Fourth Wing
Fourth Wing
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Rebecca Yarros on Fourth Wing
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
Fantasy first, dragons thirdFantasy was Yarros’s original ambition, not romance. Her first completed novel was a fantasy that died on submission, which sent her into contemporary romance as a fallback career that lasted more than a decade. The door back opened when Entangled’s Red Tower imprint announced a new adult fantasy romance line and she submitted five pitches. Dragons was the third one. Her editor picked it, and her own response was disbelief.
Fantasy’s my first love. And my first book that I ever wrote was a fantasy. It didn’t sell, and so I wrote a contemporary romance while it was out on submission. And that’s the one that took off and became my debut. So this felt like getting back to my roots and going back to what I really love. I remember getting up in the morning and looking at my husband and being like, ‘I get to play with dragons today.’ [paraphrased from audio]
The enemies-to-lovers setup had frustrated Yarros in contemporary settings for years because nothing in the real world produces conflict sturdy enough to sustain it. Fantasy, she found, could deliver stakes that don’t dissolve once two people finally speak honestly to each other.
So much enemies to lovers is just miscommunication and semantics. If you had just had a different word choice, we could have all resolved it, it never would have had a plot. Dude, you killed like — my mother killed your dad, you killed my brother — like, oh, we’re at it. We’re at like Romeo and Juliet, Capulet levels. [paraphrased from audio]
The book’s central political argument was sparked by a specific moment in American education policy. Yarros was watching states remove material about slavery from school curricula and built her response directly into the world of Navarre, the book’s fictional war-college kingdom.
I went into *Fourth Wing* with the absolute intent of discussing the erasure of history, and it was a direct critique of what we’re doing here in the States. [paraphrased from audio]
That intent found its structural home once the setting shifted to a war college, where the scribe quadrant, the division of students trained to record events rather than fight, made the question of who controls the historical record a matter of institutional design rather than authorial commentary.
How she wrote it
Two months, two screens, one surgeryYarros began plotting in April, turned in the first ten pages, then learned the book would launch the entire Red Tower imprint. She wrote the bulk of the manuscript in June and July. The schedule she kept during those weeks was not sustainable by any ordinary measure, and she said so directly.
I loved the idea of forced proximity, enemies-to-lovers set up due to mated dragons, and when my editor suggested we move the backdrop from a regular ‘army’ to a war college, my brain ran happily with it. Once I sat down and decided I really wanted a theme of the book to be about history and who gets to decide what’s taught, I knew we were looking at a series, and I’m so lucky that my publisher agreed!
Her daily writing setup is not a preference but a medical requirement. EDS, the connective tissue disorder Yarros shares with four of her six children, shapes everything from the chair she sits in to the monitor she uses. The dual-screen arrangement she describes here is also a continuity tool for a series where breaking internal logic carries real consequences.
Because I have Ehlers-Danlos, I write in the most ergonomically correct setup I can muster to ease my joints, and a monitor without pulse width modulation to keep my migraines at bay. When I’m writing in the Empyrean series, I use a dual-monitor setup, keeping my manuscript on one screen and a PDF of the last book in the series on the other screen for quick searching to make sure I’m not breaking my world.
The original final chapter, written from Violet’s perspective, ran to seven thousand words because of a character problem: Violet, the book’s narrator, interrogates until she has complete answers. The scene worked emotionally but failed structurally, and the fix required switching the point of view to Xaden, the book’s male lead, whose perspective could carry the revelation without exhausting it.
the first way I wrote it in her POV, it was a 7,000 word chapter where he explained everything because she was like, you will tell me now. And it was an info dump at the end. So we cut it and we put it in Xaden’s POV.
The personal thread
Her sons playing hockey, her diagnosis, and VioletYarros received her EDS diagnosis while she was writing the book, and the timing meant she was processing what the condition would mean for her body at the same moment she was building a heroine with the same disorder. She had negotiated the inclusion of the chronic illness element with her editor from the project’s first pitch.
Her chronic illness is mine, look at it that way. I have Ehlers Danlos, and my sons do too. So it was important to me when I brought the project to my editor, I said, ‘I would like to include this in there.’
The emotional model for Violet’s persistence was not Yarros herself but her sons, who kept playing contact sports despite what EDS does to joints and bones. That image, of kids refusing to stop doing something that could seriously hurt them, gave her the specific version of defiance she needed for a heroine who walks into a dragon rider war college knowing her body will work against her.
I never saw anyone like me reading fantasy. Everyone was always already a badass or ready to do their training montage and then be awesome. Whereas I break constantly, my kids break constantly, and I wanted to see someone with that particular chronic illness succeed by using her brain and I wanted to see the power dynamic flip the second she bonds the most powerful dragon. Because we are never the most powerful people in the room, but our brains can be.
On what the book is wrestling with
Who records the war decides who won itThe Empyrean series, of which Fourth Wing is the first volume, was always going to be a series rather than a standalone, and the reason is structural: the history question Yarros built into Navarre cannot be answered in a single book. The scribe quadrant, the division of war-college students trained as recorders, exists in the novel precisely to make visible what gets left out when power controls the archive.
The whole series is plotted out and arced and all of that. And I think it really deals with the theme of history: Who’s allowed to tell our history, and what happens when only people in power are the ones who record our history.
Beyond the institutional question, Yarros embeds a moral dilemma she refuses to resolve. Lilith Sorrengail, Violet’s commanding general mother, is the character who forces the question into its sharpest form, and Yarros presented it at the Library of Congress as an unanswerable problem she deliberately hands to the reader.
Would you willingly give up your sword to be someone else’s shield? Because everyone says they would until you ask like Lilith Sorrengail. And then she says, what would you do to protect your kids? So if you have a shield and someone else needs it as a sword, do you give it up to them or do you protect your children? And there’s no right answer. [paraphrased from audio]
What she wants us to sit with
Ignorance as a weapon, brains as powerYarros is direct about the political architecture underneath the world-building. The suppression of knowledge in Navarre is not background atmosphere. She described the book’s core to an OverDrive audience in terms that connect the fantasy mechanics directly to contemporary policy.
about weaponizing ignorance and what happens when you ban books and you alter history to suit your own purposes. [paraphrased from audio]
The history theme carries a specific reader instruction. Yarros told Young Entertainment what she wants the book to leave behind once it’s finished.
I hope every reader can sit back and question who gets to tell our own history and how that impacts the future.
For readers with chronic illness, the ask is different but related: not a political question but a recognition. Yarros wrote a heroine who wins not despite her body but around it, because she had never read that book herself and wanted it to exist.