The Night Prince
The Night Prince
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Lauren Palphreyman on The Night Prince
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
Writing the book she most wants to readBefore she wrote a single word of the Wolf King series, Palphreyman had already spent years reading and watching stories built around romantic tension. That appetite for the ‘will they or won’t they’ dynamic is not incidental to The Night Prince; the love triangle at its center is the direct product of what she finds compulsive as a reader.
I love stories that include romance. I love the chemistry and the push and pull between characters while we wait to see whether they’re going to get together! It always keeps me on the edge of my seat while I’m reading a book or watching a tv series.
The supernatural setting of The Night Prince belongs to the same logic. Palphreyman did not land on werewolves and paranormal mythology because the genre was commercially viable; the sources make clear she arrived there because those creatures are exactly what she reads for pleasure.
I also LOVE anything supernatural – vampires, werewolves, fae, witches – sign me up!
Palphreyman had spent several years as an analyst at Penguin Random House before writing full-time, which meant she understood the commercial pressures on any book before she sat down to write one. Her answer to that pressure was a practical rule about where her own energy has to go first.
If I’m going to be spending a lot of time writing and crafting a world – it has to be a place that I’m going to enjoy spending my time in!
The Night Prince is the second book in a series that has now sold into 20 languages and attracted a TV development at STARZ. The foundation of that reach was built on Wattpad, where her earlier supernatural series Cupid’s Match drew over 70 million reads chapter by chapter. In both cases, the starting point was the same: she chose the genre she could not stop reading.
How she wrote it
Making it up, then making it look plannedPalphreyman built her early readership on Wattpad, where she published chapter by chapter to a live audience. That format leaves no room for the myth of the fully formed authorial vision, and she eventually named the myth directly.
Before I started writing, I thought that authors had fully realized plots and worlds in their heads before they put pen to paper. I thought they went into a project knowing exactly what they were doing. As I started creating books myself, I realized we’re making it up as we go along!
Knowing that discovery is baked into her process, she treats the first draft not as a failure to plan but as the mechanism by which the story gets found. The revision pass is where the apparent coherence gets installed retroactively.
I learn a lot about my characters and my world as I’m writing the story – and in my first drafts there’s often strange plot holes and weird things going on that don’t make much sense! But that’s okay, that’s what a first draft is for. When you edit a book – you can amend your story it and pretend like you knew what you were doing from the start!
Discovery drafting carries a real risk: losing the thread entirely. Her guard against that is fixing one structural element before she begins, not the world or the characters, but the conflict that everything else must serve.
The main conflict is basically what the main character has to do, what will get in their way, and what will happen if they don’t overcome it. It’s essentially the backbone of the novel. It’s what keeps your story moving forward. So knowing what the conflict is going to be at the start of the project will prevent you, as a writer, from getting lost while you’re writing.
Within that structure, her emotional energy is not evenly distributed. She identifies a specific window in any book where her enthusiasm runs highest, and it is earlier than most readers might expect.
writing the first third (or the first act) of the book is probably my favorite part. It’s the section of a book where the main characters, the world, the magic, the potential relationships, etc. are all introduced for the first time – and I always get excited when writing it. I feel like it’s the bit of the book where I’m excitedly telling the readers, ‘hey, look at this cool thing!’
What she wants us to sit with
Character first, alwaysPalphreyman supplied her own author bio to the Late Night Reads podcast, and the description she chose to write about herself in the third person is essentially a statement of intent: the kinds of people she builds and the relationship she wants those people to have with genre convention.
She likes to write strong and complicated men who respect women, women who can be soft as well as fierce, and romantasy tropes with a twist. [Author-supplied bio, written in third person]
That commitment to character is not just aesthetic preference; it reflects her view of what holds a story together when everything else is imperfect. She has been direct about where a reader’s tolerance actually comes from.
People can forgive a weaker story if they enjoy spending time with the characters, and a tightly paced plot stops the book from dragging and readers getting bored.
For a book-club reader, this is the tension worth sitting with after finishing The Night Prince: which element did the work for you? If the plot held, was it the pace, or was it that you were already invested in the people moving through it? Palphreyman is betting those two things reinforce each other, but she is candid that character is the load-bearing one.