My Writing Process & How This Series Came Together

People ask me some version of the same question a lot: how long have you been sitting on this world? The honest answer is longer than I want to admit, and not in the way that sounds romantic.

The idea showed up wrong the first time.

The Unseen Series didn't start as six books. It started as a single scene I couldn't stop rewriting — a girl on a marble floor, no name, no bloodline, and a court full of people deciding what to do with her. I wrote that scene probably a dozen different ways before I understood it wasn't the opening of a short story. It was the opening of a girl's entire life, and I was going to need a lot more room than I'd planned for.

That's usually how it goes for me. I don't outline a series and then populate it. It's either a scene or a character, something that won't leave me alone until I chase it down. I don't want to give too much away, but Frostfire was all TBD until Tefret wouldn't stop talking to me. I'd wake up already listening to her describe finding her sister, until I had no choice but to get up and write it down. I flesh out the rest of her story from there. Whichever one grabs me first, the world builds itself around whatever has to be true for that moment to make sense. Jadira surviving the Dragon Court only works if there's an empire big enough to make her survival small. One court's cruelty, not the whole world's. The Cadre only works if there's something institutional watching from the edges the entire time, waiting for Book 1 to end before it matters. None of that was in my head on day one. It showed up because the story needed somewhere to go next.

I write from somewhere between midnight and deadline.

That's not a line. It's a schedule that happens for me more than I like to admit. Most of Unchosen got written in the hours after everyone else in my house was asleep, which meant a lot of scenes got written tired, torn apart the next morning, and rebuilt from whatever survived the read-through. I don't think that's a flaw in the process. I think first drafts are supposed to be a little feral. The job afterward is going back in daylight and asking whether the scene is actually doing what I thought it was doing at 1 a.m., or whether I just liked the sentence.

I revise hard. Harder than I want to, most of the time. If you've read Unchosen, you read a version that got cut apart and put back together more than once, not because the first draft was wrong, exactly, but because ten POVs across one book meant I owed every single one of those characters a version of the story where they weren't just furniture in Jadira's plot. That's the part of the process nobody sees: the pass where you go back and ask if a character earned their page time, or if you just needed them there.

Ten POVs was a structural bet, not a stylistic flourish.

I could have told this story through Jadira alone. I chose not to because the whole point of the empire she's surviving is that it looks completely different depending on where you're standing in it. Her sister sees a different court than she does. Her father sees a different court than either of them. Lady Calanthe isn't a villain from the inside. She's someone running her own version of survival, and I wanted readers to feel that, not just be told it. Multiple POVs was the only honest way to build a political world instead of a backdrop.

What's next

I'm deep in Unclaimed right now, and the same process is happening again: a scene I can't stop rewriting, a world reshaping itself around what has to be true for it to land. I'll have more to share on that soon.

If you want to be in the room for that (early looks, behind-the-scenes process notes, the stuff that doesn't make it to social), that's exactly what the Cadre is for.

~ M. Nightwell

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