Heir of Fire
Heir of Fire
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Sarah J. Maas on Heir of Fire
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A world that finally had room to breatheMaas had been carrying the world of Throne of Glass since she was sixteen, but the first two books were geographically confined to a single city. Heir of Fire was always going to be the book where the architecture she’d held in reserve could finally show itself. In a 2014 USA Today interview, she explained that the people closest to the manuscript saw the expansion coming from the beginning.
My editor and critique partners have always known that I had plans to expand upon the world and cast of characters, so the jump in length wasn’t that surprising for any of us.
Long before the series had a publisher, Maas had settled on the kind of heroine she wanted to write. The moral architecture of Celaena Sardothien was not a concession to plot necessity but a deliberate choice made when Maas was still a teenager posting chapters online. In a 2012 blog tour piece for The Book Smugglers, she traced that choice to a specific archetype she found more honest than the alternatives.
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. So, as an assassin, I could have Celaena be that kind of gray-area character — I could have her waffle between somewhat-good and somewhat-bad, and I could really explore the darkness in her character. It’s made her a ton of fun to write — and is probably the reason why I’ve stuck with her story for over ten years now.
That decade-long commitment meant Heir of Fire wasn’t a course correction. The darkness Maas explores in this third book had been the point all along.
How she wrote it
Sixty thousand words she had to throw awayThe version of Heir of Fire that Maas eventually abandoned runs to roughly the length of a standalone novel. About a third of the way into a draft she had been building toward, she decided the whole thing was wrong, not structurally broken but emotionally false to the character she knew better than anyone. The reset that followed produced a book she ultimately called her favorite of the series.
Heir of Fire was a prime example: I had the story in mind, wrote 60k words of it, and felt that it wasn’t working at all. So I dumped that 60k and gave Celaena free rein to guide the story where she wanted to go and wound up with a book that felt true to her character, the world and fit even better into my overarching plans for the series.
Discarding sixty thousand words was only the first disruption. The draft that replaced them arrived under a schedule tight enough that her critique partners had to absorb an enormous manuscript in a compressed window. What they received was nearly a third longer than what readers eventually held in their hands.
I think the first draft of Heir of Fire clocked in at around 210k words (the published version is around 165k-170k), and because I was on such a crazy-tight schedule, it meant my CPs had a lot of reading to do in a pretty short timeframe. (This is also why I adore my CPs and can’t live without them.) They helped me pare down the book to a more manageable length and made it a much stronger, tighter book in the process. (Though, let’s be honest: Heir of Fire is still a beast. You could use it as a bludgeoning weapon. Or a really beautiful doorstop.)
The willingness to scrap sixty thousand words and follow a character instead of a plan reflects something Maas treats as a working principle across the series. In a September 2015 Goodreads interview, she described why she doesn’t grip outlines even when they’re the safer option.
I’m not a big fan of outlining, and I’ve found that (for me, at least) clinging to an outline even when the characters want to do something else, even when they’ve outgrown those plans, can be detrimental to the story. So I try to listen to my characters and my gut, even if that means changing the ending of the series, even if it means rewriting and re-envisioning big chunks of the story. But every time I’ve done it, the series has been better for it.
When the Bloomsbury camera crew asked Maas to describe Heir of Fire before its 2014 publication, she ran directly into the problem of how much the book had grown. It now carried three separate narrative threads across three distinct settings, including a brand-new character she had not been able to introduce in either of the first two books.
[paraphrased from audio] Pitching the book for Bloomsbury’s camera, Maas called Manon Blackbeak “one of my new favorite characters” and said the book is “more of an epic story” on “a bigger scale than the first two.” Then, stopping herself mid-description: “I’m not — I haven’t pitched this book yet. You can include this in the video as I try to figure out what the hell to say.” [paraphrased from audio]
The personal thread
Feelings that found their way inMaas has been careful to distinguish between autobiography and emotional truth. She doesn’t map events from her life onto her heroines, but she has described something more diffuse: a consistent borrowing of interior experience that runs through the series as a whole. This matters for Heir of Fire in particular, which is the book where Celaena’s grief, shame, and suppressed history are finally brought to the surface.
a lot of pieces of my own journey have made their way into my work over the years — not specific events, exactly, but the feelings and emotional journeys my heroines have gone through.
The template for Celaena as a character type also has a personal dimension. Maas grew up reading and watching stories that sorted heroines into legible, narrow roles, and Celaena was built in direct opposition to that. In Cosmopolitan, she named the specific touchstone she’d held onto since conceiving the 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.
What she wants us to sit with
A character who can still surprise her own creatorMaas has spent more than a decade with Celaena, which makes the fact that the character still catches her off guard significant. By the time Heir of Fire published, Maas had written and rewritten this world through a long querying process and multiple complete overhauls of the first book. What she said in a September 2015 Goodreads interview points to what she wants readers to feel on the other side of the story.
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. I love that Celaena can still surprise me, even after all this time.
Reader response to Heir of Fire’s new characters confirmed that what Maas hoped to build was landing. Rowan Whitethorn, the Fae warrior who serves as Celaena’s reluctant mentor in this book, drew a stronger reaction than she expected. She addressed the response directly in the same USA Today interview.
Oh, Rowan. My silver-haired warrior-prince. You are definitely not alone in adoring him — and I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how many people have, erm, jumped ship and embraced Team Rowan.
The fact that readers were jumping ship at all confirmed that Heir of Fire had done what the abandoned sixty-thousand-word draft could not: made Celaena’s world feel bigger and more consequential than the one readers had been given in the first two books.