Scribes of Sword-and-Sorcery

“Sword-and-sorcery is the modern descendant of the hero myth.”

As a genre, sword-and-sorcery is urgent and visceral: one hero, one blade, carving a decisive path through vivid, hostile worlds crowded with magic and monsters.

In Arcane Arts and Cold Steel, David C. Smith teaches how to write sword-and-sorcery by breaking it down into its working parts. Drawing on nearly a century of fiction—from the foundations laid by Robert E. Howard and Fritz Leiber, to the gritty reinventions of Karl Edward Wagner and Charles Saunders, and into the “New Edge” renaissance pioneered by Howard Andrew Jones—Smith explains how the form achieves its distinctive power on the page.

Smith writes not just as a scholar, but as a veteran of the field. Author of Robert E. Howard: A Literary Biography, creator of the Oron saga, and co-author of the Ace Red Sonja novels, he examines character, setting, scene construction, plot, style, voice, and tone with an emphasis on practical application. The book concludes with direct guidance for writers ready to apply these techniques to their own work.

Part master class, part genre analysis, Arcane Arts and Cold Steel is written for authors who want to write bestselling sword-and-sorcery for a modern audience.