Rose in Chains
Rose in Chains
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Julie Soto on Rose in Chains
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
The wish for a story that didn’t exist yetLong before she wrote a word of her own fiction, Soto spent years as a reader inside fanfiction communities, absorbing the form from the inside out. The shift from reader to writer came from a simple frustration.
I had been reading fan fiction for so long, I eventually wanted to try it myself... I would wish there was a certain story out there and I finally thought, go write it yourself!
When she did start writing, she kept returning to a particular romantic architecture. Asked what made Dramione, the fan pairing of Draco Malfoy and Hermione Granger from the Harry Potter series, so persistent for her as a writer, she traced the pull back to a template far older than any fandom.
I kind of always boil it down to the Darcy and Elizabeth trope. It’s not necessarily always enemies to lovers, but it’s a sense of opposites attract that I always am attracted to. And on top of that, a misunderstanding between the opposites. [paraphrased from audio]
Soto had been reading Dramione since high school, years before she wrote any of it herself. “The Auction,” the fanfiction story that would eventually become Rose in Chains, arrived well into her adult life, after a long apprenticeship as a reader rather than a writer.
I started reading Dramione fanfiction in high school, and I started writing a long time after that. So I was really just enjoying the fandom. [paraphrased from audio]
How she wrote it
Unplanting something and seeing if it growsFanfiction writing had always absolved Soto of one of fiction’s most demanding tasks. She had spent years writing in borrowed universes where readers arrived pre-loaded with shared knowledge, so she never had to prove she could build a world from nothing. Rose in Chains was the first time that debt came due.
One of the things that I love about reading and writing fanfiction is the immersion. I don’t have to explain to you what The Force is or what a lightsaber is... I never felt like I was someone who knew how to set anything up. I didn’t ever need to flex that muscle of world-building as a writer. I didn’t have to describe a new political climate or create a new magic system… One of the things that’s really exciting to me about Rose in Chains is that opportunity to take something that worked really well and meant a lot to me and getting to actually flex those world-building muscles now. Even beyond the Rose in Chains trilogy, if I wanted to continue writing fantasy, it doesn’t feel as daunting anymore. It’s another new genre to play with, and that’s the fun part.
Moving “The Auction” into an original world meant dismantling the Harry Potter scaffolding piece by piece, then deciding what the story actually needed around it. The most demanding part of that process was the world itself: where, politically and geographically, did this story want to live.
I reworked and completely stripped out and rebuilt that story, but it’ll feel very familiar to people who’ve read my fanfiction. The good thing about fanfiction is that, most of the time, the plot is yours. I had to start with plot and refashion characters that suited those circumstances. I built a world that feels far more like a Westeros, almost, that feels more politically complex. There are multiple countries, and some of them leave each other alone, some of them have been in silent war for years. I looked at other fantasy worlds and decided: Where did I want to go? Where did I want this story to live? So, to answer your question, it was very hard.
She reached for an organic metaphor to describe what the translation from fanfic to original fiction actually felt like in practice. The story had roots, but the soil it needed was entirely different.
It’s kind of like unplanting something from a garden and seeing if it grows somewhere else too. ‘Cause it needs completely different things and it’s like a lot of it is completely beginning over and finding just what was the seed, what was the thing that worked and kind of going from there. [paraphrased from audio]
“The Auction” was a complete, self-contained story. Turning it into the opening volume of a trilogy meant engineering structure where none had existed: a new internal climax, and two clean break points that hadn’t been part of the original arc.
I wanted three books. Um, and so kind of figuring out where things would cut and just also like adding in a climax where there wasn’t a climax. [paraphrased from audio]
Some readers arrived at Rose in Chains hunting for fandom Easter eggs in the character names. On a character named Cordelia, Soto pushed back on the idea that naming is a game of winks at the source material.
I actually appreciated more the Shakespearean connotation of Cordelia... going back into where some of those names became popular in the first place. [paraphrased from audio]
What she wants us to sit with
Dark world, deliberate romanceRose in Chains sits inside a genre, dark romantasy, where the line between the violence of the world and the violence of the relationship is often deliberately blurred. Soto drew that line explicitly, separating what Briony, the book’s captive protagonist, endures from how the central relationship between Briony and her captor Toven actually unfolds.
I consider Rose in Chains — it is dark romance, but the romance itself is not dark. And it is the slowest burn. [paraphrased from audio]
That distinction matters for book-club conversation. Readers who come expecting the coercion of the setting to contaminate the romance will find something more restrained than the genre label suggests, which is itself a craft argument worth examining.
Soto learned to write inside AO3, Archive of Our Own, the major fanfiction platform where writers post directly to readers with no agents, editors, or publishers between them. That education shaped how she thinks about the distance traditional publishing places between writer and audience.
It is so different, but at the same time, I learned everything I know about writing from AO3. There’s no middleman between you and your audience. And there are so many middlemen in [traditional] publishing.