Empire of Storms
Empire of Storms
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Sarah J. Maas on Empire of Storms
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
Fourteen years of a character who wouldn’t stop talkingAelin Galathynius, the assassin-queen at the center of the Throne of Glass series, did not arrive as a sketch to be developed. She arrived complete, and Maas spent the years that followed learning what that meant. By the time Empire of Storms was being drafted, fourteen years of rewrites, submission rounds, and editorial revision had gone into that character. What kept Maas at the desk, she said, was not discipline but genuine surprise.
She was pretty much fully formed from the moment she walked into my head all those years ago—and I’ve spent the past 14 years basically letting her dictate where she needs her journey to go. I love that she still manages to surprise me, and that I still learn little secrets of hers every now and then—which I suppose is part of why I’ve stuck with this series for so long.
The world, too, kept producing things she hadn’t designed. While drafting one of the prequel novellas, The Assassin and the Desert, she ran into a set of creatures that simply appeared in the scene and then opened narrative doors she hadn’t known were there.
I had no idea they existed until I was writing that scene in The Assassin and the Desert, and then…there they were. And it opened up so many fun/cool possibilities for me to play with. I live for moments like that when writing.
Those creatures, the Stygian spiders, carry real weight in Empire of Storms. Knowing they were unplanned makes the texture of the book feel less like execution and more like discovery.
Maas has traced the DNA of her Throne of Glass heroine to a very specific pop-culture moment: the Buffy the Vampire Slayer template of a girl who is fully feminine and fully lethal, with no apology required for either. That refusal to choose between categories was the founding question of the whole series.
When I got the idea for my Throne of Glass series, Celaena was very much in the vein of Buffy, where she’s this young assassin who loves clothes and dancing and ‘feminine’ things, but she also loves to beat the crap out of people and murder them. I had no interest in writing heroines who had to be squeezed into these very narrow definitions.
How she wrote it
Outlines, tissues, and the gut that overrules the planMaas published Empire of Storms on September 6, 2016, and the Barnes and Noble blog asked her what writing it had actually cost her. Her answer was physical.
Writing Empire of Storms was…intense. Ha. In all honesty, it was equal parts fun and devastating. There were some parts when I literally had to stop writing and go cry for a few minutes because a scene totally wrecked me emotionally. But there were also parts that made me so amped up I could barely sit still while writing them. (In other words, writing this book was an emotional rollercoaster and I used a lot of tissues and blasted a lot of epic music.)
That kind of emotional expenditure is not incidental to her process. It follows directly from a structural decision she made about the order in which she drafts. Writing Heir of Fire, the third book in the series, had given her a headache for most of the project from crying. She has kept the method anyway.
I write linearly just so I can experience the entire emotional arc of my characters the way they go through it—which means that when they suffer, I suffer alongside them. It’s never easy to write. Never.
For the Throne of Glass series, Maas submits detailed outlines to Bloomsbury before she starts drafting. But she treats those outlines as a starting position, not a contract. The 2015 Goodreads interview, conducted the year before Empire of Storms was published, laid out exactly how much authority a finished outline actually holds over her.
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.
Music is not background noise while she works. In the Booktopia interview she gave in 2018, two years after Empire of Storms, she described how a piece of music functions for her as a kind of hallucination: a scene or a character materializes before she has words for it.
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.
The personal thread
The friendships that hurt, put into Aelin’s handsEmpire of Storms is the book where the alliances among women in the series, Aelin, Lysandra, Elide, and Manon, become load-bearing. That dynamic did not come from a desire to write politically about female solidarity. It came from something much more specific: her own history. At a Queen of Shadows signing in Pennsylvania in September 2015, roughly a year before Empire of Storms was published, Maas traced the emotional core of that arc back to high school and college.
Maas said she had genuinely painful experiences with female friendships in high school and college, and had always wanted Aelin’s arc to carry that — the trusting, the betrayal, and then learning to trust again and see women as allies rather than enemies. [paraphrased from hand-transcribed signing notes]
The note-taker flagged the transcript as approximately ninety percent accurate, which means the shape of the statement is reliable even if the exact phrasing is reconstructed. The arc she describes maps directly onto what Empire of Storms asks its female characters to do.
What she wants us to sit with
Women who survive, and the hope that is not softIn a video interview with Jenna Bush Hager for TODAY, Maas came back to the same argument she had been making since the series began: that a female character should be able to occupy contradictory registers at once without one canceling the other. Empire of Storms is the novel in the series where that argument is tested hardest, because Aelin is being asked to carry both the most feminine and the most brutal demands of her story simultaneously.
I’ve always been drawn to writing women that can’t be placed in any definable category. You know, they can be very feminine, but then also go like beat the, you know what, out of the bad guy and save the world and then look good doing it. [paraphrased from audio]
She has also pushed back, across multiple interviews, against the complaint that her characters carry too much emotional damage. For her, the damage is a condition of honesty: characters who walk through world-ending events and come out unmarked would be a lie. In the same TODAY interview, she used a specific example to make the case.
When you, like, when you watch any kind of fantasy thing, like Lord of the Rings, for example, when you go through an orc massacre, you’re going to have some trauma, right?... The fate of the world sometimes is on their shoulders. That’s gonna leave a mark on them. [paraphrased from audio]
And underneath all the devastation she builds, both in Empire of Storms specifically and across her whole body of work, there is one thing she will not negotiate away.
I always try to give a sense of hope in my stories.
That line is short enough to pass for a platitude, but in the context of a book that ends on one of the cruelest cliffhangers in the series, it reads as a promise made under pressure, not comfort offered cheaply.