Steven Brust is the author of twenty-six novels so far, with his most popular following the assassin Vlad Taltos (starting with the novel Jhereg). His most recent novel, The Incrementalists, is a collaboration with author Skyler White.
Steven is also a member of the Pre-Joycean Fellowship, a group of writers who value 19th-century values of storytelling. He joins us to discuss something he loves to do, playing with structure.
Speaking generally, where do your ideas start – a plot or structure idea, a character, a question you want answered – or does it change with each novel?
It changes with each novel. With Hawk, it was plot structure. With Athyra, it was a single image I couldn’t get out of my head. Sometimes it’s a particular scene that grabs me, so I need to write to it, then follow up the consequences. My favorite is when I get a sentence that makes me go, “That’d be a great first sentence for a book. I wonder what the book is about?”