The Assassin's Blade
The Assassin's Blade
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Summaries & Analyses
Author Insights
Quizzes
NEWReading Tools
Sarah J. Maas on The Assassin's Blade
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A fairy tale heard the wrong wayThe entire premise of Celaena Sardothien began with a piece of music that felt like a mismatch. As a teenager in Manhattan, Maas heard the score accompanying Cinderella’s escape from the ball and found it too dark, too frantic for an ordinary fairy-tale exit. That wrongness was the opening.
What if Cinderella had been an assassin sent to the ball to kill the prince?
That question gave Maas not just a character but a built-in physical history: a heroine who had started training young and spent a decade becoming genuinely dangerous before a single novella begins.
Having arrived at an assassin heroine, Maas discovered the premise unlocked moral territory she had been searching for across everything she had read as a teenager. The heroines she loved in books like Sabriel were reliably on the right side. Celaena gave her room to go somewhere messier.
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.
The novellas are where that darkness operates most freely: Celaena takes jobs she finds repugnant, defies her master Arobynn for reasons she can barely articulate, and develops feelings for someone the life she leads will cost her.
Ansel, the character who befriends and then betrays Celaena in the novella set at a desert assassin’s fortress, was not invented to fill a plot slot. She came from somewhere considerably closer to home.
When I wrote The Assassin in the Desert and Ansel came along, she was very much a combination of these failed friendships with other women that I’ve had.
How she wrote it
Sand dunes, outlines abandoned, and a character who kept decidingMusic is not background noise for Maas while she drafts. It is the engine of the whole process, present from the moment a project begins to every session of actual writing. By 2018 she had written enough books to reflect on why, and she still had no tidy answer.
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 desert novella’s physical ordeal drew on a specific, humiliating memory. Maas once attempted to hike the enormous sand dunes at a national park in Michigan and found herself unable to breathe, essentially pinned partway up the dune. When she put Celaena in the desert, she had an exact physical template for what misery on sand actually feels like.
She said she knew Celaena had to suffer on those sand dunes exactly as she had during a failed hike in Michigan — she was drawing on her own physical experience of struggling and giving out on the dunes. [paraphrased from audio]
Maas submits detailed outlines to Bloomsbury before drafting, but she has learned to treat them as opening bets rather than binding contracts. In the novellas, Celaena repeatedly makes moral choices that override whatever plan her story might have followed: defying Arobynn over the slave trade, choosing Sam at a cost she cannot afford. Those decisions feel organic because Maas lets characters override strategy when they insist on it.
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.
Writing Sam Cortland’s fate — the loss that explains the broken, imprisoned woman readers meet at the start of Throne of Glass — was not a detached craft exercise. At a 2015 signing, after joking with a reader who asked whether Sam was really dead, Maas caught herself and admitted what the humor was covering.
I cried so much while writing the Novellas and like I had to walk away.
She told that same audience that her instinct to answer grief with a joke was a coping mechanism. The quip lands differently once you know the cost of what she was writing.
The personal thread
What failed friendships builtAnsel’s arc in the novellas, from close ally to betrayer, was not just a plot mechanism. It came from Maas’s own record of female friendships that broke apart, and she threaded that experience directly into a character who feels like she could have become Celaena’s closest companion.
When I wrote The Assassin in the Desert and Ansel came along, she was very much a combination of these failed friendships with other women that I’ve had.
The Ansel storyline was also the first piece of a much longer arc that Maas had mapped from the beginning of the series. The betrayal in the desert is not a standalone wound. It is the opening move in a pattern Maas intended Aelin to live through across multiple books.
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.
What she wants us to sit with
A heroine before she becomes a legendShe expressed hope that female readers would find in Celaena a heroine who could stand up for herself and feel like they could go through hell and come out of it. The novellas document exactly that hell: the losses and betrayals that make Celaena’s despair at the opening of Throne of Glass feel earned rather than imposed.
She expressed hope that female readers would find in Celaena a heroine who could stand up for herself and feel like they could go through hell and come out of it. [paraphrased from audio]
Maas came back to the same argument more than a decade after writing the novellas, in a 2024 interview about her entire body of work. The version of it she articulates by then is sharper, but it describes exactly what Celaena is doing in The Assassin’s Blade: shopping for books and gowns between assassinations and taking pride in both, refusing to be sorted into a single type.
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.
The novellas are the purest version of that argument: Celaena has not yet become the queen she is destined to be, so there is no destiny to explain her. She is simply herself, which is complicated enough.