Fiction Writer’s Toolshed · Practical Tools for Authors
You have an adventure in mind for a character. Maybe it happens when they’re young. Maybe it happens years after another story you’ve already written. Do you have to fill in everything between those moments before you can write it?
Conan the Barbarian gives us an interesting way to think about that. Robert E. Howard’s stories let us encounter Conan at different stages of his life, entering adventures without walking us through every year that came before them.
In this conversation, writer and editor Matt Click joins me to explore an approach I’m calling modular continuity: relatively self-contained stories that still belong to one character, world, and larger continuity. We also work through the extremely important question that started the conversation: why does Conan rip so hard?
Listen to the episode
Fiction Writer’s Toolshed
What Conan the Barbarian Teaches Us About Writing Stories Out of Order (with Matt Click) | ep 027
Follow the podcast (opens in new tab)
What this episode covers
- Why Conan’s appeal goes well beyond being strong enough to swing a sword.
- What happens when stories show us different moments in a character’s life.
- How gaps between adventures can leave room for mystery and more stories.
- Why I want to try this approach in my own fiction.
What I mean by modular continuity
Think of each adventure as a glimpse into a character’s life. The character has a history, and the stories share a world, but you don’t have to tell every part of that history in sequence.
Matt describes the experience of reading one Conan story at one stage of his life, then another from a very different stage. You’re dropped into an adventure. You discover what matters there, while other parts of his life remain outside the story.
That’s the possibility I’m interested in: writing adventures that can work on their own while remaining compatible with the larger continuity. You can leave space between them for things you haven’t written yet.
Here, we’re talking about separate adventures across a character’s life. The conversation isn’t about shuffling the scenes inside a single novel.
Give readers a character they want to follow
Matt’s first point about Conan is his strength. His next is his cunning. Conan is quick-witted, resourceful, and often surprisingly practical. His ability to survive comes from more than muscle.
He also has an emotional life. He can laugh, feel sadness, notice beauty, be hungry, and admit he’s afraid. Those things make him feel more human to us, even when he’s the most capable person in the room.
Matt points to stories in which Conan faces a difficult choice that he can’t solve just by swinging a sword. There may be no easy way out. Watching a character you care about make that choice can be more compelling than watching them overpower another opponent.
That matters to this discussion because the adventures keep bringing us back to someone we want to spend time with. His life has room for different situations, different decisions, and different versions of what it means to survive.
Leave room between the adventures
One thing Matt loves about Howard’s stories is the feeling that he’s seeing pieces of a much larger life. Those glimpses leave him with a world that feels mysterious. There are places Conan has been and experiences he’s had that the current story doesn’t need to explain.
We also talk about Savage Sword of Conan, including adventures that can fit between other stories. The open space gives the imagination somewhere to go. Another story can explore part of that space without requiring every gap to be filled first.
I contrast that feeling with having a fully fleshed-out timeline, a world bible, and somewhere to look up every detail. What interests me is choosing to leave some of that space open, then writing the adventures that pull at my attention.
The shared continuity still matters. An open space is a place where something can happen. It doesn’t mean the things you’ve already established stop mattering.
An experiment I want to try
During the conversation, I start thinking about approaching a fiction project this way on purpose: writing separate adventures, moving between stages of a character’s life, and resisting the urge to connect every moment.
I’m also not sure I have the restraint to do it. Could I let a character be young in one story and much older in another without immediately trying to write everything in between?
This is my current best approach to an idea I’m exploring. The episode captures the conversation that made me want to try it. It leaves room to learn what happens when I actually write that way.
About Matt Click
Matt Click is a writer, editor, and game developer, as well as one of my longtime creative collaborators and closest friends. He co-founded Absolute Tabletop and brings a deep love of Conan to this conversation.
Explore Matt’s work (opens in new tab).
Reading mentioned in the conversation
Matt names The Tower of the Elephant as his favorite Conan story. You can read Robert E. Howard’s story in the PDF available on Conan.com (opens in new tab).
We also discuss Savage Sword of Conan and the different ways books, comics, films, animation, and artwork shaped our own experiences of the character.
A related conversation about continuity
Matt also joins me in Write This Instead of a Multiverse, where we explore polycontinuity: multiple distinct continuities built from the same fictional property.
That’s a different possibility from the one we’re discussing here. Modular continuity leaves room for separate adventures within a shared continuity.
Try the adventure that interests you
If this approach appeals to you, try an adventure at a point in your character’s life that you want to explore. Keep it compatible with what you’ve already established, and let there be space before and after it.
You can leave that space open while you write -- and see what the story gives you.
Fiction Writer’s Toolshed: Practical Tools for Authors is a Make Exist podcast hosted by Tim Kearney. It offers hands-on training for fiction writers to diagnose writing problems, build their skills, and finish more work.