persona mia: YA Author Cassandra Clare Reveals the Practical Magic Behind Her Bestselling ‘Shadowhunter’ Series

Wednesday, April 17, 2019

YA Author Cassandra Clare Reveals the Practical Magic Behind Her Bestselling ‘Shadowhunter’ Series

Cassandra Clare wrote her first published novel in a closet. That is, in one of those “cozy”

New York City apartments, wherein the bed doubles as an office chair and the desk looks suspiciously like a windowsill. At the time, she worked the night shift as a copy editor for the National Enquirer, spending daylight hours in her cramped apartment, cranking out chapters, researching agents, writing queries, reworking her manuscript and, eventually, signing a contract for publication of the soon-to-be New York Times bestselling YA novel City of Bones.

That book would prove to be the first of several bestsellers in a multi-series collection of 12 novels (and counting)—plus several short story anthologies—known as the Shadowhunter Chronicles: tales from an urban fantasy world brimming with angels, demons, warlocks, vampires and faeries, plus the enemies and allies thereof. Of those, perhaps the best-known series within the broader universe is The Mortal Instruments sextet. Clare’s follow up, the Infernal Devices prequel trilogy, harks back to the Victorian Era, and the December 2018 release of Queen of Air and Darkness completes The Dark Artifices, a sequel trilogy to Mortal Instruments. Fans of Clare can expect to further explore the Shadowhunter universe in a new trilogy, The Eldest Curses, the first of which will be released in Spring 2019.

Despite her early successes, it wasn’t until the stellar release of her third book that the YA superstar was finally able to ditch her tabloid gig and embrace novel-writing full time. Today, the 45-year-old’s books have sold over 50 million copies worldwide in more than 35 languages and have been adapted into film, television and two manga series.

Clare, whose real name is Judith Lewis, pens her books like clockwork: She’s published at least one Shadowhunter book per year since 2007, with additional short stories and collaborative works interspersed among them. Often, she says, the processes overlap such that she’s plotting out one book while copy editing its predecessor.

Many of her co-authored works, like The Bane Chronicles novellas with Sarah Rees Brennan and Maureen Johnson, belong to the Shadowhunter universe, while the five-book middle-grade Magisterium series with Holly Black, author of The Spiderwick Chronicles, ventures into an entirely new world.

In conversation with WD, Clare shares her thoughts on plotting a multi-part series, venturing out into middle-grade, collaborating with other writers, and more.

Your world is so intricate. Tell me about your plotting process. How do you lay out your narratives?

I’m an outliner. I know there are people who are plotters and people who are more pantsers, but I am definitely a plotter. I need to know what is going to happen in a story. So I generally start with what I call a “macro-plot,” in which I sort of take the story from Point A, where it begins, to the end, and try to lay out the significant moments. And I think pacing is a good way of looking at it, because I’m looking at the moments where the story turns.

For me, there are basically five points where the story turns: You’ve got the beginning of the story. Then you’ve got the inciting incident, something that changes things for the character so that the story [takes off]. And that’ll be a realization or an event: a birth, a death, something that causes you to answer the question of, Why now?—Why are you telling this story now, from this point? And then you have your midpoint, where the story often reverses itself or changes and you learn new information. You usually have the low point of the story where things seem lost for your characters. And then you have your denouement.

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I try to plot those out, and that forms a spine on which everything else is built. Then I’ll do what I call a “micro-plot,” in which I actually plot out each chapter and what is happening in terms of the characters and the arcs and the events that are occurring in order to create a full story.

Obviously those things will change. They’re not going to stay completely the same as I move through the story; some things will work, some things won’t work. But for me, it helps to have that as a guide. And I think that does help me keep these books, which are quite sprawling and involve a lot of characters, as tightly plotted as possible.