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Princess Alyrra’s strength lies in silence. Scorned by her family, she avoids the court, spending her time with servants. When her marriage is unexpectedly arranged with the prince of a powerful neighboring kingdom, Alyrra feels trapped. As the court celebrates her match, dark rumors spread about the unexplained deaths of the women of her new family. Alyrra begins her journey with mounting trepidation. Betrayed while traveling, she seizes an opportunity to start a life away from court.
Walking away from a prince whom she doesn’t know should have been easy. But from the moment she sets eyes on him, Alyrra realizes that her freedom could cost him his life. Without any magical defense of her own, she is plunged into a lethal game of sorcery and deceit. Now Alyrra must decide whom she can trust and what she’s willing to fight for—before her silence proves fatal.
The author, Intisar Khanani grew up a
nomad and traveler. Born in Wisconsin, she has lived in five different states
as well as in Jeddah on the coast of the Red Sea. She first remembers seeing
snow on a wintry street in Zurich, Switzerland, and vaguely recollects having
breakfast with the orangutans at the Singapore Zoo when she was five. She now
resides in Cincinnati, Ohio, with her husband and young daughter. Intisar
writes grants and develops projects to address community health with the
Cincinnati Health Department, which is as close as she can get to saving the
world. Her approach to writing fantasy reflects her lifelong passion for
stories from different cultures. She is currently writing a trilogy set in the
same world as Thorn. This is her
first novel.
Writing Scenes
I started out writing scenes by the
textbook: following the much vaunted advice about moving action or character
development from point A to point B over the course of a scene, developing in-depth
character descriptions, having beats in your dialogue, etc. Sometimes it
worked, and sometimes writing scenes was excruciating, which meant loads of
revision before it was ready to be shared. I’ve since learned to scrap the
advice I’d so carefully gathered and focus on how my imagination works.
Here’s an example: I am working on revising
the first novel in a trilogy set in the same world as Thorn. I knew there needed to be an interaction between the main
character, Rae, and a thief called Bren. Because Rae had just come out of a harrowing
experience, I needed something light. For a couple weeks, I wrote stilted
scenes trying to go from A to B and didn’t like my results. Then, all of a
sudden, I had a vision of Rae and Bren sitting on the floor, their backs
against a bed, laughing like the best of friends. That was it: the heart of the
scene. I started building the moment first, asking myself what was on the
floor, whose bed it was, what the light was like in the room. Then came the
questions of how they got there, and what would happen next. The scene spun out
from there, connecting to the previous scene and opening up possibilities for
the next one.
Sometimes I stumble along building a scene
until I find the heart of it, and sometimes all I have to go on to build the
whole scene is that kernel at the heart: a line of dialogue, a glimpse from the
corner of the main character’s eye, a touch. Once I have the central moment of the scene, I start building
outward—forward, backward, over and around—until the rest of the scene falls
into place. Eventually, I line up my scenes and build in the connectors that
are missing to shape the scenes into a full storyline.
My best advice, then, is to find works for
you. Writing should be fun. It’s work, there’s no arguing with that, but it
should be the kind of work that you look forward to doing. What kind of writing
advice has worked for you? What hasn’t?
