Queen of Shadows
Queen of Shadows
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Sarah J. Maas on Queen of Shadows
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A ballroom escape that asked the wrong questionThe Throne of Glass series began not with a plan but with a feeling of wrongness. Listening to the Cinderella score as a teenager, Maas kept snagging on the same detail: the music sounded genuinely menacing for a scene where a princess was simply leaving a party. The question that followed rewired everything.
when I got the idea for THRONE OF GLASS (‘what if Cinderella had been an assassin sent to the ball to kill the prince?’), it was FINALLY the perfect way for me to write a story about that heroine who got to do all the fun, epic stuff.
The assassin concept solved a problem Maas had been carrying for years: how to write a heroine whose moral life is complicated enough to be interesting. She named the specific literary type she had always wanted but rarely found in fantasy.
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.)
By the fourth book, Queen of Shadows, the gray-zone heroine is mid-transformation into a queen, and Maas had a second, more personal reason to be writing it. At a September 2015 Barnes & Noble signing in Bensalem, Pennsylvania, she traced the female friendship arc directly to her own adolescence and early adulthood. The quotes from that event survive as fan-transcribed shorthand, a close approximation rather than verbatim transcript.
When I was younger in HS and college I had a really tough time making girlfriends and I had a really bad experiences with them where they did really horrible things and they really broke my trust in other girls... 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.
That intention predates Queen of Shadows by years. It was built into Aelin’s story from the beginning, waiting for the book that would finally pay it off.
How she wrote it
Thirteen years of characters who knew better than her outlineBy the time Maas was writing Queen of Shadows, she had spent more than a decade inside these characters’ heads. In a September 2015 Goodreads interview timed to the book’s release, she described the working principle that had accumulated over that time: the characters themselves, not any planned structure, determine where a scene goes.
I truly believe in letting my characters guide the story, and because I’ve been working with them for over a decade, I know them well enough to trust them to lead the story where it needs to go. So sometimes that means I’ll have plans that get uprooted — but it’s always for the best and always makes the story stronger.
That trust in character over outline was learned through failure. When she has tried to hold characters to a predetermined path, the result was not just imperfect prose but dead material that had to be discarded entirely.
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.
One structural advantage Maas had going into Queen of Shadows was its opening line. She noted at the Bensalem signing that first lines usually stop her cold, so having this one ready before she began was a concrete relief rather than a minor footnote. What cost her instead were the chapters following Dorian Havilliard, the crown prince of Adarlan, who spends much of the book imprisoned inside his own body by a Valg prince, a demonic entity from another world.
I cried like a million tears like writing this book and like half of them were in the Dorian sections... its actually really horrific he’s just like stuck there.
Music is where scenes begin for her, before a word is on the page. The shift from Celaena, the name under which Aelin hid her identity across the earlier books, to Aelin came with its own distinct score: she had said previously that Celaena was born from the Cinderella soundtrack while Aelin emerged from Swan Lake, two emotional keys for what is ultimately one character at two stages of her life.
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.
At the sentence level, she solves the problem of dialogue with a tool that is deliberately low-tech. The mirror behind her desk was first described in a 2012 How I Write piece, years before Queen of Shadows, but the method carried through her entire process with these characters.
I keep a giant mirror behind my desk so I can watch myself as I act out each scene while writing. It helps me nail the facial expressions/gestures during dialogue…and reminds me when I need to take a shower.
The personal thread
What the author’s own journey left on the pageMaas has consistently drawn a line between autobiography and emotional truth: specific events from her life do not map onto her plots, but the interior texture of those events does. She made the distinction in a 2020 Goodreads interview focused on her first adult fantasy novel, but the pattern she describes runs through all her work, including Queen of Shadows.
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 clearest example of that transfer is the female friendship arc in QOS, which Maas has linked directly to her own broken trust with women in high school and college. She had always planned it as Aelin’s story too, which meant that by the time she was writing the book, she was drawing on something she had been carrying for years and had been waiting to write through.
One of my big pet peeves is seeing women meet and instantly see each other as enemies.
That frustration is structural in Queen of Shadows: the relationships Aelin builds across the book are written as a deliberate argument against the reflex Maas names here.
What she wants us to sit with
Women who survive and resist the easy labelThe empowerment Maas hoped to deliver through Celaena was not motivational in a vague sense. In an early Bloomsbury video interview, she was specific about what she wanted female readers to walk away feeling: not inspired in the abstract, but capable in the particular sense that survival is possible.
I hope readers, especially female readers will feel empowered by Celaena and you know, find a heroine that, you know, can stand up for herself and I really want girls to feel like, you know, they can be who they want to be and they can find their own strength and, you know, they can go through hell and come out of it. [paraphrased from audio]
By the time she spoke to Today.com in 2024, that ambition had clarified into a specific resistance to how fiction sorts women into types. Queen of Shadows is the book where Aelin stops hiding inside the Celaena persona entirely, which makes it the most direct case for what Maas means by refusing category.
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.
That refusal is not just a character preference. In Queen of Shadows, Aelin’s femininity and her lethality are inseparable, and the book asks readers to hold both without resolving the tension into something neater.