Rosaria Munda: Stories Are Like Soup

Don’t rush them. The longer they simmer, the richer and more complex they come out.

That was my experience with Fireborne, my debut young adult fantasy, a novel about two orphans in a post-revolutionary world who ride dragons. It simmered for five years before I wrote the first draft.

I was eighteen when first inspiration struck. Driving an hour each way to scoop ice cream for a summer job, listening to my rural library’s only audiobook, I was hooked on a history of the Blitz and imagined battles in the air fought by teens bearing the weight of the world on their shoulders.

At nineteen, I saw How to Train Your Dragon for the first time. Like Spitfires, these dragons could battle in the sky—but they were also predators, pets, companions, and weapons of mass destruction. I imagined teens with the weight of the world on their shoulders, now on dragonback.

At twenty, I took a class on Plato’s Republic. A cute nerdy boy sat a row behind me; I was a nerd too, so we hung out and argued. Plato suggests a utopia can be engineered by raising promising children apart from their parents and training them to be just rulers. This sounded like something straight out of Hunger Games or Divergent, which were the rage at the time, but why would anyone trust teens with such responsibility?

OK, hear me out, I told the cute nerd. What if your utopia-in-the-making had a tradition of dragonriding among a hereditary aristocracy, a la the Targaryens, but needed a new, more meritocratic way to select young dragonriders? (Down the road, I married the cute nerd.)

At twenty-one, on an internship in Paris, I stood in Place de la Concorde, once the site of the guillotine and now a traffic circle. At twenty-two, I sat in a Beijing café after a long day teaching and made a friend. Her family had lost everything in the Cultural Revolution. I made another friend whose family had gained everything. As I asked them questions and mulled their answers, I thought: Even if you made a new order, where teens were selected to ride dragons based on merit rather than birthright—there would have been a bloody revolution first. If you had been a peasant before the revolution, struggling in abject poverty, you would owe the new regime everything. But if your family had been part of the aristocracy, you might have watched them die.

In the new regime, a former peasant and former aristocrat might test into the same program and ride dragons side by side.