Problem Solving

Bob Howard’s innovation was to use the high-octane action of the adventure story as a way to end supernatural mysteries. All of Howard’s best stories presented a mystery of some kind, even if they were just “who is the evil wizard this time?” Conan, Cormac, and Solomon were usually called on to figure something out – whether it be finding a secret door, a path through a deadly maze, or a way into a well-guarded tower.

Other Sword & Sorcery writers leaned less hard on the mystery aspect, and thus had to rely on other sorts of story structures. Either they went for Lovecraftian horror, or they fell more into fantasy quest tropes. This started to cause problems with plots, because if you solve all your problems the same way, your stories start to get predictable.

There was something fun about setting up a mystic mystery with some Yellow-Peril-styled wizard, and then having Conan split his head open before he could get a spell off. It was subverting a trope that writers like Sax Rohmer had been using for decades, along with slews of lesser authors of “exotic” adventure fiction. The wizard always has another trick up his sleeve, and the heroes often stand maddeningly and gawp while the sorcerer (or his equivalent) pulls ropes, flips levers, or steps on suspiciously-colored sections of floor just as the lights go out.

Once Conan had been through a few adventures, it was obvious that he was physically far superior to anyone he faced. The reader didn’t really worry about it, and it was harder and harder to pit him against opponents who posed a credible threat. All of Howard’s heroes were like this – they were so badass that making us worry about them got harder and harder.

Hence the mysteries and misdirections. We knew that once he comes face to face with his foes, whatever Howard hero we are following will handily wipe the floor with them. Howard was good at action, and he strove mightily to make the fights seem bloody and dangerous, like every one was a near thing. He was good enough at it that he was able to carry you past the fact that you know the hero is not going to lose.

The writer has to make the way his hero solves a problem seem exciting, not a foregone conclusion. The problem with building your hero up into an unstoppable killing machine is that you start having trouble using violence as a problem solver. This is a common weakness with second-rate S&S. Hack writers see the violence and like it (and well-done violence can be a real pleasure), and they want to imitate that.

But if your protagonist is The Best at violence, then all the violence in the story has less tension, because the reader does not seriously believe the hero can’t win, or won’t win. The violence becomes dull, and in response the bad writer pumps it up more and more, verging into exaggeration and hyperbole that make the suspension of disbelief impossible.

Under these circumstances, you have to make something besides pure violence the solution to the story’s problems. Violence should still be part of it, because this is Sword & Sorcery, but you need something else.

Some writers then resort to magic, which has its own set of problems. Unless your character is a wizard – which most S&S heroes are not – then the magic has to come from somebody or something else. Useful magic has to be difficult and dangerous, it has to have a price. If it does, then you have something you can work with, especially if the character knows the cost ahead of time and still chooses to use it. Sacrifice always makes for a good ending.

But it risks reducing your character, if you do it that way. The power to defeat the enemy should come from within the hero or from a decision they make, not from some magical doodad. You run the risk of falling into High Fantasy tropes of using the Magic Thing to defeat the Bad Thing, and your characters feel superfluous.

So it all presents its own set of problems. This is an action genre, and we want the action to mean something, but the battles can’t feel like a foregone conclusion. There has to be risk and danger, but we don’t want it to become unbelievable, as our hero is supposed to be good at this. There should be magic, but we can’t use the magic to solve all the problems presented by the antagonist. Ideally, any magic used by the hero should serve only to negate a magical advantage from the villain, so that they are once again on an even footing. Fairness in conflict is an excellent source of drama and excitement, and if things are not fair, then they should be stacked against your protagonist, not for them.