Sword and Scimitar by Simon Scarrow - review

This week I thought I’d use a close reading of Simon Scarrow’s ‘Sword and Scimitar’ as an example of what not to do in your writing. I feel bad criticising a fellow writer, especially a fellow UEA-taught writer, but Scarrow seems to break every creative writing rule we are taught at UEA.

If you've been following my blog for a while you’ll remember the ‘8 creative writing rules’ I posted a while back. I wanted to see how many of these rules Scarrow breaks. Unfortunately, I gave this book away after I gave up on reading it myself so I had to make do with the first six pages that they give you on Amazon. Just in those first few pages, these are the broken rules that jumped out at me:

1.       ‘The air was uncomfortably humid and he raised a hand to wipe the beads of sweat from his brow’ – Both halves of this sentence say the exact same thing. We don’t need to know that it’s humid and he’s sweating. If we know one, we know the other. ‘Beads of sweat on his brow’ is also quite a generic and clichéd phrase.

2.       ‘The waters along the African coast were plagued by corsairs but it was not the fierce pirates that the Turks would be looking out for. The writ of Sultan Suleiman in Istanbul protected their vessel from the depredations of corsairs… The danger came from the Order of Saint John, a small band of Christian knights who waged ceaseless war against those who followed the teachings of Mohammed’ – What happened to show don’t tell? This is way too much information. Scarrow’s narrative is constantly interrupted by historical essays. He forgets the rule that the reader is always cleverer than we anticipate. If he had left this historical detail out we would have picked up on it through dialogue and description, rather than being frequently bored by these historical lectures. Moreover, if the Turks aren’t looking out for the corsairs and they’re not going to contribute to the narrative at all, why do we need to know about their existence?

3.       ‘Thomas had mused… the captain reminded him in a stern tone… Thomas replied softly’ – One of my 8 rules was to avoid using words other than ‘said’ to describe speech. These three examples all took place in the same conversation and make the dialogue sound juvenile.

4.       ‘The unbidden thought caused a deep chill in Thomas’s heart’ – This sentence sounds very generic and clichéd. It’s always a good idea to avoid commonly used phrases like ‘a deep chill in his heart’ or ‘it made his blood boil’. Scarrow also tells us that ‘Thomas’s ears pricked up’, another commonly used phrase in fiction that, in my opinion, should be avoided.

5.       ‘Thomas had seen men choke to death after some of the battles he had taken part in’ – This is a petty one but the ‘he had taken part in’ really isn’t necessary. The sentence reads much better if it ends with ‘after some battles’.

I didn’t do this just to criticise Simon Scarrow who, I’m sure, has written some wonderful fiction. Doing a close reading like this of any text, good or bad, is always a good exercise for a creative writer to do. Not only can you learn from other writers’ mistakes and successes but analysing another work to this extent gives you practice analysing and improving your own work.

Thanks for reading.