Throne of Glass
Throne of Glass
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Sarah J. Maas on Throne of Glass
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.
Why she wrote it
A Cinderella score that demanded a darker storyThe book began with a piece of music that felt wrong for the scene it was scoring. Maas was sixteen, listening to the Disney Cinderella soundtrack, when the passage that plays during the heroine’s flight from the ball stopped her cold. The music was too dark, too urgent, for a girl who had simply stayed out past midnight. That mismatch between the score and the story it served cracked the premise open.
The original idea actually came from listening to Disney’s Cinderella soundtrack and thinking that the music that plays when she flees the ball would be much better-suited to a story where Cinderella had done something TRULY bad — like try to assassinate the prince.
enchantedinkpot.blogspot.com, “The Enchanted Inkpot: Interview with Sarah J. Maas, author of THRONE OF GLASS”Choosing an assassin as her protagonist was not just a plot decision. Maas had been reading epic fantasy since she was twelve and had noticed a recurring gap: male heroes got the monsters, the battles, the swagger, and female heroes were handed a narrower set of permissions. The assassin premise was a structural solution. Years of professional training, built into the character’s backstory, meant Celaena’s abilities never had to be explained away or softened.
I decided to stick with the assassin idea because it provided me with the perfect opportunity to write about a heroine who got to do all of the fun stuff that only guys typically get to do (slay monsters, partake in epic battles, swagger about…).
She also arrived at the project with a very specific sense of which kind of heroine she found worth writing. The morally straightforward, self-sacrificing protagonist she had grown up reading left her less interested than the figure who operated in murkier territory. Celaena’s moral complexity was not a feature added in revision. It was the original design.
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.
A West End trip gave the character her final missing ingredient. Maas saw Chicago in London as a teenager and watched Velma Kelly hold a stage with total, unapologetic self-possession. That quality, the refusal to apologize for talent or ambition, was something she had not yet found in the fiction she was reading, and it became the emotional core she built Celaena around.
Oh, Velma’s arrogance and fierceness made me want to write about a woman like her — about a woman who never once said sorry for being talented and determined and utterly in love with herself.
enchantedinkpot.blogspot.com, “The Enchanted Inkpot: Interview with Sarah J. Maas, author of THRONE OF GLASS”How she wrote it
Ten years, five rewrites, and a playlist for every draftThe manuscript Maas first queried was 240,000 words long, earned three rejections, and had to be rebuilt from the ground up before any editor would look at it seriously. When Bloomsbury expressed interest in December 2009, they asked for a more self-contained first book. Her solution, worked out with her agent, was to split the original Book 1 in half, pull a major plotline out to seed what became Book 2, and rebuild what remained around a resolved ending. Three rounds of editorial revision letters followed through most of 2011. The result was not a polished version of the original draft. It was a different book.
Each of those revisions and rewrites brought me closer to my true vision for the book, even if I didn’t realize it at the time.
Music was not background noise while she wrote. It was closer to a pre-writing tool, a way of generating scenes and emotional arcs before a single word of prose existed. The comparison she returned to was Disney’s Fantasia, the way a piece of music can conjure images and narrative sequences that have nothing to do with the composition’s original intent. Celaena’s voice came from the Cinderella score; Aelin, the identity Celaena grows into across the later books, came from Swan Lake.
Making my writing playlist for each book is a crucial part of my process — it’s almost like making an outline.
When revision letters arrived from editors, she resisted the pull to respond on a screen. She printed them out and answered in longhand, because the physical act of writing helped her absorb what was actually being asked and plan a response she could commit to. Her natural mode was to write without a fixed plan, but the series required submitting detailed outlines to her editor before beginning each book, a discipline she described as both useful and deeply frustrating.
Something about hand writing helps me internalize my game plan and understand the revisions being asked of me.
Real places fed the manuscript in specific ways. A miserable day hiking at Indiana Dunes, where she lay on the side of a dune waiting for the ordeal to end, became the direct source material for Celaena’s desert suffering in one of the novellas. A trip to Egypt, Cairo, and Jerusalem shaped the market scene in the same novella. Maas described the Indiana Dunes experience with particular feeling in a Bloomsbury video interview, making clear the suffering was autobiographical before it was fictional.
I was like lying on the side of a dune, like just waiting to die. It was horrible... so when I started writing The Assassin in the Desert, I knew that Celaena had to suffer, like brutally suffer on the sand dunes the way I had. [paraphrased from audio]
The personal thread
The girl behind the hard shellWriting began for Maas not as craft ambition but as a private refuge. She was still in high school when she started posting what would become Throne of Glass on FictionPress, and the act of writing was inseparable from what she needed it to do for her emotionally at the time. That function came before any thought of publication.
Writing is what brought me joy and writing in high school was a sanctuary for me. Like if things weren’t going well at school, with friends or you know, at home with family, I could turn to writing and that was my escape and my joy. [paraphrased from audio]
The emotional architecture of Celaena’s interior life drew directly from Maas’s own adolescence. In a Bloomsbury video interview recorded at the time of publication, she described the specific quality of loneliness she had felt in high school: surrounded by people, not yet found. That experience translated into the gap between the face Celaena shows the world and what she actually feels when no one is watching.
When I was in high school, I definitely had a hard shell that I didn’t let very many people in, but I was really lonely. I had friends, but they weren’t really the soul friends I was looking for... when I started writing Throne of Glass, I definitely put some of that into Celaena’s character, where she shows the world one face, but when she’s on her own, she’s pretty lonely and desperately wants a friend. [paraphrased from audio]
That loneliness also explains why friendship, rather than romance, is the emotional question Throne of Glass opens with. Celaena’s want is specific: not love, not freedom, but a person who sees through the performance.
What she wants us to sit with
Permission to be everything at onceMaas built Celaena as a direct counter to a heroine type she felt fantasy had overcorrected toward: the woman whose fighting ability requires her to give up femininity as proof of seriousness. The model she found first was Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and the thing she valued in Buffy was the refusal to choose between the two registers.
Celaena was very much in the vein of Buffy, where she’s this young assassin who loves clothes and dancing and ‘feminine’ things, but she also loves to beat the crap out of people and murder them.
By the time she was speaking to the Today show, with several series behind her and a global readership, the aspiration she named had not changed from what she had wanted at sixteen. The heroine she kept returning to across every book was the one who refused to resolve into a single legible type, because that refusal was the point.
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.
She also wanted readers to feel the weight of what her characters carry, not just watch them carry it. In the TODAY video, she pushed back gently against the idea that her books are pure escapism. The emotional consequences she writes into her characters are the argument the books make about what heroism actually costs.
It felt like a natural thing for my characters to face emotional consequences. The fate of the world sometimes is on their shoulders. That’s gonna leave a mark on them. [paraphrased from audio]
Her most direct statement of intent for female readers came in the Bloomsbury video recorded in 2012, when the book had just been published and she was still describing what she had hoped to do rather than what she had already been credited with doing. The aspiration was not about plot or world-building. It was about what a reader might feel after closing the book.
I hope readers, especially female readers, will feel empowered by Celaena and find a heroine that can stand up for herself. I really want girls to feel like they can be who they want to be and they can find their own strength, and they can go through hell and come out of it. [paraphrased from audio]