Tower of Dawn (Throne of Glass, #6)
Tower of Dawn (Throne of Glass, #6)
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Sarah J. Maas on Tower of Dawn (Throne of Glass, #6)
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.
Why she wrote it
A novella that refused to stay smallThe book began with a geographic premise, not a character one. At a Baltimore signing in May 2017, Maas described what she had in mind before she typed a single word: a story that would run beside ‘Empire of Storms’ in real time, set far from Aelin’s war, in a world readers had barely glimpsed.
Meanwhile, in the Southern Kingdom.....
emiesnook.wordpress.com, “Meeting Sarah J. Maas! (Again) – Prose and Purls”That ellipsis was the whole concept. She had intended a short novella, roughly 20,000 to 35,000 words. The finished manuscript ran to 193,000.
The explosion in scale came from the research. Maas spent serious time in the history of the Mongolian Empire before drafting, and the reading changed her thinking so thoroughly that she arrived at the signing prepared to argue Genghis Khan’s legacy to an audience of fantasy readers. She recommended Jack Weatherford’s ‘Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World’ and made a specific case: European accounts had buried the fact that his empire established universal education.
[paraphrased from audio] Maas described doing “a ton of research” into the Mongolian Empire for the book, leaving the process as Genghis Khan’s “#1 fangirl,” and pushing back on European accounts of him — she pointed specifically to universal education in his empire, which she felt got obscured by the conqueror narrative.
emiesnook.wordpress.com, “Meeting Sarah J. Maas! (Again) – Prose and Purls”She placed ‘Tower of Dawn’ alongside ‘Heir of Fire’ as one of the two series entries she feels most strongly about, and made clear at the Baltimore signing that readers who skipped it would hit ‘Kingdom of Ash’ missing load-bearing information.
Some major shit happens.
emiesnook.wordpress.com, “Meeting Sarah J. Maas! (Again) – Prose and Purls”How she wrote it
Outlines, gut instinct, and a decade of planted detailsFor the Throne of Glass books, Maas works under a structural constraint she does not apply to everything she writes. Her publisher requires detailed outlines before drafting begins, and she has described living inside that tension for years.
when it comes to working on the THRONE OF GLASS series, I actually need to submit pretty detailed outlines before I even begin writing (which can be both useful and immensely frustrating).
Those outlines are a map, not a contract. When a character’s internal logic pulls against the planned path, Maas has learned which one to follow, a lesson that came from forcing scenes that didn’t work and then cutting them.
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.
Yrene Towers, a healer who first appears in ‘The Assassin’s Blade,’ becomes one of the three POV characters in ‘Tower of Dawn.’ That kind of payoff, a detail planted books earlier that returns with weight, traces to a formative reading experience Maas has named specifically. She read the Harry Potter series as she was learning to write, and Rowling’s technique of seeding small facts across thousands of pages lodged in her as a goal rather than a habit.
I grew up with Harry Potter, and I feel like J.K. Rowling is the queen of little details that are on the page in book one and then in book six they come back in a huge way. That definitely left its mark on me when I was growing up as a reader and a writer.
The draw toward long-form serialized storytelling goes beyond technique. Maas has described the satisfaction of building a multi-book arc as something structural, a pleasure in the fitting-together of parts across a large span of time and pages.
I love building a long arc over a series, and taking the time to get to know characters and worlds inside and out. I find it really satisfying to take bits and pieces of a larger story and figure out how it all fits together.
Music enters every drafting session before character or plot does. Maas has described it not as atmosphere but as source material: a piece of score produces a scene or a person almost involuntarily, which means her playlists function as a first draft before any words exist.
Music inspires pretty much everything that I write, and 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. All of my books have sprung from pieces of music, and nearly every scene within them (and character) was inspired by it, too.
What she wants us to sit with
Women who resist a single definitionMaas does not address in any available source what she specifically hoped readers would carry away from ‘Tower of Dawn.’ Her broader thinking about the women she writes does, however, illuminate what made Yrene Towers an unusual choice for this series. Every other protagonist in the Throne of Glass sequence is defined partly by combat; Yrene’s power is healing. In an interview with Jenna Bush Hager on TODAY, Maas described what she keeps reaching for across her catalog, a quality she named as resistance to category.
[paraphrased from audio] Maas described being drawn to writing women who “can’t be placed in any definable category” — capable of being “very feminine” but also of defeating the villain and “saving the world.”
A healer who becomes essential to defeating an empire fits that frame exactly, even if Maas never drew the line herself in any available source.