Crown of Midnight
Crown of Midnight
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Sarah J. Maas on Crown of Midnight
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A plotline pulled loose and made into its own bookThe immediate origin of Crown of Midnight was an editorial condition, not an artistic one. When Bloomsbury acquired Throne of Glass, they wanted a more self-contained ending than the original manuscript offered. Her solution was structural: extract one of the two major plotlines running through that first book and build a second novel around it.
I’d split Book 1 in half. Not chronologically, but rather just PULL one of the major plotlines (there were two) and set it aside to make a brand-new Book 2 (thus pushing back other books in the series).
Long before Bloomsbury entered the picture, the premise of an assassin heroine existed to let her write a female character whose ethics shifted with circumstance. The Scarlett O’Hara reference she reaches for here is not decorative. O’Hara survives by doing things heroines are not supposed to do, and that was exactly the territory Maas wanted to occupy.
I was always more interested in the Scarlett O’Hara type of heroine — the kind of person whose morality dwells in the gray zone, who didn’t always act selfless and kind. (What can I say? Goody Two-shoes types don’t float my boat.)
Crown of Midnight presses this further than the first book dared: Celaena publicly performs her role as the King’s Champion while secretly staging every assassination to spare her targets. The moral gray zone is no longer an attribute but the entire architecture of the plot.
The bond between Celaena and Nehemia, Adarlan’s princess and Celaena’s closest friend in the series, has a biographical current behind it. At a 2015 signing for Queen of Shadows, Maas described a difficult stretch in her own high school and college years when female friendships went badly wrong, and said she had always meant that wound to run through Celaena’s full arc.
I’ve wanted that to be a part of Aelin’s story from the get go that trusting and then breaking of trust with other women and then learning to trust them again and see them as allies and partners instead of enemies.
In Crown of Midnight, Nehemia is both the fullest expression of that trust and, in the book’s most devastating sequence, its collapse.
How she wrote it
Fixed endpoints, music, and the cost of forcing the plotMusic is not background noise for Maas’s drafting process: it is where the material originates. She has traced Celaena’s entire premise to the Cinderella score, specifically the frantic strings as the princess flees the ball, which struck her as too dark and threatening for a fairy tale. She imagined an assassin fleeing instead. Crown of Midnight is the book where that Cinderella-born character begins moving toward something else entirely.
Music inspires pretty much everything that I write, and I have no idea why. It’s just the way my brain works: I hear a piece of music (usually movie scores or classical music) and I just see a scene, or a character, or an entire book. All of my books have sprung from pieces of music, and nearly every scene within them (and character) was inspired by it, too.
Her structural method holds certain things fixed while leaving the middle open. Submitting detailed outlines to Bloomsbury gave her series-level scaffolding, but she has been clear about what happens when she treats those outlines as binding rather than provisional.
The times when I try to force characters into following a path/outline I’d planned have always resulted in disaster (aka it sucks, and I have to cut/rewrite everything), so I’ve learned the hard way to trust my gut, even if it means veering away from earlier plans and into new, exciting/terrifying territory.
The principle behind that reluctance to over-plan is a decade-long familiarity with Celaena and the people around her. By the time Crown of Midnight went to press in 2013, Maas had been living with this character for more than eleven years, and she treats that accumulated knowledge as the real outline.
I truly believe in letting my characters guide the story, and because I’ve been writing/working with them for over a decade, I know them well enough to trust them to lead the story where it needs to go.
The revision history behind the series puts the writing of Crown of Midnight in context. The original Throne of Glass manuscript ran to 240,000 words and went through approximately five major rewrites, losing close to 120,000 words before Bloomsbury ever saw it. That process was the condition Crown of Midnight was built on.
It was hell. It was exhausting, and it was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do. But each of those revisions and rewrites brought me closer to my true vision for the book, even if I didn’t realize it at the time.
One craft habit she absorbed from reading shapes how Crown of Midnight plants details that pay off three or four books later. She named the specific influence at the time she was writing the ACOTAR series, but the technique was already running in the Throne of Glass books.
I grew up with Harry Potter, and I feel like J.K. Rowling is the queen of little details that are on the page in book one and then in book six they come back in a huge way. That definitely left its mark on me when I was growing up as a reader and a writer.
What she wants us to sit with
A heroine who refuses a single shapeThe argument she returns to most often is that female characters should be able to hold contradictions without being flattened into a type. In Crown of Midnight that argument is literal: Celaena presents one face to the king’s court while operating on entirely different terms in private.
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.
She also wants readers to accept that the grief in Crown of Midnight is not incidental. The losses in this book are among the most severe in the series, and she has been direct about why she does not soften what her characters carry.
The fate of the world sometimes is on their shoulders. That’s gonna leave a mark on them. That’s what books did for me. So if my books can offer any kind of comfort and joy, I’ve done my job well. [paraphrased from audio]
For younger readers in particular, she made the intended effect explicit at a promotional event for Throne of Glass. The aspiration she described there applies with equal force to Crown of Midnight, where Celaena survives circumstances that would destroy most people.
I hope readers, especially female readers will feel empowered by Celaena and find a heroine that can stand up for herself. And I really want girls to feel like they can be who they want to be and they can find their own strength and go through hell and come out of it. [paraphrased from audio]