Shadowhunters and Downworlders

Shadowhunters and Downworlders by Cassandra Clare





INTRODUCTION



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.