A Court of Thorns and Roses
A Court of Thorns and Roses
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Sarah J. Maas on A Court of Thorns and Roses
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A beloved fairy tale, made uncomfortably honestMaas had already spent years reimagining Cinderella as the spine of her Throne of Glass series before she turned to Beauty and the Beast. The switch brought a new problem: the source material is far darker than its reputation suggests, and she wanted readers to feel that discomfort rather than be insulated from it.
The whole series, you know, my first series was an adaptation of Cinderella and now this is an adaptation of Beauty and the Beast. And it’s just such a beloved fairy tale, but I loved taking a lot of the tropes of the fairy tale and kind of turning them on their head and exploring the darker side of Beauty and the Beast because when you think about it, it’s pretty dark. There’s a curse, there’s a monster, there’s a human girl held captive, which is creepy. [paraphrased from audio]
The heroine she built for that darker story had a long genealogy. Maas has traced Feyre’s refusal to occupy a single register back to Buffy Summers, the television character she credits as one of the most formative of her reading and viewing life. The specific quality she borrowed was Buffy’s ability to hold practicality and femininity at the same time, never trading one for the other.
I’ve always been drawn to writing women that can’t be placed in any definable category. … They can be very feminine, but then also go kick the you-know-what out of the bad guy and save the world and look good doing it.
Feyre’s sexual history before the novel opens was a structural decision as much as a thematic one. Most young fantasy heroines in 2015 arrived on the page as virgins; Maas wanted to write past that convention from the first page, and to skip the scene she had no interest in writing.
I wanted her to have a sexual history that wasn’t something to be ashamed of, that was something that she was in charge of; I wanted her to be in charge of her body, her passions and desires.
The most calculated decision in the entire series was also the one she had to keep secret longest. Before book one reached readers, Maas had already designed Tamlin as a trap: a love interest whose controlling behavior would read as romantic in the first novel and then snap into focus as harmful once Rhysand, the series’ eventual male lead, appeared in book two.
I wanted readers to experience book one with Tamlin and his controlling, alpha-male behavior and be like, ‘Oh, it’s kind of the norm,’ and fall in love with him the way Feyre does — not blindly, but accepting that that’s how things are. So then in book two when Rhys comes along and Feyre has her own journey, they can look back at book one and see all those moments where things that kind of got brushed over by Feyre weren’t exactly OK.
The long game required her to smile at readers who declared their love for Tamlin at events, already knowing what was coming for him.
How she wrote it
Seeds planted before the readers arriveMaas writes backward from endings. She locks down the major reveals before she drafts the opening chapters, so that early details can carry weight the reader won’t yet understand. She attributes the habit directly to growing up with the Harry Potter series, where J.K. Rowling planted objects and names in book one that detonated five books later.
When it comes to the big reveals and all the stuff that happens in book three, a lot of that I’ll plan far in advance so that I can plant the seeds pretty early on in book one or two.
Writing the series’ first explicit sex scene was a different kind of preparation. ACOTAR was her transition from young adult fantasy to adult fantasy, which meant putting on the page what she had previously left off it. She had already written the novel’s opening before she reached that scene; what she needed, apparently, was courage.
My first on the page sex scene was in my Court of Thorns and Roses, the first novel in that series. And I needed a glass of wine just to like take the edge off. I felt like everyone was staring over my shoulder watching as I wrote these dirty words, and then also thinking, oh my God, my grandmother is going to read this. [paraphrased from audio]
Nesta, the older sister who becomes the center of the fifth book in the series, was not part of any plan. Maas designed her and Elain as minor figures, functional obstacles from the fairy-tale template. A single scene in the finished novel changed everything: the moment Feyre returns home and learns what Nesta had attempted in her absence.
When I wrote A Court of Thorns and Roses, I actually just kind of imagined her sisters as these like cardboard cutouts of the typical fairy tale like evil older sisters… when Feyre went back home, and we learned that Nesta had tried to go into Prythian to get her, it opened up this whole part of Nesta’s personality that I just didn’t see coming. And then wound up shifting the entire course of the series. [paraphrased from audio]
Prythian, the immortal Fae realm that separates the human world from the courts of the series, is the territory Nesta had been willing to cross alone. That willingness, discovered mid-draft rather than planned, is what unlocked her.
The personal thread
What living it made writableThe bond between Feyre and Rhysand, the High Lord of the Night Court, drew from a relationship Maas was already inside. She met her husband Josh at Hamilton College, and the series tracks their relationship closely enough that she has named him as the direct source of what she knows about that particular emotional register.
Rhys’ bond with Feyre is inspired by the bond I feel with Josh. It’s because of him that I can only really write about true love, because I have it every day.
emiesnook.wordpress.com, “Meeting Sarah J. Maas! (Again) – Prose and Purls”The sex-positivity threaded through the ACOTAR books is something she traces to her own formation as a reader. Romantic fantasy taught her things she would never have asked about publicly, and that experience shaped what she believes her books owe the people reading them now.
Slut-shaming really sets my blood boiling and it’s important for me to have sex-positive books.
What she wants us to sit with
The promise at the end of every bookMaas positions happy endings as a form of argument, not a concession to comfort. She spent years writing heroines who fight through the full weight of what the plot puts on them, and the ending is where that fight is answered. The promise is deliberate and she states it without apology.
I want my readers to come away from my books with the knowledge that they can fight for what matters to them. My books have happy endings. They’re supposed to be hopeful.