Sarah J. Maas is one of the few living novelists who has managed to sustain three interconnected fantasy series simultaneously while consistently landing on the New York Times bestseller list. The Throne of Glass series, A Court of Thorns and Roses, and Crescent City are not thin books. They run long, they carry enormous amounts of world-building, and they're written to be re-read. Readers come back for new installments the way people return to a place they love. Building something like that requires a working method that can handle serious structural complexity without breaking down under the weight of it.
Maas started writing the story that would become Throne of Glass when she was sixteen, posting chapters online through FictionPress.com. By the time it published through Bloomsbury in 2012, she'd been living inside those characters for years. That origin shapes how she talks about the work. She's not precious about the drafting stage, and she's never pretended that the first version of anything is the thing she's actually trying to make. The routine reflects that. Get the story down, then fix it.
The Routine at a Glance
- Wake Time
- Not publicly specified. Maas has described writing around her family life, including her son, rather than keeping a fixed daily hour.
- Writing Location
- Home, typically at a desk. She's mentioned writing with music on, which suggests a private workspace rather than a shared or public setting.
- Daily Output
- Varies by phase. During a drafting sprint she writes in sustained bursts; she's described herself as a binge-drafter who goes deep on a project rather than maintaining a steady low-volume daily quota.
- Tools
- Laptop, with a curated playlist running in the background. She builds a distinct Spotify playlist for each book before and during drafting.
- Famous Ritual
- Building a book-specific playlist before drafting begins. Each playlist becomes a sonic map of the novel's emotional arc, and she listens to it on repeat while writing.
- Books Written This Way
- Throne of Glass series (7 books), A Court of Thorns and Roses series (5+ books), Crescent City series (ongoing).
Binge-Drafting: What It Actually Means
Writers tend to sort themselves into two camps. There are the daily-quota people, who sit down every morning and put a fixed number of words on the page whether or not they feel like it. And there are the binge-drafters, who write in long, concentrated bursts, going hard on a project for days or weeks before coming up for air. Maas belongs clearly to the second camp, and she's been open about it in interviews over the years. She doesn't frame it as a lack of discipline. She frames it as understanding how her own creative energy actually works.
Binge-drafting has a specific logic to it, especially for long-form fantasy. When you're inside a 700-page novel with three or four interconnected plotlines, the amount of information you need to hold in your head while writing any given chapter is enormous. The longer you're away from the manuscript, the more time you spend each session rebuilding that internal model before you can move forward. Daily-quota writers who write an hour and then step away for twenty-three hours are constantly paying the re-entry cost. A writer who stays inside the book for a week straight pays it once.
The tradeoff is that binge-drafting requires blocking time rather than stealing it. You can carve a daily hour out of almost any life. You can't as easily carve a two-week sprint. For Maas, who has spoken in interviews about working around family life and the demands of being a mother, this means the scheduling problem is real. The approach requires planning the drafting windows in advance, protecting them, and trusting that the silence between sprints is part of the process rather than a sign that something has gone wrong.
What comes out of a binge draft is often a mess. Maas has said clearly that her first drafts are rough and that heavy revision is where the actual writing happens. The binge gets the story out. It's not the book yet.
Music as a Drafting Tool
A lot of writers use music. Maas uses it differently. Before she starts drafting a book, she builds a playlist for it. She's talked about this in interviews and on social media over the years, and she shares the playlists with readers as a companion to each release. The playlist for A Court of Silver Flames went live when the book did, as a way for readers to hear the emotional landscape she'd been inside while writing it. It's become a recognizable part of how she releases work, but the origin of the practice is functional, not marketing. She builds the playlist because it helps her write.
What she's describing, at its core, is a way of keeping the emotional register of a book consistent across a long drafting period. A fantasy novel can take a year or more to draft. The tone of the opening chapters needs to connect to the tone of the climax even though they might have been written eight months apart. Music is a shortcut to mood. If you've spent six months conditioning yourself to associate a particular set of songs with a particular character's emotional state, you can put on those songs and be back inside that state in minutes, regardless of how much time has passed.
This is a more sophisticated version of the writer's ritual than most people give it credit for. Morrison watched the dawn light through her kitchen window to trigger her writing state. Hemingway reread his previous pages to get back into the prose rhythm. Maas puts on a playlist. The mechanism is different; the function is the same. You're building a Pavlovian link between a sensory input and a creative state, and then using that link to get to work faster every time you sit down.
Readers of romantasy tend to be emotionally invested in ways that go beyond most genre fiction. They reread. They make playlists themselves. The fact that Maas shares hers feeds that dynamic, but it also reflects how central the emotional consistency of a long series is to why readers come back. The books feel continuous in their emotional tone because the drafting process was emotionally continuous. The playlist is part of how she keeps that thread intact across hundreds of thousands of words and years of writing.