I’m re-reading Steven Brust’s Vlad Taltos series, as comfort reading for my winter blues and the stress of our upcoming move.1 It’s power-fantasy (he’s an assassin! friends with the Empress! on a first-name basis with gods!) but with just enough self-aware edge to make me not feel horribly guilty about enjoying it.2 And re-reading the series so far in quick succession is showing up some interesting things about his technique.

Firstly, his plotting is amazing. The very first book has callbacks to things that happened in Vlad’s past, that are call-forwards to several books further down the series. (I’m reading them in publication order, which is nothing at all like internal chronological order, even leaving aside the books which intertwine stories from different parts of Vlad’s life.)

Even in the first book, though, before you’ve really seen this plotting in action, he pulls a very clever trick. He introduces Vlad by showing him at two periods at the same time: in short flashbacks he describes his early childhood, while the majority of the action has him already a fairly powerful person, with special skills and Cool Stuff making him someone to take seriously, and with a number of even more powerful friends who help him out when he runs into something too big to deal with on his own. These skills and friends and so on are essential to the story of that book, but the clever bit is: Brust doesn’t really tell you how he got there. You see the hardcase kid making a start for himself, and then you see the hardcase assassin-made-good with the powerful sorcerous allies, and you take it on faith that there is some line between the two. (Successive books fill out that line a lot, although usually they drop yet more call-forwards in the process.)

The lesson I take from this is: if your main plotline requires some Cool Stuff available to make use of, don’t be afraid to say “I’ve got this Cool Stuff available, and I’ll tell you the story of how I got it some other day”. (The trick is, of course, to avoid giving the impression that you needed said Cool Stuff and that’s exactly why you’ve got it.)3

Lesson number two comes directly from Brust himself: the Cool Stuff Theory of Literature:

The Cool Stuff Theory of Literature is as follows: All literature consists of whatever the writer thinks is cool. The reader will like the book to the degree that he agrees with the writer about what’s cool. And that works all the way from the external trappings to the level of metaphor, subtext, and the way one uses words. In other words, I happen not to think that full-plate armor and great big honking greatswords are cool. I don’t like ‘em. I like cloaks and rapiers. So I write stories with a lot of cloaks and rapiers in ’em, ’cause that’s cool. Guys who like military hardware, who think advanced military hardware is cool, are not gonna jump all over my books, because they have other ideas about what’s cool.

The novel should be understood as a structure built to accommodate the greatest possible amount of cool stuff.

It’s a variant on the old “write what you know” trope, except it’s better: write what you think is cool.4

Lesson number three comes from how Brust deals with food. Vlad started his career running a restaurant, and he’s passionate about food: he often describes it in detail, and one of the books is structured around the courses of a dinner at a fancy restaurant (Dzur). These recipes aren’t just invented nonsense: people have tried them, apparently successfully. The point I take from this, though, is the difference between how Brust deals with food and how say Melville deals with whaling, or O’Brian with rigging: all that attention to detail is for Brust a side dish rather than the main meal. It’s there for colour, sometimes as a structural principle, for subtle characterisation, but never as the main material that the story is about. That’s clever.5

The last lesson comes from the scope of the Vlad Taltos series. It’s set in a fictional world with seventeen “Great Houses”, and each novel is named after one of the houses (except for one named after Vlad, and a planned final novel entitled The Last Contract). Bam: seventeen books (and change). But it’s taken Brust thirty years to get to book 14 (Jhereg came out in 1983, and he’s working on Hawk now). I wonder if he might be a bit sick of some aspects of the setting, by now? Maybe his politics or his views on personal relationships have changed, or even how cool he thinks rapiers and cloaks are. Or maybe they haven’t, it’s not really my business, but the point is: it’s a huge constraint to design yourself into such a large structure. Just because he’s getting away with it doesn’t mean that everyone has to try.

Notes:

  1. I’m through the one where his marriage breaks down, which wasn’t very comforting at all. [↪]
  2. As a schoolkid I enjoyed Stephen Donaldson’s Gap series. That’s the one with the rapist protagonist you’re supposed to feel sorry for. Sorry, no, the other one by him with a rapist protagonist you’re supposed to feel sorry for. The more popular one scared me off early with some disturbing imagery involving giants getting magically lobotomised; I’ve never gone back to see whether I was less disturbed by the rape scene, or just didn’t get that far. [↪]
  3. I suspect that Brust has somewhere an outline that fills in all the main details to be covered in the 19 books the series is supposed to run to, although probably not how they are allocated to the books. If that’s true, he’s got a lot of Cool Stuff stored away to help him out of plotholes. [↪]
  4. Makes you wonder about Donaldson. [↪]
  5. I’m so taken with these ideas that I’m putting some research together for a heavily Brust-inspired novel of my own. (With overwhelming probability this will become not a novel but a series of notes towards a novel, but that’s no reason not to make a start on it.) The food-equivalent for me is, rather obviously, music and music-making. And the biggest hurdle I will face — if I make it over the first one of actually writing anything down — will be avoiding making it so much about music that nobody but me will want to read it. Note the part of the Cool Stuff Theory where your audience has to agree with you about the coolness. [↪]