Cassandra Clare was born to American parents in Teheran, Iran and spent much of her childhood travelling the world with her family, including one trek through the Himalayas as a toddler where she spent a month living in her father's backpack. She lived in France, England and Switzerland. Since her family moved around so much she found familiarity in books and went everywhere with a book under her arm. Her favourites included the work of the Bront' sisters and Tolkien, as well as the Chronicles of Narnia, Lloyd Alexander's Prydain Chronicles and Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising series. She spent her high school years in Los Angeles where she used to write stories to amuse her classmates.

 Here she talks to Nikki Gamble about the first book in the Mortal Insturments sequence, The City of Bones.

Demons, angels and vampires have a perennial appeal. Each generation seems to reinvent them so they continue to have vigour and interest us. Why do you think that is?

I think you’re right; people are often surprised that the archetypes, the creatures of fable and legend, continue to have allegorical relevance. Buffy The Vampire Slayer, is one of my favourite television shows and I think did a lot to help regenerate the urban fantasy genre. That series made a great use of demons because it set the story in an ordinary High School, with a teenage girl. Basically the message was “it’s High School that’s hell”. And we all know that.  The High School Principal is a demon and when she sleeps with her first boyfriend, he becomes a demon. We can relate to that experience.

If you are writing realistic fiction you might write a book about a girl who doesn’t feel like she belongs anywhere. But if you write a book about a girl who literally is a changeling, then you are free to explore that sense of not belonging in very literal ways. For instance, in my book, City of Bones, Clary has the feeling that something in her life is missing. Many of us have similar feelings. But in this case her mother has literally been removing her memory since she was a very small child there are really things that she’s lacking.

So in a way these characters are representatives of Everyman/person.

That’s absolutely true. When you’re a child growing up, I think one of your first experiences of betrayal is to find out the things that your parents never told you. They may well have very good reasons but it can be very traumatic. I’ve known a lot of people who’ve grown up to find they were adopted, for instance. When you’re using magic and enchantment, you’re characters can wake up one morning and you discover that everything they thought was true is not true; it’s like a spell.

One of the ways in which your vampires differ from the old stories is the characters’ ambiguity. In an old vampire tale, we know exactly what we’re meant to feel about the vampires. In City of Bones the reader’s sympathies shift. At the outset Jace is not presented as a likeable character but our sympathies are gradually aroused.

I definitely wanted Jace to be a character that was initially unappealing. I wanted the reader to experience him as Clary experienced him. He’s someone who’s very guarded and doesn’t show much of himself; he’s buried a lot of his pain and his confusion about his life as a Shadowhunter. He is dedicated to killing demons and his greater purpose, but it masks confusion and loss. So I wanted portray someone who was extremely confident, aggressive, even arrogant, and take the reader to the point where he realises that everything that he believes in isn’t true. This makes him very vulnerable and he has to struggle with that.

In fact my editor offered some good advice. She said it was important not open with Jace’s point of view as he would have been immediately sympathetic. By opening with Clary’s point of view, Jace remains a closed character.

 He must have been an interesting character to write.

I did enjoy writing from Jace’s point of view; he’s very dry and witty. He’s one of those people who looks at the world and identifies all the things that he finds ridiculous. Yes, it’s fun to write from the point of view of people like that.

At its heart, City of Bones is a book about identity, or the search for identity.

It’s a book about knowing who you are. People often ask me “Why do you write for teenagers?” and I think that one of the great things about writing about teenagers (I don’t believe that a book about teenagers is necessarily only for teenagers) is that you are writing about a period in a person’s life where they are deciding who you want to be. So, everyone in the book is, deciding what, kind of, person they want to be and making choices. Clary and Jace have identities, which they were unaware of and have to come to terms with that.

I often think that teenagers are trying on different hats, trying out different identities and that books can help them to do that.

Yes, through books you can live all sorts of different lives. None of us can actually live hundreds of lives; we choose the life we want to live. However, books provide a way of experiencing lives chosen by other people, which I think is great for teenagers. Much better for them to read a book about the drug addict than go out and experiment by becoming one. You can learn a lot about yourself by reading.

Can you tell us  a bit about your teenage reading and whether in some way  informed the kinds of books that you write?

 I think that it definitely did. When I was a teenager I discovered that fantasy reading, was a great experience for me. I think the allegorical nature of fantasy spoke to me very strongly. In books about the great battles between good and evil, the characters in the books are forced to make enormous choices, but they still reflect back to us the everyday choices that we make. Fantasy is a great way to hold a mirror up to your life. So reading The Dark is Rising, sequence by Susan Cooper was transformative experience.

Then I read Lloyd Alexander’s Chronicles of Prydain, the C S Lewis Narnia Chronicles, of course, and I was completely convinced that I would find a door into Narnia. When we visited houses my parents would have to explain to their friends “Oh, she’s going to open all the closet doors, just ignore her” That’s the gift of really good fantasy it really makes you believe that its true, that the magical world is very close to you. Imagination is one of the gifts that will help us get through life; when things are really difficult, art, music poetry can be a source of strength.

 Is fantasy still a big part of your reading diet.?

Yes, I love urban fantasy, more so than high fantasy and alternate worlds. I like books where there’s a magical world that is very close to our own. There are a lot of wonderful urban fantasy writers, Emma Bull, Will Shetterly, Doris Schneider and Holly Black. Technically Harry Potter is urban fantasy Harry lives in London and has to travel through, King’s Cross Station to get to the magical world of Hogwarts. I think there’s something gripping about the idea of travelling from the ordinary world to a magical world. So, when I sat down to write City of Bones, I wanted to ground it in my daily experience of life in New York.

Is urban fantasy more the American tradition and the British more pastoral?

It might be. Britain has made a huge contribution to fantasy and I think that American fantasy builds itself off  the tropes of British fantasy. Tolkien and C S Lewis were British and I think American fantasy is a reaction to that. Tolkien was very explicitly a celebration of pastoral life and a rejection of urbanity and cities. The Dark is Rising, might be classified as urban fantasy because it’s contemporary and takes place in the real world but it also celebrates the countryside. It takes place in, a rural part of the Thames Valley. Alan Garner’s The Owl Service takes place, in the rural areas of Wales and it definitely speaks about the magic is in the countryside. It’s a recurring theme in fantasy: there’s a great Elisabeth Marie Pope poem called 'The Perilous Guard', which is set in the late 17th Century about how the fairies of England have retreated to a tiny area because of encroaching urbanity.

 So an interesting question is what is magical about modernity, how do the creatures of Myth and legend, fit themselves into our modern world?

Yes, one of the things that urban fantasy does is pose the question, ‘what if the fairies didn’t retreat? What if they merged with the cities? Why should modern life get rid of all of the magic? It’s about blending magic and the modern world.

One of the things I wanted to explore with you is Valentine’s statement that power is lost unless there is a refusal to serve. Can you tell us something about what lies behind that?

I wanted to model Valentine on one of the greatest anti-heroes of literature - Lucifer from Paradise Lost. He’s a mixture of Lucifer and a horrible college Professor that I once had - my ultimate villain. In this case Valentine is talking about rebellion. He’s basically reciting the non servium. In Lucifer’s case it was “I will not serve God” and in Valentine’s case it’s “I won’t serve the clave. I won’t serve the authority of my community.

It’s is more explicit in the second book, where he talks about what he wants to be like as Lucifer does in Paradise Lost. When you are writing a villain, it’s so difficult not to create a cardboard cut-out, who is evil just for the sake of destruction. Villains are less compelling if they don’t seem realistic. I wanted Valentine to be somebody who was driven by a comprehensible motive. In his case, like Lucifer, he truly believes the authority of the clave to be corrupt. He believes that they’re too lenient and are letting the demons take over the world. So, when he recites that non servium, and says, you know “power lost or refusal to serve”, he is saying, you know, I’m a rebel”

 Sometimes it’s hard to see the difference between the good guys and the bad guys…

One of the goals that I had in creating the world of the Downworlders was that it would, mirror racism. The vampires are presented as the bad guy and Valentine believes them all to be inhuman worthy of nothing, but destruction and extermination. It’s interesting; I was in the Imperial War Museum this week reading a letter that was written by a British soldier who had been involved in liberating the concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen. He wrote “I’ve never seen anything like this. It’s so horrible you wouldn’t believe it, and the moment that I laid eyes on this camp I knew that the Germans were not human and should be exterminated.” And I thought, well, we didn’t learn from the concentration camp experience, did we?

You can understand why he feels that way, and so with Valentine I wanted to capture that sense exactly, which is that he’s looked on the horrors committed by Downworlders. But his response is misguided. The idea that the entire group is evil and fit only for extermination is always wrong.

Your heroine’s name bears some resemblance to your own. In what ways is Clary like you?

 I have a friend named Clary and I named the heroine after her. I picked the name Clary because I thought it was such a beautiful name and because clary sage according to Folklore enables you to see fairies; Clary literally has the psychic ability to see the magical world. It’s also the French word for “clarity”.

Clary is a little bit like me when I was her age, in the sense that she has a great passion for her art. I was as fixated on reading and writing as she is on art. I spent a lot of time looking at the, kind of, art that I thought that she would look at, watching the, kind of, animators that I thought that she would watch. When I look at something in the world, I think, ‘how would I describe this in words?’ And when Clary looks at something, she thinks, ‘how would I paint that?’ There is a scene in the Vampire Hotel where she sees a stairway that’s been broken in half and doesn’t go anywhere, and she thinks this is the kind of stairway Magritte would paint.

 I had a best friend, who was a girl, but rather like Simon in a lot of ways. So part of that relationship is based on my relationship with my best friend.

The process you’ve described shows quite a dedication to finding out about your characters. Is this how you generally work?

Well, I always do more with my point of view character because you have to see the world the way that they see it. This is a limited third person perspective story. With the other characters I have a set of questions that I would ask the characters such as, “What’s your best memory? What’s your worst memory?” “What do you think about before you go to sleep at night? What’s your favourite food?” “What are you most afraid of?”

Can you tell us a little bit more about the way you approach the writing process?

Sure. I’m an outliner. I outline the entire book and then II have a set of flashcards for each chapter. I’ll note down the important things that happen in those chapters, and I’ll often have a colour coding for each character. So, Clary would be blue, Jace, red. I’ll note on the flashcard what important thing happens to the character in that chapter. I’ve a new computer programme called 'Scrivener' which is specifically for writers, and allows you to do all of these things on the computer. There’s a whole section for references. My books are so firmly placed in New York that I go around New York with a digital camera taking photographs which I import into the programme as references.

How do you maintain the sense of mystery, providing clues for the reader without revealing too much?

 It’s very difficult. I read the Peter Whimsey books as I was writing City of Bones. I looked at the structure of character driven mysteries. Little things about the plot are revealed in the small things that the characters do and say. One of the great joys of knowing where things are going is the ability to drop in little mysterious hints. Several readers have figured out what happens to Simon in Book Two and have written to me because there’s a hint in Book One. That’s great I’m so glad that my little hint that I dropped in there has landed on fertile ground. If teenagers like your book, they’ll read it 15 times, so they always notice things like that. Sometimes I’ll reveal too much; that’s one of those things that you work out in revisions.

Can you tell us anything about Book Two?

 In Book Two, the Lightwood parents come home have just found out that Jace’s father is Valentine and not who they thought he was and they throw Jace out, so he is cut off from the Shadowhunter Society. I wanted it to be the book where Jace has to figure out who he is beyond just saying, “I’m a Shadowhunter, I kill demons”. As this is going on, someone starts murdering Downworlder children in New York and draining out all their blood. Suspicion falls on various people and the Inquisitor is despatched from Idris to look into the matter and for reasons that nobody else can quite understand she suspects Jace.

 At the moment you are better known in the US than here. What differences have you noticed about the publishing in the US and UK?

I’m generalising, but I suppose I’ve noticed a tendency for what I would call slightly subtler fiction over here. There’s a teenager book that did very well in America but I noticed that it didn’t have the same success here. When I asked someone about it she said, “Well, it was just so purple”. In the UK I think there’s a little bit more credit given for being able to cope with emotions.

Aside from mood and style, there are obvious things that don’t necessarily translate that well. Anything that’s extremely and specifically American or extremely specifically British can have some trouble. I’m thinking of Jacqueline Wilson, who’s so well known here but nobody has heard of her in the States.

 It’s a shame that we only want to read books that we think are culturally relevant.

I know, because one of the great things about literature, of course, is it allows you to travel to places that you haven’t been, and for me, the great joy of reading Jacqueline Wilson, is the insight it provides into what it’s like to be a young person growing up in Britain. I think that there is a strong belief, which may be erroneous, that children won’t read books about people who aren’t from their culture.

So, your forthcoming books are set in New York and London. What other projects are bubbling beneath the surface?

I have another book in progress that’s a fantasy that’s based on The Ballad of Tam Lin and is set in Barbados. It’s about a girl who falls in love with a boy who has sold his soul to the powerful Voodoo Queen, who has taken his soul and made him into a zombie. The girl has to prove her power and win him back. We’ll look forward to that.

 It’s been a pleasure talking to you.

Thank you Cassandra Clare, for talking to Write Away.

2008-01-05