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It’s a welcome return for a previous guest, the brilliant writer Sebastien de Castell. His first published novel was Traitor’s Blade in 2014. Since then he has published the Greatcoats Quartet, the Spellslinger YA fantasy series, The Malevolent Seven and his latest Play of Shadows. He also has eight more books under contract, so there are plenty more to come!
Sebastien has written some of my favourite sword fights in all of literature, so when I decided to update my book, Swordfighting for Writers, Game Designers and Martial Artists, it was a no-brainer to talk to Sebastien about how he approaches writing action scenes in his books.
We talk about more than just sword fights, and this conversation will be fascinating to any writer or anyone thinking about writing their first novel.
It’s not just a chat for novellists. As you’d expect on The Sword Guy Podcast, we do talk about weapons, like a pistol within a rapier, and other strange and unusual weapons that never quite caught on.
To find out more about Sebastien’s books, visit https://decastell.com/ and to listen to his previous appearance on the podcast, check out episode 69: Swashbuckling with Sebastien de Castell.
Transcript
Guy Windsor
I'm here today with Sebastien de Castell, author of the Greatcoats series, which has some of my favourite sword fights in all of literature, and the Spellslinger series, a kind of wild west with magic, not to mention The Malevolent Seven and his latest Play of Shadows. So, of course, his main claim to fame is appearing on this show in Episode 69. So Sebastien, it's lovely to see you again. How are you?
Sebastien de Castell
Lovely to see you. It was the honour of a lifetime the last time. I can't believe you're letting me on again.
Guy Windsor
You’re very kind. Whereabouts are you?
Sebastien de Castell
I'm here in beautiful Vancouver, British Columbia in Canada. It finally feels like spring here. So for your UK listeners, I've noticed one thing, because I spent a lot of time in the UK. Both my world rights publishers are based in the UK. My agents are in the UK. And I found that British people have this weird assumption that every part of Canada is vastly colder than the UK. Whereas, in fact, Vancouver temperatures almost always track with London temperatures. So, when you're wondering what it like in Vancouver, probably check London. It’s probably pretty similar.
Guy Windsor
I've been to Vancouver in I think it was February, and I was coming from Finland, and, yeah, it was a lot warmer, and you did have snow, but it was the thinnest, lightest little dusting. It was like London snow, like, you know, it's there in the morning, everyone goes, oh, my God, it's snowing, and then it goes away again.
Sebastien de Castell
Yeah, Vancouver is generally warmer, because it's right next to the Pacific Ocean, and we get very little slow, I think snow. I think this year, my wife and I, we were away, we were in Sri Lanka, while the snow was around. And I think it was for a week or 10 days or something, there was snow. But that's pretty rare. It's usually just a few days. It's very rare that it's that there's snow on Christmas, for example.
Guy Windsor
Does the whole place seize up when it snows?
Sebastien de Castell
No, no. It's extraordinary, yeah. Well, so one thing is, I've never met anyone in England or Wales or Scotland or Ireland who had snow tyres. So when it gets so as winter comes on here, I think a fair chunk of people get winter tyres, because even when it's not snowing, it's actually considerably more dangerous. As it cools down, the actual road surface changes in its complexity or in its tackiness. And so, yeah, whereas when I was in the UK, I'm just continuously amazed. I remember one time I needed to get to Heathrow Airport. I was staying with one of my agents, who I adore, and then they offered to drive me but there was a tiny, there was a tiny bit of snow on the ground, or a little bit of snow. I was snowing then, and they and they said, oh yeah, we'll drive you. I was like, you have winter tyres? And they had virtually no idea what I was talking about, despite having lived in Canada. And then we went out, and the car, of course, couldn't get up a short hill. And just on the side of the side of this narrow road were just all these cars that were basically in the ditch and you just kept seeing people driving and swerving. It was amazing. So, yeah, it's a very strange thing to come from a Canadian winter and then go to the UK and see winter there.
Guy Windsor
I lived in Finland a long time, and it has a comedy effect. It's like everyone is surprised that this ice from the sky occurs, and then, oh my god. And then my kids were astonished. The first year we were here, we had this amazing, like, actual proper snow for like, a day, maybe a foot of actual snow, you could actually sledge. And the schools were shut because people couldn't get to school, and the children were just like, but it's just snow, because they been school in Finland where you walk school, or you ski to school, or you can drive to school because everyone has snow tires between November and April, because that's the law.
Sebastien de Castell
Well, we have to temper our amusement with the UK by recalling that the Finns are probably the single toughest breed of people.
Guy Windsor
True, yeah. Just because the Finns can do doesn't mean everybody else can. That is absolutely true.
Sebastien de Castell
It's a much stranger country than people think. I was there for Worldcon one year and learned all about the weird subterranean the building requirements that to create all these subterranean areas where people can live in the event of a nuclear war.
Guy Windsor
That's right, yeah, all apartment buildings of a certain vintage have like nuclear bomb shelters in the basement, which are now converted into other things. And there's this enormous, kind of sports hall type complex in Tampere, which is built in the nuclear bomb shelter. And the doors are there, and you see these absolutely gigantic doors, and then you kind of go through them. They're kind of pinned open, and you go through them, and there's like, dojos. And I mean, of course, I was going to a dojo, and it's a huge complex, and they have lockers and lockers and lockers of imperishable food. And so, if the Russians do decide to get a bit feisty, then they better wait for those Finns to come back up out the ground with rifles and bayonets and yes, goodbye Russia.
Sebastien de Castell
I guess there's probably not a ton of Finnish post-apocalyptic fiction, just because they're kind of already ready for it.
Guy Windsor
Who was it wrote the Mythago Woods series.
Sebastien de Castell
Oh, Robert Holdstock,
Guy Windsor
That's the one. He was in Finland for a convention of some kind, fantasy convention, something like that, which a friend of mine was involved in organizing. And he said that he didn't understand why his Mythago Wood books were popular in Finland. Because everywhere else in the world, people go into the forest to have adventures, but in Finland they come out of the forest to buy milk. Yeah, I love that country. I don't know. I'm torn between Italy for the food and the history and Finland, just because I don't know. It's just magic.
Sebastien de Castell
Hence why some of us write fantasy, not because we're desperately trying to imagine a different world, but because the world we all share actually has so many of these kind of fantastical secrets to it that that you just want to kind of find and accumulate and bring together into fictional story.
Guy Windsor
That's a good point, actually. And speaking of books, I mean, I'm looking over your shoulder at your wall, which has been very carefully designed to prevent you from ever writing any more books, because you have these three shelves, which I'm just describing it for anyone who's listening, the top shelf is just big enough for four hardbacks from the great coat series. Because it's a four-book series. And then you've got all the Argosi and Spellslinger books on the next shelf, and that shelf is full. And then you've got the shelf below that with Play of Shadows, Crucible of Chaos, Malevolent Seven and some others, which I can't read from here, but I've almost certainly read them, and they're probably on my shelves through that room. But you seem to have, like, run out of shelf space. Is the Malevolent Eight big thing is an iPad so you can cycle it?
Sebastien de Castell
Yeah, it's a really old LCD monitor that I repurposed so that whenever I had a new book coming out, and I was doing interviews, and I didn't yet have the actual physical copy of the book, the author copies, I'd at least be able to show the cover there.
Guy Windsor
That is smart.
Sebastien de Castell
Yeah, it was because I'm incredibly lazy by nature. And after my first couple of books came out, I was so constantly doing interviews, video interviews, and every time I did, I'd have to try to find a way to arrange myself or my office, or tidy up the office so that I had some angle that didn't look just like a horrible wall. Yeah, exactly.
Guy Windsor
I failed to tidy up mine. My kids are revising for exams at the moment, so every surface in in the house is covered in revision papers, like every surface.
Sebastien de Castell
Yeah, you've got man cave going on back there, which is terrific. I love that if I turn my camera around, you'd see man cave. But I have one wall that always shows my book. I have it set so that it can kind of rotate through images. The sad part of it is, because it's such an old monitor, it doesn't actually display portrait, so I have to take all the images and adjust the length to match the aspect ratio of the monitor, but it does the job. The only problem is that, as you noted on the bottom shelf, what's beyond my latest books are anthologies that my stories have appeared in. Before that I used to have translated editions, because I've been really fortunate that the Greatcoats and Spellslinger and other things have been translated into 15 different languages, soon to be 16, which is exciting for me.
Guy Windsor
Wow, that's cool.
Sebastien de Castell
So I used to have translated versions, but then as more of my new books would come out, I sort of have to take things off and move it there, and I think I've got room for in total, 24 books on that shelf I've had, I think 17 published so far, or 16 published so far, and nine under contract. So even if I just quit from writing once I finish my contracted books, I will still be missing one spot for one book, the evil book that shall never be named, whatever it turns to be.
Guy Windsor
Or just write a really bad one for a change.
Sebastien de Castell
I've been trying, failing miserably. I really thought I had hit the nail on the head with Malevolent Seven, and that ended up being a big success.
Guy Windsor
Oh good. I didn't know how it would do, because it's got a similar kind of tone to Greatcoats and Spellslinger, but it is quite different, and it's much more magic heavy.
Sebastien de Castell
Yeah, I wrote that book in 2020 when the pandemic hit, it was February, and I had a break between things I had to deliver, and I decided I was just going to write a fantasy novel just for myself, something that had the elements that I used to love about 1980s fantasy that tended to be a little bit more rebellious I felt like, than a lot of where things had been heading in the in the 2010s and into 2020, and so I was just writing a book just for myself. It literally wasn't meant to be published, because I was just going, I'm just going to write whatever I want. I'm going to put in 12 different magic systems. It's a magnificent seven. It is a fantasy. It's wizards going around, blowing things up and swearing constantly, and then accidentally, my agent said she wanted to read it. And then I said, okay, fine, but nobody's going to want this. And she said, oh, I love this. We should sell it. And I said, no, you can't. And then she ended up retiring, and my new agent said, I've heard about this manuscript Malevolent Seven. And I said, yeah, fine, you can read it, but look, nobody's going to want this. And he read it, and then he said, oh god, I think I can sell this. And I said, you’re nuts. And then it was, like, the fastest book deal I ever did, I don't know why. I mean, I think Jo Fletcher, who I adore, who's been my editor since Traitor’s Blade, my debut. She likes a certain amount of irreverence and she knows my writing so well, so she can spot, you know, she knows the difference between if I were to write something that was just, I'm just going to put a bunch of stupid elements in for spectacle, versus if I'm writing something where the spectacle is in service to a theme, even if it's taken me a while to find it. So for me, Malevolent Seven started as, haha, I'm going to write whatever the hell I want and it would be stuff that would offend people if they ever read it, but it's okay, because they never will. And by the end, ended up being this kind of, as I say, quite irreverent dark fantasy novel. But that allowed me to explore this question that had been really bothering me, which has to do with we've all basically decided to divide humanity up into two categories, good people and bad people. And the definition of a bad person is someone who has ever done anything bad, and the definition of a good person is someone who's never done anything bad. It's not someone who's done something good, because if you've done lots of good things, but you do something terrible, then you're a bad person. And I completely understand why people see it through that lens. It's very natural in this time to see it that way. The problem with that is that you need the racist firefighter who works in your community to actually put out the fire of your South Asian neighbour's house, regardless of their opinions about people, and we have to sometimes count on each other's shared humanity in order to just basically survive. Because, if it's only the people who never do bad things that we're going to rely on to kind of keep us all together and alive and healthy and safe, we’re doomed from the start. I don't know how to reconcile that, I would never position myself as any kind of having any kind of expertise in this. I don't know how we kind of resolve those problems of X actor has delivered some of the most wonderful performances that people adore, and then, it turns out, did some horrible things. I think people struggle to separate the art from the artist. But I don't know what happens when we can't separate the brilliant pharmaceutical researcher who comes up with an innovative treatment for a pernicious disease from the fact that they also have terrible attitudes about something else, or have actually done terrible things. We have to be able to draw on each other. So that's what Malevolent Seven ended up being about, because Cade is this sort of antihero, mercenary mage who is convinced that he's a piece of crap, and he has the evidence, he has the receipts to prove that he's a piece of crap, who therefore tells himself, as I think a lot of people are doing now, because I'm a piece of crap, I have no obligation to anybody else, I'm already kind of broken and irredeemable. So I don't need to worry. And ends up in this position where he and a group of six other fairly unredeemable people are kind of the only ones in a position to have to either sort of save humanity or watch it fall apart. And that's kind of what I ended up writing about is, is that notion that we can't let each other off the hook by saying because you're because we've decided you're a bad person, you've done something bad we're never going to count on you again. We actually might have to count on all of us. So anyway, I mean, that's complicating it for a book where the sequel has a vampire kangaroo that only uses one word and it's entirely offensive.
Guy Windsor
That is a very Sebastien de Castell character.
Sebastien de Castell
That came from the pitch. My agent told me, hey, they're thrilled with the Malevolent Seven, they’d like a sequel. And I said, Okay, fine. And he said, so could you write a pitch? And I was like, why would I write a pitch for a sequel to a book where the reason they want the sequel is because the first book was so successful at a level that really delighted them and delighted me. And he said, well, that's just how it is. But take as long as you want. And I was like, forget it. I got off the phone. I was like, I'm spending one hour on this and nothing more. And I just wrote what I think is one of the most offensive fiction pitches ever in that it literally insulted the publishers for asking for a pitch. And I went, but fine, you know, you want some story here, and let's start by killing a bunch of angels. And so I just start sketching out this Hollywood kind of scene that's just absolutely gruesome, just bloodthirsty, and then as an excuse to introduce each of the characters, and I realized, oh no, there's only six now, so I have to add a new character. And I just went, fuck it. And there's Temper, a six-and-a-half-foot tall beast that looks like a kind of a giant rabbit, but with a weird, long tail, who punches his enemy's faces to pulp and then drinks their blood. And then I wrote, yeah, it's a fucking vampire kangaroo. And that was literally the origin of it. And I sent it to my agent, thinking that this was a pretty funny pitch, because he would come back and be completely horrified and tell me, okay, now give me a proper pitch. But he didn't, because he has, like me, all the kind of maturity of a 13-year-old teenage boy who just discovered dirty magazines for the first time. And so he sent it off to my publishers, and three days later, we got a literally just one sentence reply. It was, “You had me at vampire kangaroo.” So it turns out there's also something wrong with my publishers.
Guy Windsor
And, of course, which means there's something wrong with all of us who like your books. But, as you just said, you have to rely on the on people who are perhaps not perfect.
Sebastien de Castell
Yeah, exactly. So, yeah, no, it's wonderful. You know, that's the beauty of writing fiction, especially if you're not approaching it from an overly kind of fearful place. If you approach it from a place of, I really have to fit in, or I really have to be unique from everyone, which I meet new writers who do. And you just create this sort of environment of terror when what you're really trying to do is just kind of open the door, like, start writing, so that you open the door to whatever is working its way inside you. And eventually you hit a point where you're like, my favourite part of writing a novel is often hitting the end and going, oh my God, that's what this book was about the whole time. I didn't know.
Guy Windsor
It's quite different to writing books about how to fight his swords.
Sebastien de Castell
With those it's often best if you're not just making stuff up on the spot.
Guy Windsor
Yeah, yeah. I do sometimes think I ought to write some fiction, but then I have too many friends like you who do it really, really well, and it's like, nah.
Sebastien de Castell
That's exactly the thing I'm talking about. That is a very normal reaction that is part of you, that is part of your brain, trying to protect you. You've built up lots of things. You build up status and reputation and success. And it's like, hey, don't screw with that. But I promise you, if you write fiction, you will find something that is different because you're different. And that's, at its essence, what it is. You're writing a story in a genre, generally that we all share, that's the language, and then you're writing until you start to say the things that are about you, even though it's through characters and that's what makes it different. And so, you know, that's why you can have 100,000 fantasy novels and the vast majority of them can actually be quite wonderful.
Guy Windsor
Okay, all right, I shall do it, and I shall send it to you, and you can tell me how crap it is, and that's fine.
Sebastien de Castell
I won't tell you how crap it is, but I'll be happy to read it.
Guy Windsor
Okay. All right, fine. Now, the reason we're having this conversation, initially, is because I am basically updating my book, Sword Fighting for Writers, Game Designers and Martial Artists. I thought I would just update it and do a second edition, and then I had a really proper look at it and ended up stripping out half of it: this isn't actually relevant. Get rid of that. And I'm trying to create a book that is Sword Fighting for Writers. And the idea being that someone who is not experienced with swords, who is writing fiction with swords in it, could use this book to make their sword fights better. And also, a bunch of resources about the different kinds of swords that exist, various different ways of using these swords, some things that look entirely crazy but are actually real, some things that are common tropes but are actually wrong, that sort of thing. So basically, a useful thing for writers of fiction who have swords in their books, and obviously you're like that my first call because you write my favourite sword fights in all the books I've ever read. So how do you approach writing your action scenes?
Sebastien de Castell
Well, first, thank you for the kind words. I'm delighted. I will say that when I was writing Traitor’s Blade, which was my debut and has a ton of sword fights in it, because I know so many people in the historical sword fighting community, or knew some, and even when I was doing stage combat, even when I was choreographing sword fights for theatre plays, that community has a tendency of being actually much more attached to “historical authenticity” than sport fencers, or people actually try to kill people with bladed weapons in life. And so I was actually consciously nervous at first of what happens when people are kind of evaluating these things through this lens, and will people complain about it? And so I went very much in the opposite direction, which was, I was very careful not to ever use a term that would have been used in our notion of Historical European Martial Arts, for example, and to give things sometimes absurd names and to create certain definitional differences for the this fantasy world, even though they're never discussed in the books, that are different from our world. So, for example, in this fantasy world, steel tends to not be very good. It's very difficult to make very good steel, and so plate armour tends to be not as durable as it would be in our world.
Guy Windsor
Yeah, you do stuff with plate armour that means this is very clearly not historical fiction.
Sebastien de Castell
Once in a while, if you had a suit of plate armour, that was where the steel was basically not good steel and was softer than it should be.
Guy Windsor
Well, like plate armour in the 14th century was mostly made of iron. You could actually punch a poleaxe through it, for example.
Sebastien de Castell
And now you have a rapier where you spent a ton more money because you desperately needed to be the best possible steel it can be. It very rarely happens in the books, but you will, on occasion, be able to kind of pierce that plate armour. It doesn't come up a lot in books, but I wanted there to be some of those kind of distinctions in there. But in terms of how I approach a fight scene, the first thing, and I think it's worth especially for your listeners and your readers, it's important to remember that if you were to talk to somebody like a soldier who'd been in a knife fight, or somebody died at the end in the middle of combat, or almost any kind of combat, they would tell you that there is no possible way that anyone is thinking about anything during a sword or a knife fight. There isn't time. It's reflex and terror. And there's chemicals floating through your brain that are basically designed to prevent you from sitting there thinking, I wonder whether I should parry over here or do a crosscut. And so there is no memory. There are flash impressions, and most of those are physical. So if we were writing a very realistic sword fight, for example, where we wanted to allow for the character to have any awareness. Often, we would write things like, where they are trying to stab this guy in the throat, because they see an opening and then there's a bunch of noise, and then they have a headache. Their left side of their head hurts, and then they noticed that there's blood on their right thigh, and only then do they notice the sting of it, even though they were probably stabbed 30 seconds ago, and it would just be chaos and chaos and chaos and, oh, my God, I think I'm dead. This is it. It's over. And then suddenly the other person is dead on the ground. Which is something that I tried, that I sort of evoked a little bit in Traitor’s Blade, where there's a there's a chapter where we're seeing Falcio is basically in order to get a job for him and his two companions in this caravan as security guards, he's forced to take on a number of these other caravan guards in various ways. And so he's managing to cleverly, kind of defeat the first few and then there's a guy with who's put on plate armour and carrying an axe. And because of what happened in Falcio’s past, he loses it in terms of having dealt with a guy with an axe before. And then when the when he kind of comes out of it he's just staring down at the guy, and the guy's got a rapier on the ground in his eyeball. And that was my way of blending those two things. Because I think when we talk about authenticity in sword fighting, or in any aspect of fiction, the real danger is that we'll forget that the authenticity that's most important is emotional authenticity. It's how it would feel, or how it feels to the reader to go through those things with the characters that needs to actually feel authentic. And so sometimes even though you and I can say pretty accurately that I would imagine in any fencing bout we've ever been in, that really actually felt high stakes, we probably don't remember 99% of it. And it wasn't a very strategic sort of, in your mind, sipping tea whilst consulting the pages of Capoferro’s best treatise. It's chaos. But for a reader, they actually kind of want to know what's going on. And so you're blending the characters’ past in terms of what they know about sword fighting with their present in terms of what they're actually doing. I think it's harder to write sword fights if you're writing present tense. So, you know, if a writer is writing, ‘I walk into the room and I draw my sword, and he draws his, and we engage.’ I think that's harder than the typical, the somewhat more common, past tense, where it's ‘I walked into the room. He was standing there waiting for me. I drew my sword. He drew his kind of thing. Because that way, in the past tense, we know that it's reconstructed memory. And so if you or I asked each other about a particular fencing about even though our memories probably aren't good enough to recreate it. We will recreate it anyway. We'll fill in the gaps with our assumptions.
Guy Windsor
Trained fences can reconstruct how they just got hit, or how they just landed the hit, usually fairly accurately if they're trained to do it, but it's a very specific skill that has to be trained, and a lot of it isn't really memory so much as logic. It's like, if I hit you like this, and your sword was in this position when that happened, and I had just done this other action before that. You must have been doing this and it's a sort of combination of logic and experience. And actually it when you practice it a lot deliberately, and you match up your recollection of the fight with what happened with video camera, you can actually reconstruct a fight that way. But it's the sort of thing that is only useful to people who are very, very interested in the practice of sword fighting, because it's a very specific skill. And you have to use very specific jargon for that to work, because if I say and your sword touched my sword and then I moved my sword around to the other side, that's very vague, but if I say, you engaged me in cuarta, I know exactly where your sword is. I know exactly where my sword is, just by the use of that one word, and I disengage, now I have to be on the other side, therefore my hand must have closed the line in seconde if we’re doing rapier, almost certainly. So it's the jargon that gives you that ability to string it together. And as you said, okay, I have three top tips for writers.
Sebastien de Castell
Just before you launch into those though, let me say that what you've just described is detective work. You've just described a detective who, in this case, happens to be the fencer who goes, there's a there's a little bruise on my shoulder here. And before this, I was trying to do this thing. So you have a couple you have a clue, and you have a known fact, and then you interpolate what happened. And so when we're writing a fight scene, in a sense, where you know the character is interpolating what happened to them, I mean, that all sounds a little bit overly theoretical. So yeah, go into your top three tips.
Guy Windsor
My point is basically like my second one, and it's maybe the most important, is avoid jargon. Because the one thing I can't stand when I'm reading historical fiction or fantasy fiction or whatever is when people use historical fencing jargon, and they get it even very slightly wrong, because it just ruins everything. And for most people, if I was to say in cuartata, you might know what that is, because you've done a bit of rapier, and there's a rapier hanging on your wall, and I know what that is, and most of my rapier students will know what that is, but the overwhelming majority of the book buying public have no clue what that is. And if they're like, what the hell's that? And they then have to go, huh? And maybe it's like this, and maybe it's like that, and they're not actually reading the book anymore. They're trying to figure out what a word in the book meant, and as soon as that happens, they're gone. Their mind is not where you want it, and for me, with the specialist knowledge, it's particularly aggravating when they use a term, for example, contra tempo, that pops up in books occasionally. And the thing is, that meant different things to different historical masters. So for that word to make any sense, I need to know exactly the period, and even ideally, which of the main historical fencing sources of that period we're referring to, because it's used differently by different masters. So I don't know what you're trying to tell me, unless you give me all of this context which is entirely irrelevant to the story. And so could you please just use a different word?
Sebastien de Castell
Here's what I find interesting about that. So what you what you're describing is someone throwing in what amounts to a kind of technical jargon, as a placeholder for apparent authorial expertise. So why do we put contra tempo into the scene? Why do we throw the word in? Because we believe that it causes the reader to go, oh, wow, this must be a real sword fight, because there's a word that sounds like something that would be a fencing word, and that doesn't work that well. Now contrast that though, in one of the more odd developments of my writing career, last year, I ended up signing a book deal with Simon and Schuster for an astronaut book. I don't usually write sci fi, but I'm writing with the wonderful Christy Cherish. She's a good friend of mine, a great writer and also a scientist. And we had written basically a short story that turned into a novella that ended up getting us a book deal. And I can't say much about the book, but what I will say is, one of the first things you realise is, if you're writing anything about astronaut stuff, as opposed to, like, space opera, in space opera, you can just have people go, oh yeah, I saw him pull out a zimbato blaster. And you're like, I don't know what the hell that is, but whatever, it’s some kind of cool blaster. I don't need to know how to work. But if you think of, let's say, The Martian or almost any sci-fi that you're ever going to watch, they're constantly having to refer to very kind of technical things. The difference is, they explain them to you and so and so. The way that they do that is they'll sort of go, the amazing thing about trying to replicate gravity is that you can't replicate gravity. All you can do is create centrifugal force, which basically pulls people by spinning a room, which basically pulls people towards the floor. And that's the closest we can get to gravity. But that still only gets us to roughly 30% because you need an incredibly giant ship, to get more than that, which means that now you've got not enough gravity, so you've got bone leaching from you, and you have to worry about this. And then the reader’s like, oh, that's really cool, because that's something interesting that I can know about. With what I try to do with sword fights in fantasy novels, for example, is apply the same thing. Rather than have the character go, I did an envelopment followed by a parry in octave, you know, blah, blah, blah. Is, have them go, “The cool thing about an envelopment, is they're not expecting it. All of a sudden, your blade is going around theirs and theirs is pulled out of line at the exact moment that yours is suddenly in line. But more than that, because they weren't expecting it, they're now off balance. And you get the split second that is the difference between you killing them and them killing you.” And then the reader can sort of feel like, oh, cool. Now when I see an envelopment happening, or now when this author tells me about an envelopment, I know what it means. And so in a later fight, you can have a great moment where the character’s, like, and then this punk, after a flurry of ridiculously long double lunges that never got anywhere, actually tried to envelop me. And I practically shouted, that's my move, you know, blah, blah, right? You do counter envelopment or something, and, and that way the reader is in on the jargon. They're in on the joke. And that's, I think, the key thing to do. One of the first things very early on in my career, interestingly enough, I think Writer’s Digest asked me to write an article on about like, five tips for writing sword fights or something. And surprisingly, that thing still goes around all the time, and I still see people refer to it. But one of the things I talked about, and I think this is one of my big tips for writing fight scenes, is make the reader the choreographer. If you describe every single move of a sword fight, it's the most boring thing imaginable. It's the same as if, imagine a martial artist, or, let's say, a kickboxer describing every move of a kickboxing fight. It's just a bunch of movement. It would be like writing a love scene by describing the literal, physical movement of every body part. It would be pretty embarrassing and not at all sexy or romantic. So what I always suggest, there's two sword fights that I always tell people to watch, and I think this is one of the easiest ways to get a good comprehension of how to how you might approach sword fights, which is the first one is almost everyone knows it's the Westley/Inigo fight from The Princess Bride. And the second is the opening fight from The Duellists.
Guy Windsor
That would be my second choice. It is so good. Because they're two completely different fights. But The Duellists one, particularly, you have a trained killer who's not really a swordsman, or certainly not a smallsword fencer, and you have someone who has no real fighting experience, but may maybe has some smallsword practice behind him, and they fight each other, and it's a foregone conclusion what's going to happen. And the whole thing just goes exactly right. It's stunning. Bill Hobbs choreographed that.
Sebastien de Castell
Well, exactly. So you what you have in those two fights is two of the great British choreographers. Now, there's some debate about whether it was Bob Diamond or Bob Anderson in The Princess Bride.
Guy Windsor
In Cary Elwes’s book, As You Wish, Bob Anderson is the overall choreographer, and Peter Diamond is there to help with the fight scenes. Because they had to basically be practicing the fight all through the making of the film, because they had so much choreography to practice. I think Peter Diamond was with Cary Elwes, and Bob Anderson was with Mandy Patinkin, and so they had this one-on-one coaching, but the fight was put together by Bob and Pete together. That's what Cary says.
Sebastien de Castell
And so what's fascinating about that, Bob Anderson and Bill Hobbs to me represent the two broad stroke, broad categories of how you stage a sword fight. I think they were both stunt doubles for Errol Flynn, for example, and I think Bill Hobbs, who did the fights for The Duellists. There's a story that when the director, Ridley Scott, it was Ridley Scott's film as director. There's a powerful story that the first thing he said to Bill Hobbs was, I don't want any of that bullshit, Errol Flynn stuff. I want it to be dirty and gritty. So if you watch that opening scene, it is exactly as you describe it. It is gritty, it is dirty, it is nasty. You're entirely focused on the emotions of the two characters, because Harvey Keitel’s character has virtually no emotions. He's just there to kill the guy. he already knows how this is going to end. He's there to just kill him. The other guy has all of these, ‘I don't know why I did this. I was forced into this duel. I've agreed to this. Is there a way I can survive? Maybe I can’. He's the one who's having all the emotion, whereas with Harvey Keitel you could be watching a stopwatch for when he's going to kill this guy. And that is an emotion. What that scene evokes, for me, certainly, and I think for a lot of audiences, is I know what that feels like. Maybe I've never been a sword fight before, but I know what it feels like to walk into a conflict where I know I'm going to lose and the other guy or the other woman does not seem to have any fears about this, and it's terrifying and it's a sick feeling. And so he does that absolutely wonderfully. And that kind of thing can be very powerful in a work of fiction where that's what you're trying to evoke. You could lift that scene and pop it into almost any fantasy novel as a prologue of watching a character that you don't know yet, but you feel for them, because you see very quickly they're about to die. That would make you fear that other character, in this case, the Harvey Keitel character all the way through. Now, by complete contrast, The Princess Bride, especially that particular fight, you can watch that fight, and it's a class on how you write a sword fight for an audience. So for example, what does it begin with? It begins with establishing the two characters, the fact that they don't actually want to fight each other. One of the fascinating things about that fight is that most sword fights, your fear is for one of the characters. Like, oh no. I want the good guy to win. I don't want the bad guy to win. That's one of the only fights where you're like, oh, I don't want either of these guys to get killed, but one of them is probably going to get killed. So it establishes that right from the beginning. And then what does it do? There's even a musical cue as they come into guard, and then coming into guard, you get to see right away something from the postures, which translates well into prose fiction, by the way, which is, both of them are elegant. Both of them, they're different, but they're but you know that they're both very trained. And that's fascinating. And so what do they do next? Do they jump into a flurry of blows? No, they do a tentative thrust.
Guy Windsor
Ding, ding, slash, yeah, exactly. I once started a fight which I co-choreographed for this opening of the Antonio Banderas Zorro movie. My sword fighting club we put on a kind of like sword fighty thing at the beginning of it to sort of display for the for the audience on the first night. And when one of our sword fighting friends saw the opening move for the first time in rehearsal, he just burst out laughing, because he got the reference straight away. It's like, yeah, right, I know where I am now. Yeah, sorry, carry on.
Sebastien de Castell
So first we had the establishment of the characters and stakes. So we know what's motivating them. Inigo has to stop this guy, because he has to be able to find the guy who killed his father one day. And so he doesn't want to hurt the man in black. The man in black is like, well, I’ve got to get through you to get to Buttercup who's been taken away. And so we know why they're there, and we know the stakes. We the audience don't want either of these guys to get hurt, but we know that this is a context in which it's very likely. Phase two, we have that testing, that demonstration in their guard. We knew who they were as people a minute before. Now we know who they are as fencers. And so those little testing things, are vital because in the case of a film, they show the audience how the weapons move. Because most people don't necessarily know the difference between a longsword and a rapier or a smallsword. Obviously these are, I guess you could sort of call these transitional rapiers, in a way. They're fairly lightweight looking weapons in terms of how they move, but you see how they move, and you're like, okay, now I see how that weapon moves. If you then cut the video and just had nothing but Ting Ting Ting Ting Ting Ting Ting Ting. The audience would know what happened. They would imagine everything. Somebody tried to thrust, and somebody parried. They would be able to work out a lot. So that first phase for me, when I'm writing a scene of that sort of testing when that's happening, and by the way, that is very realistic. When you don't know what you're up against, you don't usually throw yourself at them, because you know that you're quite likely to die. And so what you're using that first testing phase of a sword fight for is, that's where you tell the reader how the swords move. That's where you tell them I attempted a thrust, extending outwards with my arm, even as I stepped forward to gain some extra distance, but he was too fast. He stepped back and parried on the side in a beautiful and elegant cuarta, if you want to call it that, or whatever else. And then he did an appel with his foot, stamping on the ground and shouting, hey. And I flinched, and he smiled, and you're like, oh, okay, well, now we know we're in some trouble here. But then what I will tend to do is in the main long part of the sword fight of a dual scene is I virtually won't talk about swords at all, because this is where they're either saying things to each other or trying unusual things, like grabbing some dirt from the ground and throwing it in the other person's face or things like that, and at that point, once you've done that, set it up properly, as you're describing the main character who might be going, as the fight continued, all I kept thinking about was, the fact that I'd let myself get drunk last night, and that everything I did was slightly slower than it should have been, and that I was getting more and more tired. And I haven't described a single sword move now, but the but the reader will be constructing those sword moves in their head. That's what I mean. By showing them that initial testing phase, you're letting them become the choreographer, and then your job is to introduce the twists and turns. And if you think of the Princess Bride, for example, they have a whole conversation about I see you are using Capoferro, you know, but Benetti’s defence and all this stuff, which I remember Bill Goldman, one of the great screenwriters of all time, talked about how proud he was that he got all of that stuff right. I'm like, none of that stuff’s actually right. But certainly those are real names, but the conversation tells you. And by the way, if you've read the book The Princess Bride, you know that, yeah, conversation works there too, because you don't need to know what Benetti’s defence is, what you know is, oh, this is a very elevated, skilful defence that not everybody knows. So now I know what's going on with these characters.
Guy Windsor
It’s especially suited to a rocky terrain, because Benetti's first name was Rocco. It's like, okay, but that's not there in the movie, but if you know, you know.
Sebastien de Castell
Yeah, exactly. And so then what comes in are the twists and turns. And so you have the first one, right? You're wonderful, but I'm not left-handed. And you're like, oh my God, this guy has been toying with them the whole time. And so then as the audience, you're like, well, there's no just way that Westley can win this fight now, because it turns out that Inigo is not left-handed and therefore has the edge. And this was the big mistake. And so then the second twist, of course, comes along, I'm not left-handed either, yeah. And so now the sort of surprise you realise, oh my God, no, it's not what we thought. It's this other thing. And again, none of that involves describing a ton of sword moves. Where you put the sword moves is in, is where you need a special moment. And it's what I think of as narrative decompression. So you can have narrative compression and narrative decompression. We got in the car and drove to Edinburgh. That's a lot of narrative compression. We walked down the front steps of the house, I could feel one of my boot heels was it was slightly more worn than the other. And I got the car, I stuck the key into the lock, but I missed it three times and scraped it. And then finally, when I turned it, it ground a little bit too much, and I stuck my hand on the handle, and it was cold because it was a cold morning, and I pulled it open, and it creaked like an old man's legs. That's narrative decompression, That's like, now I'm going to take this moment and stretch it out. It's a way of making things visceral. So, for example, you can make scenes much more horrific by making them more visceral. So there's a scene in Queenslayer, which is the fifth Spellslinger book, where Kellen, the main character, because of a kind of a magical disease he suffers from called the Shadowblack he's being controlled by this kind of horrible old monk who is using him to terrify this young woman in a bar, basically. And he grabs the front of her, the collar of her dress, and the button pops. That's sort of what happened there, but I wrote that where he's describing he can feel the roughness of the linen fabric of the collar of her dress, and he feels it starting to stretch as he's squeezing it tighter and tighter. And then the button pops, and then that suddenly makes something that you could just do as a throwaway line, you know, you grab the front of her dress into something that's quite horrible, because you're decompressing. So the same holds true in a sword fight. When you can take a moment, for example, of, sliding along the blades, where one person knows that they don't have the advantage, and you can just you hear the screeching of the blade against the other blade and the shaking of the arms, you're trying to use muscle to overcome leverage. And then just not even watching the point, but feeling that point coming for you, and knowing it's going to go through the fabric of the shirt and then the skin and into the muscle. And the only question is, is it going to be the scratch that becomes a scar for life, or is it going to be in closer to the centre line and into the meat of the muscle and mean that that arm will never work properly again. So you can decompress moments.
Guy Windsor
That was horrible.
Sebastien de Castell
So as a technical tool, if something is going to land, if I will, especially at the end of a fight, if it's a duel scene, for example, that's where I'll use narrative decompression. I saw, you know, whatever it can be. I saw the opening, and I knew my distances, and I could see in his eyes, he knew the distance too. And the sole of my foot planted harder into the ground as I pushed and the muscles in my calf drove up to the muscles in my thigh as my torso stretched out as it was all one line until my arm reached etc., etc. And I watched the sun hit the tip of the blade right before it went scarlet. And you decompress those moments. So that's one of the things that I think is important about writing sword fights in fiction, is understanding the use of narrative compression and decompression. There's lots of things to compress, like the 17 moves that were just like the previous 17 moves. Those you compress so that you can leave that space for character and story and emotional drama. And then there's the moments where you decompress, and you make it so technical that you don't have to say anything emotional about it. The fact that you're describing in such painstaking detail this move, that creates the suspense. The fact that the author has suddenly frozen the tableau and is moving it ahead at this agonizingly slow pace, towards where it's going, tells you something big is about to happen, and so that's gives you control over suspense.
Guy Windsor
Now that is fascinating. I would never have thought of that, and it's funny, because I've just reread Traitor’s Blade and Knight’s Shadow, and I'm going to be rereading Saint’s Blood and Tyrant’s Throne next. I like to have a little break usually, when reading a series, so that you don't spend too much time in the same world. But I remember the fights from those books, and when I reread them, they were not the same. Because I was expecting a whole bunch more of actual detail about the actual sword fights. But it wasn't there. Clearly my brain had done that bit for me without my even noticing, and my recollection of having read the fight was a lot more detailed than the actual description. That's wizardry, sir. That is wizardry.
Sebastien de Castell
Well, thank you, but you're exactly right. The whole aim is to let the reader choreograph the fight to the level of choreography that suits both their understanding and their imagination. Often I think it's really useful when thinking about something that can feel very specific, like sword fighting, where we go okay, well, to understand you know how to write sword fighting you need to know tons of stuff about swords, and you have to fence, and you have to do all this. And instead just go, okay, well, think about describing somebody playing piano. Now, a lot of people in the world, more people have played the piano than have picked up a rapier, but lots of people have never touched a piano and have no idea how to play piano. And so if you're going to describe a character who is desperately trying to play a piano piece in order to get accepted into Bard School, or whatever it is, you know that you're going you have to be writing in such a way that you're not leaving behind the people who've never played a piano, but that the people who have been playing piano their whole lives, know exactly what it's like to be desperately trying to play a piece well, that they're not left behind either. And so that's what I mean about beginning with, I would write that scene exactly the way I would write a sword fight, where I would have, I would establish the stakes, and I'd go, you know, oh, my God, this kid, if he doesn't get into school, that's it. His parents have told him he's got to go to military college, and he doesn't want to. And one of the instructors has hidden from everyone else that is his own niece is trying to get into the program, there's only one spot, and so this adjudicator doesn't want him in. So once you know that, then you move into he plays the first couple of notes of the piece. Often, lots of piano pieces begin with just a few simple notes, as if to teach the listener how to understand the song.
Sebastien de Castell
Yes, and those moments are where you teach them that, where you show the reader how pianos work, what it feels like to play a piano. You can describe that because that's because that that's easy to do, and then you can get in the piece. And then again, when they start to feel themselves losing control of the piece, which is something that you know happens to piano players and musicians. Sometimes you're trying to play this piece, and you realise you're starting to lose control of your tempo, and you realise you're just one note away from hitting the bad one. And then you can use that narrative decompression to describe, I felt even as I reached for the for the B note, I felt my fingertip brushing that awful black key, the B flat. I prayed that the hammer inside the piano wasn't going to be audible. And then realized that, no, it was going to be anyway. And so I decided to flash the adjudicators a grin, slam that B flat and slide onto that B as if I was a blues player come to tell them what's what you know you can. These are the kind of things that you play with to create. Because again, to go back to what we said beginning, the authenticity is around the emotion.
Guy Windsor
You just came up with that piano playing thing, just on the fly, right?
Sebastien de Castell
Yes, but I will say I'm like, the third worst professional keyboard player on the planet, because I still sometimes play music gigs. And have a music gig coming up in 10 days, and I haven't played since last June. So I'm sitting around having to relearn these pop songs and stuff on keyboards, and I keep finding myself going, man, that little run I know I'm going to hit the wrong note on that. But again, this is, this is what I mean, this is what fiction writing is about. I have anxieties about an upcoming music gig. We're talking about story and about the technical side of writing, and I allow that to come into the foreground. And then that's where you come up with things where you're like, oh, actually, that's not a bad way to describe a scene of someone who's trying to get into a music school.
Guy Windsor
Yeah. Okay. So imagine you were setting out to write Traitor’s Blade, and you came across a book, Sword Fighting for Writers, the book that I'm currently writing. What would you want to have in it? What are the things? I mean, obviously you don't need it now, but back then, what was your foundation?
Sebastien de Castell
I'm sure I'll benefit from it. I think for me, one of the things that I find is always weak about books for writers is there's frequently a tendency to go, here's this brilliant principle, here's this technique, and this is an amazing technique, and the greats all use it etc, etc. And they'll go, “for example,” and then they'll apply the technique as an example. Now this isn't a very compelling example, but you could see that you could use it to make something really great. And so I always think my response as a writer, when I'm reading books about writing, and I read a lot of them. I read How-To books on writing from people I don't think have sold 100th of the books that I've sold, because I'm always desperate. It's the same with fencing, right? You're always desperate to find the next 1% of skill, and you know that it might appear anywhere, and so it might appear in that book that you don't expect it's going to be. However, when I read things, and I find that people are either relying on goddamn Star Wars to prove their theory of story, for example. You know where they'll go. Here's the perfect structure for a book. And look, see it's just like Star Wars. Star Wars works for any structure or storytelling you can ever imagine.
Guy Windsor
Yeah, because it’s like a million different things.
Sebastien de Castell
Yeah, exactly. But when they can't produce an example that's actually compelling, where I'm like, okay, I would like to be able to write that scene. That's what I'm always looking for. And so if I were picking a book on writing sword fights, I would want to see scenes, ideally, ones that were original and fairly complete, but short enough that they were annotated. That's what I'd want to see. If you were telling me, for example, if it were me writing it, and I was going, one way to write a dual scene is, first establish the characters, then establish the stakes, then establish a testing where you show them how the blades work, then, then go into the story drama, then go to the first twist, the second twist, and then use narrative decompression for this moment. Then I would want to see a scene like the Westley and Inigo scene, but in prose where someone's got little annotations going here. See, that's the point where, see how he’s describing this. That's what I'm talking about.
Guy Windsor
And as not a novelist, currently, the book has a bunch of examples, but they're all drawn from other people's books. Or in many cases, from historical accounts of how fights actually work. Because it's a good idea, if you have some idea how sword fights actually work. So you know what violence you're doing to that in your book, so you can take that into account. It's not like you have to make every sword a realistic sword or every sword fight a realistic sword fight, but if you're being unrealistic, it should be deliberate and for a good reason that you've chosen. I'm not trying to be prescriptive, but it's just knowing how it actually works, that will give you some idea as to how what you're doing relates to reality, as I see it, at least. Examples of duels, like eyewitness accounts of actual duels, where people were actually being slaughtered, is one. And I'll be picking some additional sword fighting example scenes from books where I think it's done well. I'm not going to use any bad examples, because I think that's rude. It is ungenerous to the author.
Sebastien de Castell
It's typically not very, you know, as a sort of basic pedagogical principle, when you tell people don't do this, it usually actually has the reverse effect.
Guy Windsor
There's plenty of crap out there, but if finding the good stuff, but that's a really interesting idea. So, if I'm talking about, for example, not using jargon. Take an example of a fight where a jargony-type word is introduced for good reason, or a fight scene where it works perfectly well using only commonly understood words.
Sebastien de Castell
I think using examples is great. But remember, at some point, the aim of the fiction writer, when they're writing a sword fight is to write a great scene, a scene that that leaves them breathless, that leaves them with an emotional response. And therefore, going back to your question, if I was starting out and picking up a book on how to write sword fights, I would want there to be a complete scene in there that I could read as a reader and go, oh my God, what a great scene. I just feel so emotionally affected by that scene that I could then break down and go, oh, I see every single technique Guy's been talking about, or a bunch of the techniques Guy's been talking and here's where they are. And now I understand why it works when you put it all together. Because putting it all together is what the writer has to do. When, as a writer, you're writing things in paragraphs, you're in trouble. When you're going, okay, I got to make this paragraph, do this utilitarian thing. I've executed it very skilfully, excellent. Now that's when you start running into trouble, because it's how it all fits together, and it's not you need to understand the ingredients, but it's getting them all together in the right way, where you suddenly get the flavour. Okay, so if I were doing what you're what you're doing, I would probably find either one or more of actual amazing, either, right? One which you could do, a little daunting at first, or find scenes from books that you're like, this is an amazing scene. I want to use these entire three or four or five pages of the scene, and then just go to the publisher and say, hey, I'd like to put this in my book.
Guy Windsor
You mean, get permission from them? Generally speaking, if you're annotating, it's fair use or fair deal. I would try to get permission.
Sebastien de Castell
But yeah, just as a matter of my experience with the British, they're very picky about what they define as fair dealing or fair use.
Guy Windsor
Yeah, and just as a matter of politeness, I would generally approach the author rather than the publisher.
Sebastien de Castell
In my case, would go, I don't have a problem with it, but you're going to have to talk to my publisher.
Guy Windsor
Sure, but then the author can introduce you to the publisher. And then you're not just some random email in somebody's inbox. It's coming from somebody they know, because Penguin Random House gets probably a million emails a day, and the chances of them happening upon mine and taking it seriously is relatively small.
Sebastien de Castell
Well, I don't know you are the Dr Guy Windsor.
Guy Windsor
They don’t know that.
Sebastien de Castell
If your opening line is, “Do you know who I am?”
Guy Windsor
Well, that would help, yeah. Well, unfortunately, the immediate, subconscious or conscious answers to that question is going to be no. That, “do you know who I am?” only works if they actually do.
Sebastien de Castell
Maybe sometimes people go, oh, maybe I should know who this is. That happens to me. I'm sometimes introduced to screenwriters or actors where I'm like, I don't know who this person is, but I guess I should know, so I better seem odd. Anyway, regardless, I would say that that is a pretty good way to do it, because then you have that freedom to go, as the writer of this book on how to write sword fighting and fiction, you are saying, look, I think this works. I think this is a great scene, and this is what you believe fiction writers who are writing about swords for the first time, this is what they should aim for, in terms of, it's a fact. In fact, I would start with, if you were doing that with one scene or multiple scenes, start by saying why you think it's a great scene. We started when we talked about, you know, the opening scene from The Duellists, the Ridley Scott film. We started by our immediate thing was, start talking about why it's so great. And so start with why is it so great? And then you think it's so great. And then, you know, and then, and then, why does it and then, how is it achieving that? You know? You can take the scene from The Duellists, and you break it down, you can go look where the camera is aiming right now. Why is it doing a close up on a guy's face in the middle of a sword fight? Well, because you want.
Guy Windsor
And that's something that sometimes annoys me about movies where it's basically a martial arts movie, and you have this fight going on, and maybe it’s even a martial artist, I know of as a martial artist, and I'm watching this thing, and then it goes to a cut of the person's face. It's like, I want to see what their hips are doing.
Sebastien de Castell
As Shakira said, the hips don't lie. I had to get that in there somewhere. I think we have to remember, and this is again, something that I would want the reassurance of in a book about writing sword fights, the reassurance that the writer of this non-fiction book recognizes that it's about creating emotion. And so, yes, sometimes you're going to show the facial expressions and not the hips in a martial arts movie. Sometimes you want to show the hips, because sometimes you realize that that's where the power is coming from. And if you and I were staging a martial arts fight, I don't know, sort of a kung fu fight, no weapons at all, some type of, let's say more Yin style, or let's say Yang Style, type of fight. So force and stuff, we might show the audience the hip position, show the person getting their hips into position so that we know, oh, okay, why is that? Oh, because that's where the punch is really getting its power from. And then later in the fight, go back to suddenly showing the hips, and go, uh oh, this guy, he's building the power up for a big punch. So that that's the magic of it. But it's making sure, first and foremost, that the readers of your book are going to know. It's about creating these emotional moments for a reader. Here's an example of a scene that puts everything together and creates that emotional moment. Because they need to be able to judge it. They need to be able to read the scene and go, well, that scene does nothing for me. I hate that scene. Or, oh my god, I totally see what he's getting at. And then, here's how it works. And then those principles are all coming out again, which, in a way, is exactly how you and I have been talking about scenes in movies.
Guy Windsor
Do you have any favourite sword fights in books other than your own, obviously?
Sebastien de Castell
I don't tend to. Which is strange. Because obviously, the way that I write sword fights is obviously drawn from my response to how others have written about sword fights. I suppose it's probably fair to say that my style also comes out of having done theatrical fencing and stage combat and then choreographing those types of scenes and seeing what happens when you're trying to choreograph the scenes, which is marvellous, and is, by the way, a technique that actually works pretty well when you're if you're trying to put together a fight scene, is have a friend, and then just try to actually work it out together and see what feels good and what looks good.
Guy Windsor
My third top tip is block the fight in the real world, because that way you don't have things that are impossible to occur, like elbows bending the wrong way, or swords passing from one side of a body to the other without doing any damage.
Sebastien de Castell
There’s an old fight choreographer trick, which is, because every actor you're going to work with is, is different. I was choreographing for a production of Richard III in London. This is a million years ago, like 20 years ago, and it wasn't Shakespeare’s Richard III. It was meant to be a more historical one. But the first thing I did with the main actor, who was playing Richard III, was actually the central figure of the story. And there were quite a few sword fights happening that were going to happen. I brought some bokken with me, wooden Japanese practice swords. And I had 10 of the other actors. They all had one, and the lead actor had his in the middle. And I said, just move in slow motion. Just move in very slow motion. And you guys just try to stab him, and don't get stabbed. Just feel your way out. Feel what feels good. Now, if you do that fast, it's going to be ridiculous and pointless, if you do it hyper, hyper slow, everyone understood not to go for the face. Then if you're just moving in ultra slow motion, then that means that everyone has a chance to think, where do I feel good? Where feels like I can find things and you start to feel your way around. Well, this feels like it could work, and then, oh no, it doesn't work, because I'm taking this big, giant wind up, and the other person just extends their sword. So therefore, if I want to do that, okay, let's do that again, you know? And so you try the wind up, but you step back, and then they just step forward and extend the sword. You go, okay, all right, I'm going to, very slowly, pretend I'm going to do the wind up, and they come for me, and then I'm going to parry their sword, just knock their sword aside and use that force to get my wind up that I desperately wanted to have because it feels so good, and, oh, look, now I'm in a good position. So there's some of that I think is really helpful if you're trying to work things through. But in terms of, I recall Stephen Bruce, I often talk about Steven Bruce’s books.
Guy Windsor
Yeah, they were the great books.
Sebastien de Castell
They're a big influence on me. And I think in the earlier books, especially, he was very particular about having Vlad, his main character, who's what's called an Easterner, which is basically like a human being, like we are, versus the Dragareons, who are these, like six and a half, seven foot tall, sort of elvish, almost eternally living beings who are much stronger, and they all use basically longswords of various kinds, because they can, because they're so strong, but Vlad uses a rapier. And that itself even something that even if you know nothing else about sword fighting, you're like, he takes pride in using this rapier because it represents a kind of finesse and skill over strength, which is such an interesting contrast to the Dragareons. Who are bigger and more powerful, but they think they're vastly more elegant. They think he's a filthy kind of human, like dirty barbarian. And so his grandfather's insistence on teaching him Eastern fencing with a rapier is like this reclamation of elegance. On top of this is a weapon that's really good for fighting stronger opponents who have longswords.
Guy Windsor
I'm not sold on the whole longswords are clumsy, rapiers are elegant thing because I've handled a bunch of historical longswords and a bunch of historical rapiers. And honestly, the rapiers are pretty clunky compared to most of those longswords.
Sebastien de Castell
Oh, yeah, no, exactly. Well, it's the same when people think that longswords weighed like 15 pounds and rapiers weighed ounces and in fact, your average longsword is probably about the same weight as a rapier.
Guy Windsor
Yeah, it's maybe slightly weightier like, I think average is 1.2 kilos for a rapier, 1.6 for a longsword, something like that. But you've got two hands on the longsword.
Sebastien de Castell
Oh, no, exactly. Longswords, they're incredibly elegant. They're flowing. I don't know where it comes from. Maybe it was like Conan the Barbarian, or something, that implanted this idea into our heads of longswords as these kind of clumsy hack and slash weapons. Which is funny, because nobody thinks that about katanas. Which are longswords. Everyone thinks, oh, you know the Japanese samurai, they were so beautiful and elegant, where the Knights were clumsy. But of course, it doesn't work that way. Eventually, it all comes down to biomechanics and the physics of metal objects. And so, of course, one of the reasons why humans admire elegance. And again, this is useful when writing fiction. One of the reasons why humans innately admire elegance is because of its sublime efficiency. And so someone who has to fight with a longsword in a battle all day long, they're not going to be carrying a ridiculously heavy weapon that you have to grunt every time you swing it, because you're toast. And they're not going to be hacking and slashing, because what they have to do is conserve as much energy from the initial move as is humanly possible. A perfect longsword fight would be the most flowing, balletic thing you'd ever seen. Of course, because humans get scared and frightened or angry or hurt or slip, then that creates what can look like, the clunkiness. But nobody's ever aiming for clunky in that sense.
Guy Windsor
Longswords were basically weapons for professionals, and rapiers were often weapons held by amateurs. And that's not necessarily saying anything about the level of skill involved, but it's unlikely that very many longswords in the period were actually held by people who didn't know how to use them properly.
Sebastien de Castell
Well, that division of professional and amateur is always a tricky one, because, yes, there's a difference in going off to war, and what weapon you use in wars, especially in a context where people are wearing armour, versus what weapon you would wear for duelling or for walking around a city at night. I always find it kind of an interesting, tricky balance. Certainly, rapiers are very, very expensive, so they're mostly worn by the wealthy and nobles, which means people who are partly, it's a status symbol, so they're also going to get training because they want, they don't want to feel like just somebody who bought an expensive weapon and walks around with it but doesn't know how to use it. So there's lots of different elements in there, but in terms of status and skill and what's viable, I think it is a fair bet to say that as duels sort of became a semi formalized endeavour for the very brief period of time in which they were remotely viable. It was a linear terrain, smooth linear terrain, generally speaking, like fighting as close to in a line, not the way that modern fencing is, but more of that. And therefore it's a thrusting weapon. If I had to fight a duel like that in the street with no armour, I think I'd rather the rapier than the longsword. But I’d throw them both away for a spear.
Guy Windsor
If you actually want to win the fight. Absolutely.
Sebastien de Castell
It's the funniest thing; people talk about the gradual sophistication of weapons and stuff. And spear beats almost everything, 90% of the time.
Guy Windsor
Spears date back to the Stone Age.
Sebastien de Castell
That's the amazing thing about them. And when you look at those stone age obsidian spearheads and things that slice through anything, yeah, it's remarkable. One of the things I want to do in one of my next books, is have the character, I want them to have an interestingly modern in terms of the period that I'm writing in, like a sort of a pseudo early modern era, like 17th century, but I want them to have a spear, but a sort of a modern take for that era of the spear. Like, what would you do? The spear that can come apart in two pieces or something.
Guy Windsor
When I got married in 2006, David Edge was running the arms and armour in the Wallace Collection then, and he very kindly arranged a sword handling session for my swordy guests. So the day before the wedding, we went to the Wallace Collection, and we had an hour or so behind the scenes handling these gorgeous things. And one of the weapons I actually handled is it's basically just a sword in a scabbard. When you look at it, it's a little bit clunky and weird, and the scabbard sort of doesn't come off. And it turns out there's a button in the handle. So this three-and-a-half-foot long sword, which looks kind of like a fairly crappy rapier in a fairly chunky scabbard. You press a button, and a three-foot-long blade shoots out the pommel right and ideally locks into place. Unfortunately, the spring is long gone, so you would have to shake it and out it comes. But then you have what is basically a six-foot-long spear, right, which you can pretend is a sword. And that's historical.
Sebastien de Castell
I got in trouble once, well, not in trouble, but another fantasy writer who was doing a debut, they were being a trifle pompous. I'm sure they didn't mean to be. But was telling me about they’d read Traitor’s Blade and, like, yeah, I'll give you whatever on the sword fights. Fine, they're a little over the top, but, whatever, Falcio’s sword, with the spring-loaded blade, that's just ridiculous. I said, well, in the book, the whole point is it's ridiculous. For the first time, he had some money to spend, and he thought, I want the coolest rapier ever. And so he wanted a rapier with a spring-loaded blade. But, of course, the amount of force generated is so pathetic that you hit the button and the blade just sort of basically plops out. But part of what drove that is that when you go and see historical weapons, there are so many bizarre examples, the lantern Buckler being one of the classics that has all these weird features on because they were trying things, and what I liked about it was that in the case of Falcio, he got these rapiers. And, yes, the blades coming out are completely useless, except that when he gets stuck in a narrow alley fight. And all of a sudden, the rapier is the worst thing on the planet because you don't have room for the blade. And you can just let the blade fall out, and now you've got these knuckle dusters. So yeah, there's a book that I want to write, once I get through the nine I've got under contract that I tentatively call Werewolves of Venice, because I wanted to do a kind of historical fantasy in 17th century Venice, whereas these threats, get bigger and bigger, these two characters who are trying to deal with this strange supernatural threat that's come where they realize because, of course, these are people trained to fight other people in certain situations. They know what happens if you’ve got to fight them in armour. They know what happens if you’ve got to fight them in regular street clothes. They don't know what happens if you have to fight something that ends up being sort of like a werewolf or something like that. And they keep going back to the same weaponsmith, and going I need a bigger sword, or I needed this, yeah, so that I could take literally only things that do appear historically, like Fiore, is like burning powder, or whatever.
Guy Windsor
yeah, exactly. The blinding powder in the poleax.
Sebastien de Castell
And the lantern buckler. So that by the end of the book, using things that did appear historically somewhere, basically like a 17th century Iron Man going off to fight.
Guy Windsor
That's a genius idea.
Sebastien de Castell
I think it would be so much fun. And I just like the idea of taking all these, as you say, guys like you and I, we periodically run across something somewhere in a museum somewhere and the Wallace Collection is great for this, but there's other ones. I was in a museum in Sri Lanka where I saw there were some bizarre pieces of weaponry that somebody had tried to devise. And you just like, they're so wonderful. I just want to put them all together into one completely bizarre moment. But, yeah, the pistol swords, things like that. And even where people debate was this genuinely somebody thinking this would be good, or was the point of this that it's a hunting weapon. You shoot the thing, and then you go and finish it off with the sword blade?
Guy Windsor
No, it's not a hunting weapon. Absolutely not.
Sebastien de Castell
What's your theory on the pistol rapier?
Guy Windsor
Well, okay, so if you're hunting, you have a gun for hunting with. It is specialised as a gun, and you have a separate hunting sword, which is when you need a long blade for doing stuff on the hunt. It makes no sense to put them together, because hunting is not a surprise. You prepare the tools you're going to need for the environment you're going into, and you go off and you do your hunting. And the people doing this were experienced hunters or had experienced hunters in the party training less experienced hunters, usually children. So there's just no sense having the gun and the sword together because it makes a less good sword and a less good gun. But if I met you down a dark alley and you pull out a blade on me, and I pull out mine, I can get a shot off, which may or may not hit you, but it's certainly going to surprise you. And you know, guns back then weren't that reliable, so I'm not relying on that as my main defence, but now I have also a three-and-a-half-foot long steel blade to defend myself with, or get a thrust in. So it makes a lot of sense as a sort of self-defence type weapon. It makes no sense at all as hunting accoutrements.
Sebastien de Castell
I definitely hear you, I think it's a dubious concept to some degree, because, as you say, a pistol on a good day isn't a super reliable weapon back then. And a pistol that has to be compromised in order to fit into the hilt of the rapier means that means that there's a pretty there's roughly a 99% chance that what you're basically doing is ending up going into a fight with a slightly clumpy rapier.
Guy Windsor
Yeah, but a rapier that goes bang, because usually you can at least get a flash in the pan, if nothing else.
Sebastien de Castell
Yeah, right. I'm curious what you think. Not to sorry for this aside, but I can't remember what it's called. Christian Cameron and I used it together in a short story we wrote together about an assassin. It's a tiny little, like mini crossbow thing that you assemble in parts. Do you know what I'm talking about? I'd have to look up what we call because I we only, I only ever used it the story that one time. But I remember seeing, I think it's Todd's workshop, the guy from that video about it, where he said, all he could figure out was that maybe this was a weird nobleman's toy, where they bring it as sort of for pranks to, like, chase each other around and shoot each other with it.
Guy Windsor
Like an executive fidget toy, medieval style, yeah. So it was a small crossbow, like a pistol crossbow, that could be disassembled.
Sebastien de Castell
It was just very, very small, and you could hide it. And so one of the theories is, oh, this is an assassin's weapon, which is a very attractive idea if you're a fiction writer. And he was sort of saying, well, it's unlikely you kill somebody with this. There are so many better ways to do it. But that's the thing that we forget sometimes, is you look at all the crap that gets invented today, that people think is an innovation that ends up not working at all. That was happening historically, too. They're going, how do I build a better rapier?
Guy Windsor
Look in a World War Two Museum at some of the special operations executive, secret weapons that that they actually carried into Nazi-held Europe. And at some point might actually have to rely on it, like a pen that fires a bullet or something like that. And it's like these are weapons of last resort. You don't go in there hoping to have a fight with this thing. It's if you get caught and you have, maybe, if you can get one shot off, that might give you time to escape. Better to have that than nothing. That's sort of how I feel about the sword/gun combination weapons is and also, like we're talking about a lead ball that's been pushed down. It's like a flint lock pistol, right? So when that ball comes out, it's not necessarily terribly accurate, and there's a very good chance it's going to hit your blade on the way out right. And if that happens, it might damage the blade and it will certainly be sent off in funny directions if that does happen. So you wouldn't want to shoot a deer with it, or even a rabbit, because the chances of hitting it are pretty low.
Sebastien de Castell
I’m trying to remember where I read about that, that theory that this is a hunting weapon. But you and I, of course, I don't know if you remember, you helped me invent a superior form of pistol sword, where the pistol is coming out of the pommel.
Guy Windsor
Yes, yes.
Sebastien de Castell
You don't have those problems. And because, of course, the vision of like holding up a rapier and aiming it by aiming the line of the blade and firing the weapon, is a nice to think about. But the thing is, you're almost only ever going to use this in a context where aiming is not the problem. It's just a function of you just need something right away. And the idea of putting it in the pommel so that you're basically flipping the sword blade back from you and then firing the bullet at somebody, I think is beautiful. I haven't gotten a chance to use it in the book that I wanted to write for that. So I'm still holding that in reserve.
Guy Windsor
Oh, we should patent it and then make them.
Sebastien de Castell
There you go. Like that wonderful German guy, Jorg, with his, what did he call the instant Legolas, repeater bow. He kept perfecting it over and over, and now people actually buy these things. It's remarkable what he did. I always find that really interesting, especially as a fantasy writer. And I think that's a useful thing for writers to think about, is don't just assume that everything has to be invented in exactly the same order as it was in our world. For example, there's a 17th century type of book I want to write. It's not set in our 17th century. It's a fantasy world, but it's very much sort of early modern sort of period. But I want them to have cartridge bullets, because I want there to be a whole thing where one of the things that these pistoleers have to do, is, because of the different kinds of creatures and beings that they face, is they have to especially make each bullet, in effect, by bullet I mean cartridge in this case. And of course, the first cartridge weapon, I think, was the late 1800s or something, yeah, because you need Mercury forminate or something, which we hadn't figured out.
Guy Windsor
By cartridge, you mean the bullet and the powder are wrapped up together in a metal case with a primer at the end. Because original cartridges were you had all of that stuff together, but what you did is you bit the paper and you spit the ball down the barrel. You pour the powder down. Then you spit the ball down, then you wad up the paper and shove it down with the ram rod. I’m getting out of order. I have actually shot black powder stuff. It's Friday night, powder, then paper, then ball is how it goes. And that's one of the sort of triggers for the Indian Mutiny in 1857 was the rumour went around that the cartridge paper had been greased with pig fat to offend the Muslims and cow fat to offend the Hindus. And because you have to bite it, of course, that wasn't actually true, but that's the rumour. And so everyone was objecting to these cartridges, because there was the rumour that it had pig fat in it and cow fat in it, just because offending all of your soldiers is such a good idea. That’s 1857, so, yeah, the brass case cartridge is significantly later. I want to say 1880s, maybe 1890s.
Sebastien de Castell
I think it's 1880s, I think it's that period. I looked it up recently. But for me, the thing is, but I want that something like that, in an earlier period, and so I have to figure out why. So things get invented partly when the technology reaches a certain level, because every piece of technology is built on previous piece of technology. Like making a very precise brass casing requires first having the ability to do very precise shaping of brass, which is harder earlier on. But I want to have that earlier, but sometimes the thing that causes something to be invented later rather than earlier is actually because there isn't as much of a need for it. There are things that work perfectly well, and also technology doesn't always get better. So the flintlock gets invented after the wheellock. But I would still argue that the wheellock is a better pistol. It's just that it's vastly more expensive to make.
Guy Windsor
That's a good point. Didn't the wheellock require a spanner?
Sebastien de Castell
It did require a spanner.
Guy Windsor
So the advantage to the flintlock is you don't need a tool which could get lost.
Sebastien de Castell
Although the tool that can get lost. I mean, since anything can get lost, including your bullets and your gunpowder, once you've prepped a wheellock, once you've wound it, it's ready to fire, and it has an infinitely better chance of firing in the wet or the rain than the flintlock. It's just that they're very expensive to make. And so some things we have not because they're the best version of a thing or the most sophisticated version, but because they're the more cost effective.
Guy Windsor
Yeah, that's why stuff that used to be made out of metal is these days made out of plastic. And then breaks.
Sebastien de Castell
And then breaks every five seconds, yeah. So that's a thing I always tell writers, as well. You never have to describe in your books how you worked out why people have the things that they have when they do. But you shouldn't limit yourself to, oh no, I'm going to write a fantasy novel, or with sword play, in which it has to exactly mirror a particular period of time.
Guy Windsor
Although I remember reading one book where it was basically sort of Renaissance level technology, except they didn't have guns. It was all done with swords, but they had newspapers and premade cigarettes. And it's like, okay, for newspapers, you have to have cheap paper and massive printing presses that are capable of producing 1000s and 1000s of copies of the same thing in a single run, right? Because it's a newspaper and so yes, you had bills that were printed up or tracts that were printed up in the 17th century, and there were 1000s of them, but that's a single page, right? You can't have a 50-page newspaper before you have industrial sort of printing if it's going to be widely distributed. And like machines to make cigarettes. Why would you have a machine to make cigarettes? When absolutely, everybody has their fingers. So it requires a certain level of sort of fundamental industrial development before certain products are feasible, I think,
Sebastien de Castell
Well, I would say, so, two counter points to that. And I think on balance, you're correct, most of the time, that's a good operating principle to work on. Why do you have pre-rolled cigarettes when everybody has their fingers and can do it, and it costs a lot of money to have anything do that? If I was writing that in fiction, I might have it be that it's considered dirty to make something with your fingers, or it's considered unsacred.
Guy Windsor
The existence of premade cigarettes, isn't the issue, is the mass production of them.
Sebastien de Castell
I was watching the TV version of the Three Body Problem.
Guy Windsor
That’s a book I mean to read, is it good?
Sebastien de Castell
It's fabulous. I mean, the story is amazing. I started reading the book, but then I was watching the TV show, which is always, you know, but I really like the TV show. And one of the things they do that's interesting is they have these sort of scenes that take place in a, basically, a video game, sort of simulation world, but where they're trying to solve these unbelievably intricate and complex mathematical problems in periods of time where there's no computers or anything. And so there's one example where they basically use an army of, like 100,000 people as a giant human abacus to perform believably complicated calculations. And so you realize there's often ways of doing things. So your newspaper example, you know, how do you do this? Well, if there was enough of a reason to want to do it, you get 10,000 people with whatever, and somehow you just have to have a rationale why it's so important that people want to do this. Strange religion is, is always the freebie. You always go, oh, because their religious belief is this, but often it's better if you have a logical, social or economic rationale for it, but that's part of the trick of writing fantasy, and sometimes it's what makes it especially compelling. But if all you do is throw a melange together of things that you happen to like and you don't deal with why did they come about at that time period, or the setting that you're in, then you're just creating a weird anachronism. But the flip side to that is, I remember I was doing a reading once, and I think it was for either Traitor’s Blade or Knight’s Shadow, and a member of the audience said, I don't understand. At one point you talk about there being windows in this castle. But castles in the Middle Ages didn't have glass windows and I was like, go to France, go to the Loire Valley, and you're going to see all of these things that started as military castles, military fortresses that then became somebody's Palace, that then got taken over in the French Revolution and turned into a prison that then got turned into a school that now have been bought again by some wealthy person, and you're going to see, you know, Vancouver is funny for this, on the really premium real estate by the water, people buy this $8 million property, knock down the house right away, because it's the property that's got the value and put up some abomination that happens to make them feel important. And so it's one of the few areas point great road where I like to go jogging, sometimes by the beach, one of the few places where there's no sense of neighbourhood whatsoever, because as soon as you buy the place, you knock down what was there before and put up what you want. But it didn't used to be that way, like with a castle, they live across centuries, yeah, and they evolve, and they grow.
Guy Windsor
And why wouldn't you put glass in your windows once glass becomes available?
Sebastien de Castell
Exactly. That's the point. We all live in a kind of anachronistic world, in that sense. Imagine 300 years from now, where someone's writing. I don't know why they've done this, but they've written a novel in which you and I are talking about sword fighting books or something, and somebody says, well, that's ridiculous. Why would anybody be learning to fight with rapiers in the 21st century? There's always a reason for it, and, and part of it is interest, and it's part of the socially constructed identity, like we like to be the people that use swords. So there's just so much richness there. And that's what I mean, is that in the pursuit of a very nominal notion of authenticity, you don't want as a writer to be so focused on that that you don't allow yourself to find ways of achieving the emotional authenticity that's driving you to write the story.
Guy Windsor
Absolutely. Wow. So you have nine books under contract? Isn't that an awful lot of books?
Sebastien de Castell
It is an awful lot of books. It just happened to be that way. I have three more books under the Court of Shadows series.
Guy Windsor
Okay, so that's the Play of Shadows series, excellent, yes, because actually it may be my favourite of your books yet, Play of Shadows, and if people listen, they can't see but I'm actually waving my copy of it, because writers like it when you do that.
Sebastien de Castell
Exactly. So there's the prelude also, which is Crucible of Chaos, which is kind of almost an Agatha Christie mystery, set in a supposedly demonically invaded monastery.
Guy Windsor
It’s a very strange book, that one, yeah. Very strange.
Sebastien de Castell
Well, I just love Esther Varborough, so it first came out of some short stories I written a while back, and I just love the notion of this kind of Hercule Poirot, you know, somewhat very heavy, yet still determined to be a great swordsman, swashbuckling detective of the supernatural, who's a Greatcoat. So, yeah, I quite love that.
Speaker 1
How many more are in the series?
Sebastien de Castell
The series plus the prelude, which is Crucible of Chaos, and then each Court of Shadows book features a different new hero who will by the end, all come together, but they can be read in any order, but each one is a high wire act. I mean, Our Lady of the Blades is the most intricate, complicated and devilish, devilishly difficult book I've ever attempted. It's, it's slowly killing me.
Guy Windsor
But when is it coming out?
Sebastien de Castell
November, unless I actually fail at this next final stage.
Guy Windsor
Okay, well, don't hurry on my account, because I'd rather you were fit to write the next one after it. But I am very much looking forward to it.
Sebastien de Castell
It's an interesting book, for sure. And then, yeah, after that comes Gambling Gaze. And then the sort of the culminating book of the Court of Shadows. And yeah, as I say, I have a new fantasy YA trilogy coming out next year, and the astronaut book. And what else? And then there are the two Malevolent Seven sequels, of which one's finished. Actually, it's only eight books under contract. Ah, I got all the time in the world.
Guy Windsor
So you've written malevolent eight? Yes, that's ready to go. Okay, are there going to be any more Argosi books?
Sebastien de Castell
Yes, I have written the fourth Argosi book.
Guy Windsor
Oh, have you? When's that coming out?
Sebastien de Castell
Well, so I have to decide when to publish that. So basically, the Spellslinger series was an eight-book contract, which they were sort of like, trying to win the contract against another publisher. And so they said, well, hell, they want to buy four books. We'll buy eight from you. We said, that sounds good. And then they wanted six books for the actual Spellslinger. And said, well, I said, what do you want with the other two books? They're like, I don't know. Whatever you want. I thought that's a very weird way to approach publishing, but we ended up agreeing that it would be that the two Argosi books, and then I got annoyed at them for some reason, and said, as I was delivering the last one, oh, by the way, do you mind putting in a thing at the end, Ferius's Adventures Continue in Fate of the Argosi? And they said, what are you talking about? I said, well, you guys said you didn't want any more books. So I thought I'd just publish that one myself, but if you wouldn't mind just putting in the reference in there. And so then they ended up buying Fate of the Argosi. See, when I wrote Fate of the Argosi, I had an outline for the full story and then was halfway through that when I told my editor, this feels like it's complete at this point. And so, what do you want to do? Do you want me to try to compress everything, or let it be two books? And he said, well, this feels great to us. We're happy this is the third book, we're done with this contract. So I think continuing Ferius’s adventures, I kind of would prefer to do it separately from that publisher who is wonderful to work with on the Spellslinger books. So I have to decide when to release it. But I think what's probably going to happen is probably next year, I think there's going to be a special edition of all the Spellslinger books, and then, there'll be a special edition of the Argosi books, which this the fourth one will then be there, but it's actually already written.
Guy Windsor
Well, I'm looking forward to that. And have you opened your Argosi training school?
Sebastien de Castell
Yeah, it's funny. Of all the things I've ever done as a writer, the thing I get the most letters about is the Argosi. It's people wanting to be Argosi and figure out how to be Argosi, which is one of the reasons why I wrote the Argosi book separate from the Spellslinger, so that they could explore that a little bit more. But no, I'm not opening an Argosi training school. It is a strange thing, when I was writing the Argosi. I was trying to push back against the obsession with magic power that dominates fantasy, and especially YA fantasy. One of the things I try to show with Spellslinger is that when people obsess over wanting magic powers, it's like, well, what is it you think you want? Because a fireball is a horrific thing. It's setting people on fire. What else you think you're doing with it? You want to hurl it at somebody? Even telepathy, like reading people's minds. Imagine if somebody came up to you and said, good news. I know exactly what Stacey at school is planning because I broke into her house, stole her computer, read her diary. You’d go, well, that's a horrible person, but somehow in fantasy, we go, oh, you read her mind. Well, that's okay. And so with Spellslinger, a lot of time, I was pushing back against that to show that some of that stuff that we desire isn't so good. But I needed a counter to that, which was a notion that actually all of our human talents are what are genuinely amazing. And if you put them all together, they become their own kind of magic. And so that's what the Argosi are all about. And so as I had to kind of go deeper into the Argosi and go into the four ways of, you know, water, winds, thunder and stone, and then the seven talents of dancing and eloquence and music and resilience and all these things, I realised I was starting to kind of create a way of teaching myself how to be more like the kind of person that I want to be. And so it's very strange now when periodically I run into a thorny dilemma and start thinking, should I follow the way of water or the way of thunder here? So I would never go out and say, look, here's a school for Argosi, here's a book on how to be an Argosi.
Guy Windsor
That would not be the Argosi way. The Argosi way is always indirect.
Sebastien de Castell
That's right. And actually, the Argosi way, one of the things that comes through the books all the time is that you have to basically create your own way. You have to teach yourself. Because you have to figure out, what does it mean to you to be eloquent? How do you become eloquent? Or how do you in martial arts? So you know this, right? Like there no two bodies are the same, and therefore there's really not one perfect method of any martial art, because it always has to be adapted to that person, you know, the person who isn't as tall and strong as somebody else, needs to learn how to fight either lower down or higher up. And so, that's the one of the joys of the Argosi books is, anytime I write one of those, I find as I'm going through my own life, I get to experience, I get to sort of think about that stuff.
Guy Windsor
That is so cool. Yeah, I've been toying with a book about, basically the applications in living a modern life of stuff I've learned from historical martial arts, and it just keeps running up against the ‘this sounds like pretentious wank’. So maybe putting it in fiction would be a better way to do it.
Sebastien de Castell
Yeah, you write the very literary fiction story of a person who is dealing with all the things everyone deals with in life, but gets it in their head to just live life as a swordsman and so using all of those principles in what they're doing, I always think there's a real potency to that. You know, Dan Brown, who wrote The Da Vinci Code, his genius is going, I'm going to write, you know, either a standard or not quite a standard thriller story, adventure, but I'm going to give it a context that is about some particular field, whether it's art history, or, religious history, or he did a master class, I think, you know, that masterclass.com thing that I saw, and he said you could do this with a wine maker. You use all of the interesting stuff about wine making as the context for these scary murders and killing and power and greed story and it pretty much always works. It gives a grounding to things. And people like the idea of, I was reading this book and enjoying it, but I also learned something. Which is why you get annoyed when somebody writes fiction with poor use of very specific fencing jargon, because then there's a part of you, the teacher, that goes, all these people reading this are going to get the wrong idea.
Guy Windsor
Yeah, exactly. They're learning wrong. And that's, that's, that's a sin. That's, yeah, interesting. Wow. You have been very generous with your time. Sebastian, thank you so much.
Sebastien de Castell
It's my pleasure. Thanks for having me.
