In the debut author’s The Poet Empress, set in a world where poetry is magic but women aren’t allowed to read, a peasant girl
becomes a prince’s concubine.
How did this story come to be?
I’ve been writing for 10 years. The Poet Empress is actually my ninth book. When I started it, I was really frustrated with not being published for so long. So I was like, okay, let me just get something out, and I ended up writing the first 7,000 words in a day. But that was totally a fluke—writing the rest of the book was slow and painful. I had a magic system and a world, but I still didn’t have a story. That came together through the heart-spirit poem, which is central to the plot. It’s a device where poetry gives you the power to kill somebody, but to do so, you first have to write a poem of love. The contradiction inherent within that led to the whole story.
What inspired the worldbuilding?
It very loosely draws from the Tang Dynasty of China, which is the era when poetry really flourished. Many of the classical poems I had to memorize as a kid were from the Tang Dynasty. I didn’t include anything strictly historical
because I wanted The Poet Empress to be solidly a fantasy, but I did do a lot of research into that period.
Heroine Yin Wei goes from desperate to dangerous. How did you approach her arc?
I had an outline going in and I knew all the twists from the very beginning, but I still discovered a lot along the way. Instead of working from the top down as a writer imposing things on the character, I tried to live within her shoes as she evolved. In an early draft, around two-thirds of the way through the story she was still a little bit more demure. Then I realized that didn’t really fit her character, given all she’s been through. 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.
Is this a romantasy?
I definitely didn’t consider it a romance at all when I wrote it, so I was very surprised that it ended up with Tor’s romance imprint, Bramble. I do think romantasy readers will enjoy the book, and there are a lot of tropes that they may find familiar, but there are also some important differences. I saw a way the story could go, and I wanted to deliberately take it in the other direction. 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.
