was the natural conclusion.

When I envision a character’s native language or home setting, it comes down to my own sentimentality. I think of the places I’ve been to or lived in, and I really just want to keep them alive through writing about them.

One of my favorite things to do is ride trains to random stations and jot down every detail about an area I possibly can before hopping back onto the train and finding somewhere else. Or, similarly, I’ll walk around until I find a nice place to sit and have coffee and write my notes there. I like to watch people and eavesdrop while making notes about the place I’m in.

With these notes and experiences, I try to make places feel how I remember them. I take all the details that I’ve written and condense them into atmospheric feelings. Every reader is going to have their own ideas and experiences that they can pull from to envision their own internal setting. If I were to use a train station as a setting, I’d want to remember my details, transform those details into feelings, and then try to get the reader to envision their idea of a train station with the feelings I’ve described. It’s my job to get the reader to use their imagination, not drag them through a tedious description of the place.

Were there any particular challenges in writing this book?

Finding my voice and style as a writer while in the process of writing the book was the biggest challenge. Distinguishing my voice from Niði’s voice was a huge part of that challenge. Striking a balance at all between my desires as a writer and the identities of my characters was a great challenge to overcome.

While I am very proud of Eth and myself for completing it, I do see a lot in it that I would like to improve on in the future. At the time, I believe I did the best that I could. My writing style has changed and grown since completing this book. I’m sure it will continue to change as I continue to write.

What was the most rewarding part of the process?

Completing the story was the most rewarding part of the process. I knew the ending that I wanted to work towards, but getting there was daunting.  It is far easier to start a story than it is to complete one, and I know a lot of folks that struggle with creativity and procrastination, so for me it feels really nice to have the story be completed. All the fun parts of writing for me happen after that hurdle is overcome.

Are there any authors or works that have significantly influenced your writing?

For Eth specifically, I was acting rebellious. I wanted to create something wholly my own and not consider the style so much as the content, though I did find that the story’s style wasn’t something to neglect wholeheartedly. My rebellion ended then. I am inspired by a lot of different things and to rebel against that inspiration is much more soul draining than to lean into it.

That said, my inspirations may not shine as brightly in Eth as they may in future works.

The authors that influence me the most are Chuck Palahniuk, Arthur Nersesian, and Lois-Ann Yamanaka. Aside from books and authors, though, my writing is heavily influenced by video games and the stories I’ve experienced therein. I take a lot of inspiration from a lot of storytelling media and it isn’t restricted to the literary world.

Music is another art that truly influences and inspires me to write, albeit in a tangential way. There are so many ways to write a song and convey a mood throughout. One can be as unorthodox as they’d like when making the song they want, and I believe that is true of writing novels as well. There are a few ideas buried in me that really strive for the unorthodox and creative. Maybe someday I’ll craft a book and it will be just as interesting as a Mark Z. Danielewski novel.

What are your plans for future writing projects? Are you working on anything new?

I’m working on a few projects currently. It’s a long and lonesome process, but it’s one I’ll gladly undertake. It’s been difficult to keep on track while working as isolated as I have been, but I’m still doing my best.

My goal is to always be writing and working towards the stories that I cherish, even if I have to take breaks and am interrupted by life’s affairs in the process.

As I write, I hope to have the courage and confidence as a writer to embrace the types of stories that I want to tell, and in the future I will have many more absurd and grotesque romances to share. I truly hope to push my own boundaries on the mundane and the strange. The next novel I hope to complete is a real gut-punch.