Shadowhunters and Downworlders: A Mortal Instruments Reader

Shadowhunters and Downworlders: A Mortal Instruments Reader

by Cassandra Clare



CASSANDRA CLARE


There’s a question that every writer both is intimately familiar with and dreads having to answer. Where did you get the idea for your books?

It’s not because it’s a bad question. It’s a fair question to ask, and it’s not as if we don’t understand why we get asked it—of course people are curious about the genesis of an idea! But the truth is it’s very rare that any book or series of books grows out of one single idea. Usually it grows the way a rolling stone gathers moss or the grit in an oyster adds layers until it’s a pearl. It begins with the seed of an idea, an image or a concept, and then grows from there as the writer adds characters, ideas they love, bits and pieces of their fascinations and interests, until they’ve created a world.

I’ve told the story of “how I got the idea for City of Bones,” the first of the Shadowhunter books, so many times I worry sometimes I’ve memorized the story and forgotten the experience. So when I sat down to write this, I tried as much as possible to throw myself back into the moment when the first inkling of anything that would eventually become the Shadowhunter world crossed my mind.

I had just moved from Los Angeles to New York, and I was in love with the city. With its history, with its energy, its day life and its night life. My first roommate was an artist, with a deep love of manga and anime. She introduced me to another artist friend of hers, Valerie, who worked at a tattoo parlor. One day Valerie took me to the tattoo parlor to show me her book of flash artwork: It was a series of different strong, dark patterns in black ink that she told me were based on ancient runes.

Runes are really nothing more than letters in ancient alphabets. The oldest piece of written Scandinavian law, the Codex Runicus, is written entirely in runes. They don’t have magical powers, but there’s something very magical about them. They look like the letters of an alphabet that exists just on the edge of our imagination: familiar enough to be letters, but unfamiliar enough to be mysterious.

I’ve also always felt that tattoos and other body markings were magical—maybe because I don’t have any of my own! Throughout history, tattoos have been used to show status or beauty, to memorialize the dead, to mark outcasts, and—most useful for my purposes—to protect their bearers and lend them strength in battle. As I stood there looking at Valerie’s designs for runic tattoos, I thought, What if there was a race of people for whom tattoos worked in an immediate, magical way? And what if their tattoos were runes?

That was the first time I thought about the beings that would eventually become Shadowhunters. Over the next months, characters came to me: There was a girl and a boy, separated by some terrible fate, and a best friend, and a hard-partying warlock; there were vampires and werewolves, and an evil zealot who wanted to purge the world. And there were angels, demons, and other mythological creatures.

There has always been much argument among academics as to how folklore differs from mythology. I’ve always gone with the generalization that folklore tends to be about human beings or magical creatures (faeries, ghosts, elves) who live alongside them, interact with them, and share their lives. Myths, on the other hand, tend to center around beings far removed from humanity, often gods: The story of Lucifer’s fall from grace is a myth, as is the tale of Zeus receiving thunder from the Cyclopes. I grew up on the urban fantasy of the 1980s, which mixed folkloric creatures like vampires and faeries with the day-to-day urban life of ordinary humans. I’ve always been drawn to folklore, but am equally enamored of myths, and as the world of the Shadowhunters came to slow life, I knew that what I wanted to do was create a hybrid mythological/folkloric world where the presence of supernatural creatures was explained by the existence of angels and demons, Heaven and Hell. Therefore, the Shadowhunters (also called Nephilim, based on the biblical story of the Nephilim, “giants among men”) had been created by an angel. Faeries were the offspring of demons and angels; warlocks the offspring of demons and humans. Our world’s folkloric tales of vampires, werewolves, faeries, and witches still held true, in this world—it was just that only the Nephilim knew their true ancestry as creatures of angelic or demonic origin.

All that was a huge amount of fun to develop, but unfortunately it’s all world, no story. Plot, as Aristotle famously said, is character determined by action; no people, no story. I set about to people my world: I knew I wanted the story to center on a tough, strong girl with a reckless streak and a big heart. So Clary was born. I wanted to give her a best friend who would always be there for her, since the romance of a great friendship has always fascinated me. Along came Simon. And I’ve always loved the fair-haired rogue with a biting sense of humor who used that humor as a defense mechanism—and then there was Jace. Brave Isabelle, thoughtful Alec, zealous and misguided Valentine, supportive Luke, wise and wild Magnus, all came along gradually, spinning relationships between themselves as they grew.

One of the great challenges when you’re writing a book whose world is based in legends and is highly allusive to myths with a great deal of emotional weight—it’s not for no reason that Valentine’s last name, Morgenstern, means “morning star”; his fall from grace is meant to mirror Lucifer’s—is keeping what is happening at ground level, with the characters, relatable. It was always my intention with Clary to tell the story of a classic hero’s journey, in which the hero receives the call to adventure. (From the Wikipedia entry on the monomyth: “The hero starts off in a mundane situation of normality from which some information is received that acts as a call to head off into the unknown.” In fact, the non-magical humans in the Shadowhunter books are called mundanes, a term borrowed from my gamer friends, who call everyone who doesn’t play Dungeons and Dragons a “mundane.”) The hero confronts a father figure, dies and is reborn or otherwise transformed, and achieves their ultimate goal—unless the story is a tragic one. Clary’s call to adventure takes place when she comes home to find a monster in her apartment and must fight it to survive.