The Poet Empress
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Shen Tao on The Poet Empress
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.
Why she wrote it
The poem that made the story possibleEight manuscripts came before this one, and books six through eight had all been shaped, at least partly, by awareness of what the market wanted. That strategy kept failing. By the ninth book, she abandoned it entirely.
I just decided, I’m just going to write the story of my heart and maybe not care about all that. [paraphrased from audio]
Writing from the heart, for Tao, meant going back to Chinese history and poetry — territory she’d sidestepped in earlier manuscripts because she felt unqualified to claim it after growing up mostly in Canada.
The setting existed, the protagonist existed, the cruel prince existed, and the magic system built around poetry was already in place. None of it cohered into a story until she found a single, contradictory spell: a poem that can kill its target, but only if it is also written with love.
The origin of The Poet Empress is not so much the magic system as how it’s used. Most of the pieces were there from the beginning — an impoverished young rice farmer chosen as a concubine, a violent and despotic prince, a historically-inspired setting filled with nature and poetry magic — but the story didn’t truly come together until I figured out the poem at the center of it: ‘the heart-spirit poem.’
odysseyworkshop.wordpress.com, “Interview: Graduate Shen Tao – Odyssey Writing Workshop Blog”She had also read, one too many times, the version of this story where a woman learns of her abuser’s traumatic past and is nudged, however quietly, toward forgiveness. Writing explicitly against that pattern was not incidental to the book; it was one of its founding conditions.
I wanted a book where a young woman is facing terrible abuse by this person, and then, when she finds out that he has a traumatic past that explains his actions, I wanted her specifically not to forgive him for it. That was important to me.
Beneath the plot and the magic, a political question was driving the whole project: in a world where writing is forbidden to women and literacy is power, the question of whose voice survives is not a metaphor but a mechanism.
Who gets to tell stories? Whose stories get to be told?
How she wrote it
A novel written twice before it beganEvery manuscript before this one had been drafted without a known ending, and she’d traced some of her structural failures to that habit. The ninth book broke the pattern: she outlined first, took the outline to workshops and friends for feedback, and only started drafting once the shape of the conclusion felt stable.
Am I qualified to write a historical piece? Maybe not. But am I qualified to write a fantasy that’s inspired by history? I think maybe. [paraphrased from audio]
Choosing secondary world fantasy over historical fiction was itself a structural decision: a made-up dynasty let her comment metaphorically on gender, power, and literacy without being accountable to any specific period of Chinese history.
Even with a finished outline in hand, she still did not know who her protagonist Wei actually was. Her solution was to write a complete novel she expected to throw away entirely, using it as a space to let the character speak before the real draft began.
I think no words from the first draft made it to the second draft. So that was a full-length novel that I wrote just trying to find her voice, what did she care about... it’s hard for me to find answers to them that feel true to her without letting her speak for herself. [paraphrased from audio]
Writing in Wei’s first-person voice required keeping her own authorial knowledge out of the narration. Wei is sixteen, the daughter of rice farmers, and has no framework for the court world closing around her. Tao compared the technique to method acting: staying inside the character’s ignorance rather than letting adult or educated awareness bleed through.
I really kept in mind that she was just a village girl. She didn’t have a large vocabulary, she didn’t know the terms for the things that were happening to her, and she didn’t have context for a lot of things that were happening to her. [paraphrased from audio]
The outline had given her a shape, but not a complete understanding of her own character. Two-thirds through an early draft, she realized Wei was behaving too demurely for everything she had survived. The recognition reframed the entire second half of the book.
What I was actually writing was closer to a corruption arc, to use a craft term. That moment was a total revelation for me because it changed how I wrote her for the rest of the story.
The same open quality applied to the antagonist. Tao had not pre-planned Terren’s history before drafting; she followed it in real time, arriving at the discoveries at the same moment Wei did.
I was honestly, I was discovering it right next to her. [paraphrased from audio]
The personal thread
Poems memorized before they were understoodShe grew up in Canada memorizing classical Chinese poems she only began to understand as an adult. One Tang Dynasty poem in particular, about a man who leaves his village young and returns old, unrecognized by the local children, hit her differently after years of living as an immigrant. That experience of becoming unrecognizable to where you came from fed into a book where literacy, language, and belonging are all bound together.
I just wanted to share a love for language, you know, both English and Chinese, because there’s a lot of Chinese classical poems that I read and loved and memorized as a kid. And that was an important part of me. [paraphrased from audio]
She also got Chinese readers to vet the manuscript before publication, including her father, who grew up in a rice-farming village much like Wei’s. His response to how she had rendered village life carried a particular weight for her.
I was able to go back to my roots and where I love writing and just pull back and write something I was really passionate about and wasn’t geared towards the market. [paraphrased from audio]
What she wants us to sit with
Forgiveness withheld, and what that costsThe heart-spirit poem, the spell at the center of the book, can only kill if it is also written with love. That contradiction was not an ornament on the premise; it was the premise. Tao’s publisher, Bramble, describes itself as a home for love stories that may end badly or may not be romantically centered, and Tao saw her book fitting that description precisely because of what the spell demands.
That contradiction inherent in the premise is where the whole story comes from. [paraphrased from audio]
Understanding why Terren became cruel was always going to be part of Wei’s journey. What Tao wanted to hold firm was the line between explanation and absolution: learning someone’s history does not settle the debt of what they did with it.
I don’t necessarily believe that past trauma can excuse all of the present behavior. [paraphrased from audio]
Her Nerd Daily guest post moves from the book’s world, where women are barred from writing and poetry is literal power, outward to the act of reading itself. The final turn is addressed directly to the reader, and it makes the act of finishing the book feel like participation in the argument the book is making.
Maybe the way the world is changed is one poem at a time.