Cassandra Clare: The Shadowhunter's Chronicle

I focused my Writers in Real Life Project around one author, Cassandra Clare because I was intrigued by the vast writing empire she seems to have developed over the past decade. This reflection will focus largely on a group of Clares interrelated series, all of which a part of her Shadowhunters Chronicle. This group of books fascinated me because the series they are organized over span centuries and take place a variety of locations across the globe, and even in the underworld, yet all exist within the limits of the same universe. Additionally, many of the characters in the modern-time series are descendants of characters from other series. Due to the complexity of the Shadowhunter’s Chronicles, I focused my interest largely on Clare’s inspiration,

After reading and watching several interviews with Cassandra Clare, I pieced together the basic inspiration behind the universe, as well as some of the key series. Clare largely regarded that her inspiration stemmed from combining the history of tattoos and the mythology of the Nephilim, angel-human offspring, leading to her creation of the secret race of demon hunters known as Shadowhunters. Clare, inspired by various angel and demon mythologies, grew the Shadowhunter universe to include the Downworlders— Vampires, Werewolves, Seelies, etc…— as well a slew of demons. The magic the Shadowhunters harvest, known as runes, are markings burned into the body to elicit certain traits, skills, or talents. Such runes were inspired by Claire's visit to a tattoo parlor. I was fascinated not only by the combination of ideas that evolved into the Shadowhunters chronicles but also Clare's intensive research process. Clare begins with a fascination with a specific time period or location and then delves into research, including reading books about the time and even journals written in the time period, researching old maps, and even visiting the location to take notes and pictures that Clare references while

She often claims her characters write their own stories like a person would dictate his or her own life; sometimes they even surprise her. Clare lists the following questions as her essential guidelines of dynamic characters: “Is my character developed and believable? Do they seem like a real person? What does my character want? Do they get it? How? Does it change them?” Clare also gave some insight into how she went about naming characters, especially since the Shadowhunter Chronicles (23 books) encompasses many characters, all from different locations, cultures, and time-periods. Clare mostly turns to the real world, citing newspapers, telephone books, and the radio as places where she read or heard an intriguing name that she took note of. The name of the matriarch of the Lightwood family from The Mortal Instruments, Maryse, was discovered in a hotel registry