Interview with Sebastien de Castell
- Mar 6
- 11 min read
Before we jump into the questions, could you please tell us a bit about yourself? Who are you beyond the page?
When I was sixteen years old, I read this book by Keith Tailor titled “Bard”. It was about a 6th-century Irish bard who travelled the world going on adventures, playing music, swinging swords and writing stories. The second I put the book down, I knew two things: first, I wanted to become a bard, and second, nobody hires people to be bards anymore. So, I’ve spent the decades since doing everything from working as a travelling musician to choreographing swordfights for the theatre and ultimately, writing fantasy novels for a living.
So, I kind of became a bard in the aggregate, and so, whether its going on solo cycling trips or taking up ballroom dancing with my darling wife, that spirit of searching for a sense of wonder wherever I can find it has remained at the centre of my life.
What led you to become a writer — and specifically a fantasy writer?
I’d been a full-time musician for a few years, playing in a classic rock cover band, and suddenly found myself hitting a creative low point. One of the problems with ostensibly artistic professions is that you can find yourself earning a living while simultaneously stifling your creativity. Also, I was being sued by the bass player for control of the band. So, I did what I always do when at a crossroads: I went to the library. There’s something freeing about wandering through all those shelves, picking up any book you want on any subject that attracts your interest. I ended up finding a box of cassette tapes called “Let’s Write a Mystery” by Ralph McInerny, which took the listener step-by-step through his process for writing a novel. I’d had to go hunting for a working cassette deck just to listen to them, but when I did, something shifted in me that allowed me for the first time to write a novel. Mind you, that first book was a pretty terrible mystery, but years later, I decided to jump into the deep waters again and wrote my first fantasy novel. At the time, it was titled “Three of Traitors”but was later renamed “Traitor’s Blade” and became my debut novel as part of a four-book deal that launched my career. I’ve been writing fantasy full-time ever since.
What are some personal passions or hobbies that influence your creativity?
While music and swordplay have been instrumental in my books from the very beginning, travel is what fuels my writing more than anything else. Every new town or village, ancient fortress or modern city spark questions for me about the different perspectives people have about what the world is and what it should be. Those questions often become the basis for new novels and fantasy cultures.
Any fun or little-known facts about you that you would like to share with readers?
I once had to learn all the big hits from the Swedish band ABBA to perform in a tribute show. We had two gigs and that was the end of the band.
Creative Process Inspiration
What first drew you to writing fantasy, and do you remember the moment you knew it was your genre?
I wasn’t reading a lot of books in high school until a friend lent me a copy of Jhereg by Steven Brust. I was absolutely hooked by the style and voice, and soon fell in love with both fantasy and swashbuckling fiction.
Where do you usually find inspiration for your worlds and magic systems?
There’s a quote about the field of sociology that goes something like, “Sociologists treat the strange as ordinary and the ordinary as strange”. There’s something really potent in that way of looking at the world, and often I’ll find myself asking questions about whether something that’s treated as perfectly normal in our world, like the obsession with celebrity actors, might be very different if transported into a fantasy world. That example formed the basis of Play of Shadows, a recent novel of mine in which the elements of theatre: the actors, the stage, the props, became the basis for the system of magic know as Veristor Magic in which an actor channels the spirits of the historical figures they’re playing on stage. That process of beginning with something ordinary in our world and trying to make it strange and exotic plays out with almost all my fantasy worlds in one way or another.
Do you outline your stories before writing, or do you let the plot unfold as you go?
I’ve never been one of those writers with a hard-and-fast process. Sometimes I write massively long outlines and then dump them after the first few chapters of writing, other times I start with nothing but an idea and then find myself building a kind of outline as I go. Mostly, my process is to try to live the story as I write it – to let myself feel what my characters are feeling and continuously search for the next big shift in the story.
Are there any authors or books that heavily influenced your writing style or approach to fantasy?
Roger Zelazny’s Nine Princes in Amber was a big influence on me, as were the old hardboiled writers who partly inspired him like Raymond Chandler. On the other hand, the swashbuckling writers like Rafael Sabatini always make me want to find that daring heroic spirit and put it into my stories. I’m also a fan of dialogue, so Aaron Sorkin, writer of The West Wing, has influenced my sense of timing and banter in dialogue.
What’s the most unusual source of inspiration you’ve ever used in a fantasy story?
Well, the entire basis for the Greatcoats – the order of swashbuckling travelling magistrates in my first fantasy series – came from an actual greatcoat that my brother once gave me for Christmas ages ago. At the time, I couldn’t figure out what I’d ever do with it, but then I was doing some acting work – always on night shoots – and discovered that you could pretty much carry everything you needed to survive for a week outside in the pockets of a greatcoat. That’s what got me on the idea of these travelling magistrates whose coats were the most important tool in their arsenal for surviving in a dangerous world.
Worldbuilding Magic
How do you balance creating complex, immersive worlds with keeping the story accessible to readers?
I always try to write from the standpoint of a character, starting them in a dark cave and only showing as much of the world as fits in the beam of a flashlight. In other words, if you’re always careful to tell the story through a character’s eyes rather than through all the things the author wants or needs to get on the page, you’ll almost always dole out the
world building in a natural way that the reader can follow.
What’s your process for developing magic systems or mythical creatures?
I don’t really separate the different elements of the writing process from one another. If I’m writing about a character who’s struggling to become a mage and finding their magical abilities gone, I let the magic system flow from whatever will make that problem as troublesome as possible. I don’t tend to build stories around magic systems or mythical creatures, but instead start with characters faced with dilemmas and then build the world around those dilemmas. For me, that triggers far more interesting forms of magic and mayhem than if I approach it the other way around.
How do you approach integrating real-world themes (e.g., politics, identity, morality) into fantasy settings?
The great thing about real-world themes in fantasy is that if you try to just write a “fantasy story”, you’ll inevitably bring those themes with you even when you’re not aware of it. If you try to consciously shoehorn political themes into a fantasy novel, it tends to very quickly become a kind of polemic in which it’s obvious to the reader that the characters have no real agency of their own but are basically puppets for the author to make a point. I think all fiction needs to have a point to make, but, for me at least, that needs to emerge naturally from the creative process rather than as a kind of didactic exercise.
What are some common fantasy tropes you enjoy subverting in your work?
The whole notion of the chose one has always been troublesome for me, and so I tend to subvert it quite often. I’m also troubled by the way we treat magic as this force that it’s entirely fine for us to desire. Casting fireballs and lightning is an inherently violent act, but we tend to treat it as morally acceptable in fantasy novels. Even reading people’s minds – something that’s far worse than even spying on them – is accepted unquestioningly in fantasy sometimes. So, while I’m often writing about magic in my novels, I always want its use to raise questions for the characters and the reader.
Characters & Storytelling
Do you start with characters or plot when crafting a new story?
I usually start with a situation: “What would it be like if . . .” and then ask myself what type of person would be most interesting for me to follow if they were experiencing those circumstances. Plot for me is really about the external context that the character is navigating through their choices rather than a set of inevitable events that are going to occur no matter what choices they make.
Which character that you’ve written has stayed with you the most, and why?
Probably Ferius Parfax. She starts as Kellen’s mentor in the Spellslinger books, but all her strange teachings just stick with me and make me think differently about my own choices in life.
How do you make your fantasy characters feel real and relatable, even in magical settings?
It’s a good question, and though it might sound strange to say it, it’s a bit like asking, how do you become friends with a woman if you’re a man and therefore don’t share their experiences, or be friends with someone who’s gay if you’re straight and haven’t experienced their sense of the world? The answer is that I’ll never really know what it’s like to live someone else’s life, but no matter how different they are from me, chances are they’ve felt lonely at some point. I know what it feels like to be lonely. Chances are, they’ve felt scared. I know what it feels like to be scared. I know what it feels like to want to have power over someone else when you’ve felt powerless even if that sense of powerlessness in my life is very different from the powerlessness in someone else’s. The reason we can have relationships with people who are different from us is because there are some feelings, some experiences, that are fundamental to being human. This is true even when we’re writing about ostensibly non-human characters. Do I know what it’s like to be a vampire kangaroo? Of course not. But can I relate to a lonely vampire kangaroo? Absolutely!
Have your characters ever taken the story in a direction you didn’t plan?
My characters never go in the direction I expect. I remember when I was writing a scene between Falcio, the hero of Traitor’s Blade, and Valiana, the young woman who was meant to be the villain. It was a ballroom scene in which he was expected to ask her to dance and did so in a way that was embarrassing to her – perfectly reasonable, given she was about to become a puppet queen who’d ruin everything he’d dedicated his life to. But in her reaction to that embarrassment, I found myself suddenly seeing the world from her perspective and what it must be like to have been born into – and trapped into – a role you never wanted. Valiana ended up becoming one the most heroic characters in the entire series.
How do you write compelling villains or morally grey characters?
When I meet someone in real life who I think is a villain, I think of them as entirely villainous. I don’t try to humanize them because there are things that they’re doing that violate the moral principles by which I think people should live. The problem is, the more you get to know someone, the more you find that nobody’s entirely villainous, and that there are always reasons for who we are and what we do. So, the process of writing a morally grey character – whether they start as a villain or as a hero – is simply to keep exploring their character and digging into why they do the things they do.
Challenges & Advice
What’s the hardest part of writing fantasy for you?
Trying to make sure the non-magical parts of my world make sense given that magic exists there. For example, if you had a society where one percent of the population could move giant chunks of rock with their minds, you probably wouldn’t develop cranes and heavy trucks. So whenever you have widespread magic in a fantasy world, you have to make the repercussions of that magic carry through the rest of the book.
How do you avoid info-dumping when explaining your world to readers?
Stay true to your character: show the world through their eyes. They won’t explain things that are ordinary in their world, but simply interact with them. Readers can work out tons of intricate world building so long as you show characters interacting with that world naturally.
What advice would you give to aspiring fantasy writers who are just starting out?
Write the book you most want to read boldly. Way, way too many aspiring writers spend too much time fretting over whether they’re being original enough or whether they’re failing to sufficiently subvert tropes in some bizarre post- modernist drive to make everything as unpleasant as possible. If you love sparkly vampires, write the sparkliest vampires ever. If you love tragic swashbuckling heroes – as I did when I wrote Traitor’s Blade – write the most tragic, most swashbuckling heroes you can. An editor can help you reign in too much fun when it’s hampering a story, but they can’t inject fun into your story for you.
How do you deal with writer’s block or creative burnout?
I try to remember always to beat the writer’s block, not beat the writer. If trying to write the next chapter is filling me with dread and anxiety, I ask myself if I can write just one sentence. If the answer is no – and I feel even more anxious – then I let myself go off and do whatever I want for an hour. After that hour, I come back and try to write one sentence again. If I start getting stressed out instantly, I let myself go off for another hour. Eventually, I find myself calm enough to write that first sentence, and, inevitably, it just keeps going.
What’s one fantasy novel you wish more people knew about — and why?
I’ll be shameless here and plug Way of the Argosi. It’s one of the best novels I’ve ever written, but its launch during Covid was so scattered that I still have people writing me to ask when I’ll write a Ferius Parfax book because that’s their favourite character from Spellslinger and I have to tell them that there’s an entire trilogy with Ferius out there!
Final Words & Suggestions to Aspiring Writers
Before we wrap up, what final message would you like to leave with aspiring writers—especially those dreaming of creating their own fantasy worlds?
I’ll let my earlier advice stand: write the book you most want to read as boldly and unashamedly as you can.
Any personal mantra, belief, or mindset that keeps you going?
My mother was a very strange British woman who thought that writing novels would be an easy way to make money because, after all, they’re simple to write and anyone can do it. Nobody ever bought one of her novels, but that attitude stuck with me from childhood. If you’re willing to be bad at something for a while, you’ve got a leg up over the vast majority of the world who’re terrified of trying something new.
What should they never be afraid of?
Fear is the default emotion for writers. It’s everywhere. Most of those fears are over things you can’t control like whether a particular agent will want to sign you or whether a particular reviewer till hate your book. So, don’t fear the things outside your control. The one thing you should fear? Not writing the best book you can. Put your heart and soul into every book. Fill your debut novel with every good idea you’ve ever had. You’ll come up with new ideas for your second book. But always, always make your book the absolute finest piece of art you can make.
What’s one thing you wish you had known when you started your writing journey?
That nobody’s going to fix your book for you. Editors will give you advice and point out problems, but the quest to make your book the best it can be always comes down to your willingness to face your own demons and come through the other side.
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