Primal

Sword & Sorcery tales traditionally take place in a world that is either an earlier era of our own, or a fictionalized analog of that. There’s a reason why my site is called New Iron Age and not “New Atom Age”, because that would be a different kind of image conjured in your mind, a different feel. Feel is a nebulous term in fiction, but it has meaning, and carries weight. Feel is what tells you, without having to be told, what a story is about in its essence. What kind of world you are being told about.

We develop a shorthand for this that encompasses a lot of things: style, dialogue, image, diction. In fiction it can center around what kind of prose this is: is it elevated and/or archaic? That gives us clues about how we are supposed to relate to this story. What things are described in the first lines of the story? Are we being told about mountains and forests and a castle on a hillside? That tells us something, and we begin – even if unconsciously – to set our feet.

Titles are important as well. A story that says “dragon” or “sword” is sending us one kind of message about what is going on, while a title that says, say “divorce” or “football” is telling us something very different. When a reader comes to a new story, they have a lot of things that can begin to set the scene in their minds, and a good writer takes advantage of that.

These days, a reader will often come to a story after a lot of stage-setting has already been done. They have seen the movie or the show made from the book, they have seen the cover art and read the back cover copy, they have read reviews online. They know, before they read a word, what kind of story this is in at least a broad sense. They know it is a story about a king and a war, or a story about a ballet dancer and a hostage situation in a cab, or an earthquake.

Yet as the author you still have to consider your opening very carefully. You have to choose details that will form the unconscious background the reader is building in their mind. You have to set the scene. A lot of modern fiction does not so much do this. It is rather common to see a story – or even a novel – begin with a line of dialogue divorced from any context. The author thinks this will get our attention, when really, without knowing who is speaking or even roughly where they are, the line is meaningless and makes no impact on the story.

So in a Sword & Sorcery story, you have to start selling what kind of story this is right from the word go. You have to make sure every detail is not only dripping with mood and dark atmosphere, but that it grounds you in a physical place that is like a more primally dangerous version of whatever you are basing this off of. In S&S you never dwell on the mild or nice aspects of a place – you go for the throat.

A forest might be pretty, but you don’t say that. You talk about the dark shadows and the huge, towering trees. You suggest timelessness and the gulfs of history by saying how ancient the forest is, and how it doubtless stood for aeons before the rise of man. Mountains loom, sunlight burns, rain slashes, cold bites. Everything in an S&S world has to be the amped-up, dangerous, pulp version of itself.

And characters should be introduced in the act of doing something. There is a good pulp maxim that a character should always be entering a scene with information or leaving it with intent. Characters in a Sword & Sorcery tale do not stand looking into the mirror or lounge in the autumn sunlight. A character should be hunting, fleeing, fighting, or defying something. Everything should be described in concrete terms to make the world vivid: iron swords, mail armor, burnished helms, battered shields. The adjective is your friend in this kind of story.

And you should always reach for the primal. The characters should inhabit a stark, dangerous world that feels primitive and filled with hazards. They should do things that are archetypal, like characters from legend. A Sword & Sorcery character should be in action from the start, and that action should be something that has always been, something that people have always done and that can hark back to the older, harsher world the story is evoking. It should be primal, always primal.