First Draft Episode #242: Cassandra Clare
MARCH 24, 2020
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Cassandra Clare is #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Shadowhunter Chronicles, the forthcoming Sword Catcher duology, and co-author of the Magisterium series. Her most recent Shadowhunter novel, Chain of Gold, kicks off the Last Hours trilogy.
Sarah Enni: Welcome to First Draft with me, Sarah Enni. This week I'm talking to Cassandra Clare number one New York Times bestselling author of the Shadowhunter Chronicles, the forthcoming Sword Catcher duology, and coauthor with Holly Black of the Magisterium series. Her most recent Shadowhunter novel Chain of Gold kicks off the Last Hours trilogy. Cassie and I talk about how she was always drawn to writing for an audience, her tips on building a series bible, the value of even a bad idea, and what makes for a young adult narrative.
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Okay. Now please sit back, relax, and enjoy my conversation with Cassie Clare.
Sarah Enni: Hi Cassie. How are you?
Cassandra Clare: Hi Sarah. Thanks for having me on.
Sarah Enni: Oh my gosh, I'm so excited to talk to you. I've been doing this show for a long time and you've always been a guest that I hoped to get on the show so this is a real pleasure. I actually, just really quick, I have to tell you how I came to your books, which is my mom.
Cassandra Clare: Wow!
Sarah Enni: Yes. I started reading YA in earnest in about 2009 and she knew that and she came to visit and brought City of Bones. That was the first one right?
Cassandra Clare: That was the first one.
Sarah Enni: And was like, "You have to read this immediately. And I was like, "What is my mom giving me these YA books? And then I was lost to your world for many a book.
Cassandra Clare: I love your mom!
Sarah Enni: Yes, she is a really big fan, so she'll be very excited. So for my show, I like to kind of do some bio and background, to establish where you came from. So I'd love to hear where you were born and raised.
Cassandra Clare: I was born in Tehran, Iran. My father was an international business professor and he was working over there. And this was in the mid-seventies. So it was while the Shah was still in power, the political landscape of the country was quite different.
My first language was Farsi and I remember little pieces about living there, but when the political landscape of the country changed, my parents had to leave. So they then went from Tehran to Los Angeles where my dad wound up working at University of California there. But we always traveled a lot.
So I think part of the reason he took the job that he took was so he would be able to travel. So almost every other semester he would take a job at a school that was abroad. So we lived in Switzerland and in England and in France while I was young. And pretty much by the time I got to high school I was like, "No more." Cause when you're in high school it's really hard to be gone half the year from school. It's such a bad adjustment and I just didn't want to do it.
So they compromised and we remained in Los Angeles for my high school. And then as soon as I went to college, my parents packed up everything, sold the house and moved to France.
Sarah Enni: Wow. Oh my gosh! That's wild. I love that. The last time I moved, my family moved around a bit too, and I was twelve the last time. And I think it was kind of the same thing. They were like, "Okay, we got to give her a break." I want to ask how reading and writing was a part of childhood for you?
Cassandra Clare: Well both of my parents are big readers, as was my grandparents on my maternal side that I was really close to. So my mother says she doesn't remember me learning to read, I just picked up the newspaper when I was three and started reading the headlines. And she was like, "What? " So she doesn't remember teaching me or anything, and I don't remember a time when I didn't read.
So I was always a big reader. And I do think the traveling made a difference because I'm an only child. And so for a lot of the time I would be with my parents and you want to spend time with your parents when you're eight, but not as much time as they want to spend with you. So I would be allowed to buy any book and read any book. My parents were always very much like, "You know, if we're traveling, you can have as many books as you want and read." I'm sure it was nice for them for me to be kind of quiet.
But also, this is what pre-video games, pre any kind of television I could have watched or anything like that. So it was books and they always made sure that I had whatever books I wanted to read. So books definitely became sort of my friends.
Sarah Enni: And the reason, I mean I ask everyone that question, but I'm particularly interested when people have childhoods where they jump around. Sometimes reading can be the constant and kind of a source of comfort when a lot of external things are changing all the time.
Cassandra Clare: I think that's true. My mother said she came into my room once and she was looking at my bookshelf and she was like, "How have you arranged these books?" Because they seemed to be totally random. And I was like, "I have arranged them in order of what good friends they are. Which ones are my best friends."
Sarah Enni: That's so sweet! Oh my gosh, I love that. Who were some of your best friends?
Cassandra Clare: So at that stage in my life, I mean I was pretty young, so I'm trying to remember what it was. Oh, A Little Princess, Secret Garden, all of those Shoes, books. Did you ever read those? Ballet shoes (Noel Streatfeild wrote a prolific series of books for young readers, kicking off with Ballet Shoes and including Dancing Shoes, Theater Shoes, and Skating Shoes).
Little Women was one of my bestest friends I read all the time. And I had a whole series of books that I don't even know if they still exist cause they were pretty old-fashioned. But I remember the Shoes books, and I read all of them.
Sarah Enni: Yeah, those don't come up as much as you'd think, I loved those.
Cassandra Clare: I mean, the world marches on, but From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler was one of them. So that must've been when I was about six or seven.
Sarah Enni: I heard that when you were young, you also wrote stories for your friends. I would love for you to tell that story.
Cassandra Clare: So that was when I was about twelve, and I had just finished reading Jane Austin. So I had advanced from the Ballet Shoes books and I was in this super like Anglophile phase and so I was reading all of the Bronte's and all of Jane Austin and my mom brought home a book of Jane Austen's juvenilia, which is the stories she wrote when she was young. There's a totally cute story called The Beautiful Cassandra that she wrote about her sister Cassandra, that she was very close to, in which Casandra goes on an adventure to London Town. It's adorable. And I loved it.
And so I wrote a book called The Beautiful Cassandra that had nothing to do with the juvenilia, because it was much sillier. And I was twelve so I was like, "What I want to do, is I want to write a love story, an epic romance. And I want it to be historical." Because I was totally in love with this Regency period of English history.
So The Beautiful Cassandra was a young lady who had been brought up in a convent and she didn't know anything about the world. And then she was released unto the London society where she slayed everyone with her beauty and charm, especially the dangerous son of a Duke, Sir Adrian Steel. Yeah.
[Laughing] And so they had a romance, sort of? And he professed his great love for her and she told him that she loved him and they kissed and then he died. Because I didn't know what happened after kissing. I was totally clueless, I had a vague idea, but nothing specific. So I was like, "Well, I don't know what to do now." So I killed him. And all my friends were like, "You killed him! This is the worst!"
And it was the first time I had the sense of the power of character death. They were all crying and I was like, "Oh, I did kill him. Okay." So I made up a new guy and he was like the king of the bandits. And then he was her new boyfriend. Then I killed him. So basically she would meet a guy, they would fall in love, they would kiss, and then that guy would die. This went on for about a thousand pages before I finally stopped. So that is The Beautiful Cassandra.
Sarah Enni: I love that. And when I read about this, or I think you were talking about it on 88 Cups of Tea, which is a wonderful podcast that people should checkout. But hearing you describe it, I was like, "Oh, this is like a Merry Widow story."
Cassandra Clare: I know, right? It totally is. If you read it from a certain perspective, it's the story of a woman who murders her way across Europe [laughing].
Sarah Enni: Yes! I mean, I'm here for that. That sounds fantastic. And the other thing that struck me was not only writing and kind of exploring, like you're saying, character and how that can really impact people, and how you have the power to create what impacts people. But writing for your friends and an audience. I'm just so interested in the fact that that was a part of your process so early on.
Cassandra Clare: Yeah, it's an interesting thing. I think writing is often a very solitary occupation and I think that it's really important to have somebody to read your work. For a lot of us, that's a critique partner, someone you trust. In this case, for me it was about fourteen teenage girls, but it was actually helpful because just to get people's response teaches you something.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. Right. And what people respond to and what they react to, and how you can either do that or avoid that in the future. But the other thing, and I don't so much have a question about this, I guess. It's just interesting to me the impulse to write seriously for other people to consume, is really different from the impulse to write for yourself in almost a diaristic way.
I'm just interested in, when you can look back and see that that was so obviously your motivation from the beginning. do you think that that has fundamentally impacted the kinds of stories you want to tell? Or how your career has ended up being shaped?
Cassandra Clare: I think it speaks to the kind of writer I wanted to be. I was never interested in a diary. I never wrote a diary or kept a journal because I thought, "What's the point? No one's gonna read it but me." And I kinda wish I had actually. At that time in your life, you don't realize that future you is a different person.
Sarah Enni: Not at all, right.
Cassandra Clare: And I kind of would've loved to know now what I was thinking then. But I was always writing with the idea that someday somebody would read it and that there would be a readership. Because for me, I was very struck by the concept that what makes a character real is for many people to love them. And so kind of a Velveteen Rabbit type thing. But my thought was always how can I make a character that other people will love? Thus making that character like a real person.
Sarah Enni: Well and I will tell you as someone who did write diaries, I was still assuming someone would read them [laughing].
Cassandra Clare: There are a lot of famous diaries in this world, you know?
Sarah Enni: Yeah. It was always like, "The historians one day will look back." It was just like, "Okay, you needed to be writing for an audience so much earlier than you were." Which is really funny. And partially I think why I'm so interested in this question. But I want to, and I might have a timeline off here, but I'm so interested in the fact that you went on from writing for a gaggle of friends to writing fanfiction pretty prolifically.
And that's a similar, I might be wrong, but I think that's iterative. Releasing chapter by chapter and getting instant feedback and kind of building based on reactions. I'm just so interested that you continued to grow more serious in that type of writing.
Cassandra Clare: Yeah, I think that for me it sort of went like, I did a lot of writing when I was in high school. I did some writing in college. I left school and didn't know what I wanted to do. I don't think I was ready to like write professionally. So I became interested in journalism because I wanted to write. So I went on to have an eight year career as a journalist. And during that time I think that fanfiction, for me, filled the desire to write fiction. Writing nonfiction wasn't really what I wanted to do. And so it wasn't really satisfying my desire to write, I thought it might, but it didn't.
And so while I was at work, and I think I can say that now because what are they gonna do?
Sarah Enni: The statute of limitations has passed.
Cassandra Clare: The statute of limitations has past. I started writing fanfiction and yeah, you would post it and then you would get feedback. And it was really the first time that I was getting feedback from a lot of people I didn't know. And it's interesting because the kind of feedback you get from friends is going to be different than the kind of feedback you get from a big group of total strangers, you know?
So I think in that sense it was definitely helpful. And it pushed me in the direction of wanting to write my own original work.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. Well I want to talk about the journalism really quick cause I think it was at The Hollywood Reporter. Is that right?
Cassandra Clare: Yes.
Sarah Enni: Which in my mind, and I think this is wrong, but in my mind I was like, "Ooh, the glamorous nonsense of Hollywood types." Like that's also a lot of drama in and of itself. Maybe could be a source of inspiration.
Cassandra Clare: I mean, the thing about The Hollywood Reporter is they report on the business aspects of Hollywood. So it's a lot of like, "This person has this deal. And this person is going to be helming..." This is what they call it when you direct something... "directing a feature." So you get to know who everybody is and there is that behind-the-scenes drama, you know?
But I did actually, when I moved to New York, work as a copy editor for tabloids like Star and The Inquirer. That's the stuff where it's like, "Oprah Winfrey and Tom Cruise are carrying on a passionate affair." And you're like, "Really? I don't know about this." About 50% of the time I was like, "I don't think this is true."
Though I remember I came in once and someone was like, "You will not believe it. Brad Pitt has run off with Angelina Jolie." And I was like, "That is ridiculous and clearly untrue." So I was not a good guesser.
Sarah Enni: Amazing. I love that. Yeah, sometimes the truth is stranger than fiction. I want to ask about how you think developing as a writer with that kind of feedback, especially I'm just so interested like chapter by chapter. It's kind of like being a TV writer nowadays cause you can see the reaction in real time. That wasn't really true for much fiction at the time except for what you were doing, which is almost more Dickensian really.
How do you think that, again, just kind of influenced you as a writer or the kind of stories you wanted to tell. You kind of put yourself through a very personalized MFA program in a way.
Cassandra Clare: [Chuckles] And I don't even have any student debt, so there's that. I think that it is a crash course in certain kinds of structure. That you learn some things about what people respond to, and what they don't respond to. And that they may not respond to those things because you have improperly calibrated the emotional responses of the characters. I would say that fanfiction is often very much about the emotions of these characters. Because mostly what it is is kind of filling in emotional background for characters you may not know that well because they're on TV and you're not seeing inside their head. Or that kind of thing.
And so it's a lot of work with what I call calibrating, which is balancing the right kind of emotion that creates the right response. And also I think it teaches you to avoid certain kinds of cliches that people don't respond to and teaches you to reach for things that are different and new.
And I think, you know, there are other ways you can do that online. I know there are things now more like Fiction Press and Wattpad where you can share your original work and get that kind of feedback as well. And that may have existed back then, this was twenty years ago. I wasn't aware of it. But I think it's interesting because for me, I came out of it with like a toolkit of things that were useful for me and then things that were definitely missing that I didn't learn how to write because they're not things that are part of fanfiction.
Sarah Enni: What kind of things would that be?
Cassandra Clare: Building characters. You can calibrate and adjust and create emotions for characters that already exist, but the whole point of fanfiction is that they are these characters that people already know. So how do you introduce somebody completely out of nowhere?
Sarah Enni: Yeah. Well, let's get to it. It sounds like you were kind of looking for a way to write that was fulfilling to you and not finding it. I'd love to hear what brought about the actually deciding to commit and write your own stories.
Cassandra Clare: I had been working as a copy editor for a while. I'd moved to New York thinking that I wanted to write a book. So I quit my job at The Hollywood Reporter, I moved out to New York, I was freelancing. And of course it's much harder to do it than it is to think about it. And so I tried a couple of different starts and stops with different books and then I kind of lit on the idea for City of Bones. Sometimes you just sense when you have the right idea because you're sort of fired up.
So suddenly I had this book that I was really passionate about, and I really struggled with it. Because I was actually writing a whole full book and there were things I didn't know how to do. And I was lucky to meet Holly Black ( #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Cruel Prince, The Coldest Girl in Coldtown, and The Spiderwick Chronicles (listen to her First Draft episode here) really early in my non career, I wasn't a writer when we met, and her first book was just out.
We met at a signing at Books of Wonder and we became friends. And so I had that person, the person you can call and be like, "I am stuck." Or, "I need to talk about this thing." Or, "Let me send you this scene and you can give me a response." So we would do that for each other.
Sarah Enni: She seems to be like a book whisperer.
Cassandra Clare: Yeah. Oh, Holly is! If you can get access to Holly, you're a very lucky person because she is great with reading a book and telling people how to fix it, which is a rare skill.
Sarah Enni: Many people I've spoken to have said like, "Well Holly Black fixed my book over one cup of coffee." And that's so incredible.
Cassandra Clare: It's totally true. And I have access to her every day. So I feel very lucky. I'm like, "I know Holly."
Sarah Enni: So The Mortal Instruments, which is the first series of books that ended up being six books, I'm so interested in how you did set out to create that. It's also interesting cause it's urban fantasy, so you do create an entire world, but it's sort of layered on top of our real world. Was that kind of thing you were always reading? Or how did you decide on that as your fantasy landscape?
Cassandra Clare: That was something I really loved that I discovered when I was a little bit of an older teenager. Cause I'd started with Tolkien (author of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogyand) high fantasy. So I went from Tolkien to reading other high fantasy works. Did I ever read the... No, I never read the Shannara books( by Terry Brooks, which kicks off with The Sword of Shannara).
But I did read the Tad Williams books (author of the Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn series, which kicks off with The Dragonbone Chair, and the Shadowmarch series). And Guy Gavriel Kay (author of Tigana, and my personal fav, Under Heaven and its sequel, River of Stars ).
And so I read a lot of high fantasy and then I discovered urban fantasy with authors like Annette Curtis Klause (author of Blood and Chocolate and The Silver Kiss), and Ellen Kushner (author of Thomas the Rhymer and Swordspoint).
And the people that created Bordertown ( Terri Windling created the “Bordertown” shared world urban fantasy series. In 2011 she initiated a YA revival of the series Welcome to Bordertown co-edited with Holly Black.)
And suddenly I was like, "Oh my God, you can bring this fantasy into our world and make it kind of modern and part of our lives. So I really loved the idea of doing that. And there had kind of been a downturn in urban fantasy, at least I hadn't been seeing it as much as I had before. And so that was my first thought was like, "I want to bring the magic into our own ordinary world and see how it interacts with the world that we live in." The idea that magic is just like a fingertip away is very fun and exciting.
Sarah Enni: Yeah, it is. I love those stories too. And in contempt, when there's that one twisted element that keeps you on your toes, as a reader, super fun. And it makes the world a little bit more magic. So, you have so many books, that I can't ask you all the questions about all of them that I would love to. But I do want to ask about The Mortal Instruments. Do you mind pitching that series for us so we are more familiar with it?
Cassandra Clare: Okay, yes. So The Mortal Instruments is an urban fantasy book series set in New York City where a young girl named Clary Fray, who's a teenager, goes to a club one night and she sees what looks to her like a murder. A bunch of people, other teenagers, covered in these weird markings gather together and murder a guy. So she's pretty not happy about that.
And she then meets up with one of them again the next day, he's come to see like, "Who is this girl who saw us? What's going on?" And she learns that in fact they're Shadowhunters, they are demon hunters who protect the city from monsters basically. And that they weren't actually murdering a guy they were killing a demon. And she's drawn into this magical world where she discovers that she's actually pretty connected to the Shadowhunters. There's a reason that she can see them and that she has this sort of important destiny within that world.
Sarah Enni: Yes, I love that. I know it's been a few years, pitching the first book of the series. The first book came out and was instantly a bestseller, and you instantly had this following of people for your book series. And that doesn't happen for everybody. So I was just wondering what impact that had on you creatively, to instantly know that you had a lot of people that were waiting on the next book. And that's just a unique circumstance to be in, I think
Cassandra Clare: It is unusual. I think that it was very surprising to me. I wasn't expecting it. I don't think that you feel enormous confidence immediately. You just think, "Oh, maybe it's a fluke." Like, "It hit the bestseller list, but who knows really, how this is gonna pan out?" And I'd already written The City of Ashes because this was my first book so there was a long run up to its actual publication. So in that time period I had already written the next two books.
So I was like, "Well I hope they like the next two!" You know? And I was trying to figure out how it was gonna go and whether that meant that I could write more books in this world. And it was funny because what my publisher really, really wanted was more Mortal Instruments.
And what I wanted was to do The Infernal Devices, which is the historical. Not that I didn't want to do more Mortal Instruments, but I wanted to do them afterwards. So I think what it really meant to me was now you have options about what you're gonna write next that are different than they would be. If the first book had not done well, I probably would have wanted to step away from writing Shadowhunters and do something else. But as it was, I was like, "Oh, I can write more Shadowhunters and I'm really excited about doing that. But what I really want to do is this historical project."
Sarah Enni: I've heard you talk about that in that you gave yourself a special challenge because there are new trilogies that come out that are in varying stages of time, including the new series Chain of Gold. You are nonlinearly telling us the history of Shadowhunters.
Cassandra Clare: Yes, exactly!
Sarah Enni: Which is a special kind of challenge. And I want to ask about that because I've heard that you keep a bible, like a literal single physical copy of a bible of your books. Was that started from the beginning?
Cassandra Clare: No! I wish it had been. I wish I had been that smart. No, at some point within the world of the books, when you become an adult Shadowhunter, you're given a copy of a book called the Shadowhunter's Codex that basically has all of this... It's your Hogwarts of history, I guess. It has whatever knowledge in there that you might need to know. I was asked by Simon and Schuster whether I wanted to create a Shadowhunter's Codex. And I was like, "Oh, that's a good idea." So I went to do it, and my husband was helping me, and he was like, "Your notes are scattered all over the place."
He was like, "Half of the stuff about characters and whatnot is saved in documents in a file called miscellaneous." You're only supposed to put porn in files called miscellaneous, so you're never gonna find anything. And I was just like, "Yeah." So at that point I hired an assistant, whose job was to pull all of this information together and create a bible. And she did and she was so helpful and great that she is still with me as my research assistant today.
And it's been a wonderful thing to have because it's constantly added to, it's constantly updated. We make notes about everything, family trees, how the magic works, geographical locations that we've placed things in. If magic needs to be updated, if there's an exception, all of that stuff. So it's really useful to have, even like names that have been used previously. There's a lot of background characters floating around so I'm like, "Have I ever used the name Felix?" I don't know [chuckles].
Sarah Enni: For people starting out maybe who are interested in urban fantasy or fantasy and places where you're creating worlds. Do you have hot tips for how to get ahead of that?
Cassandra Clare: I would say start creating your bible from the beginning. Don't get bogged down in it. You want to let your imagination roam free. And if you're working on your first book, your job is not to stick with what the bible says, your job is to create the story within the story and then adjust your bible accordingly. Because you need the story to do what you need it do. Later is when you will be bound to the rules that you make.
So think about them when you create your magic system, but I think it'd be like a different question. One is how do you create a magical system? And one is how do you create a way of saving your research and your whatnot, in your data in order to be able to access it? Ours is a physical copy but there is a backup.
Sarah Enni: Oh good.
Cassandra Clare: I know. Sometimes I joke like, "It's gonna get stolen and then it's all going to be over!" So you can do it virtually. I've seen people do it in all sorts of different programs. I've seen Excel spreadsheets. Whatever your comfortable with is totally fine, but make it easy for you to access that information. And I would say just go ahead with your first book. You can also plug that stuff in and kind of being like, "How does my world work?" It can give you a quick once over of your magic system, and your world, and give you a chance to look for bugs.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. Right. A bug or a feature.
Cassandra Clare: Beta test.
Sarah Enni: I read a stat, and I haven't totally verified this but I think you can, that you've released at least one Shadowhunter book per year since 2007.
Cassandra Clare: That seems true.
Sarah Enni: That does sound right. And not only new Shadowhunter books, but a Victorian series, historical fiction and historical fantasy, which is a whole other world. And I think in the future and go to going to LA and a lot of different elements. I want to ask about whether... Is that just your natural pace? Or was your publisher really encouraging you to do one book a year? Or how did that pace kind of get established and maintained?
[Both laughing]
Cassandra Clare: Um, well... I've done a lot of different projects in the Shadowhunter world. I've tried to be really flexible and experimental because I feel like it's fun to continue to challenge yourself. So there were two Shadowhunter books last year, but one of them was a collection of short stories that were co-written, and the other was a novel that was co-written as well. So while I worked on those, I also worked on Chain of Gold.
And I was able to do that because I had co-writers. And so I would say that it's true that there's a Shadowhunter book every year. They're not always the same level of intensive effort. They run along a gamut. So I think one of the things I have done is opened my world up to collaboration with other authors as a way of making sure that I can continue to give fans material that's set in my world. That I have worked on that is... what is the word? That matches with the canon that has the voice and feeling of Shadowhunter stuff that is part of the canon. But that is an official book that's part of the world.
And then I think there are these books like Chain of Gold that my fans regard slightly differently that are these big chunks of material in this world that you have to read. The other stuff? Meh. I think it's fun. I think that if you're a fan then they're great things to read and they offer a lot of insight into characters we know. And also characters that we don't know. It's your chance to get a look into the heads of characters that may be minor characters in the books, but that have a whole full life.
And that's really fun and interesting. But these are the books that are required for the Shadowhunter mythos and they do take longer to write and perfect. So I think switching off between them helps with the schedule a little. And also I've learned a lot about writing more quickly over the years without sacrificing quality.
Sarah Enni: I want to ask about that. The question as I wrote it was like... and I think you gave a NaNoWriMo pep talk, or I heard you at some point interviewed talking about the concept of NaNoWriMo. And you were kind of like, "Well, that's my every month of my year."
Cassandra Clare: Of my life. Yeah.
Sarah Enni: Which I was like, "Oh yeah, that's true." But I'm wondering whether you think that is just how you work? Or if there are ways that you've been able to figure out how to work like that. And if you think it's replicable for other people.
Cassandra Clare: I think that it is replicable for other people. I don't want to make people feel like they need to. I think that it's totally okay to work at your own pace. I am kind of a workaholic. I like working. But what I do in order to write a book quickly like this is I create a really, and this is not a thing that no one has ever done, but I create a really detailed outline and when I say really detailed, the outline for Chain of Iron is 60,000 words.
Sarah Enni: Wow. Okay. Yeah.
Cassandra Clare: But I go very quickly through this outline, and as I go through it, I check it over. And doing that outline and creating the story allows me to see bugs in the story and problems that it's gonna have and work them out before. So that when I sit down to actually write the book, I know what scenes I have to write. I know what happens in those scenes. I know want people say, and I know how the mystery plot unfolds in them, how the magic works.
Sarah Enni: And once the mystery gets involved too.
Cassandra Clare: Yeah, the mystery gets created and foreshadowed and solved and kind of tested before I'm actually sitting down to write the book. So for me it saves time because I can create that outline in a month and then I have that to work on and work from and it will allow me to write the book much more quickly.
Sarah Enni: Yeah, I did that for the last draft that I wrote and it was like, "Whoa, game changer." I think I probably saved myself two or three drafts. And it's fun [chuckles]... dare I say.
Cassandra Clare: I like it. That's why I always say if it's something you don't like, don't feel like you have to do it. But I enjoy doing it because it allows me to kind of knock out the stuff that's less fun, which is kind of bug testing the plot, you know, like, "Oh well why in this situation if these people know this thing, do they not go to the authorities?" You know, you can kind of work out all the bug stuff and then write the story and do all the stuff that most of us really enjoy, which is character work, relationship work, plot work.
Sarah Enni: Descriptions of fun outfits.
Cassandra Clare: Descriptions of fun outfits, that's always a big part of historical.
Sarah Enni: You already brought this up, but inviting other friends into your world to write with your characters. It struck me that that might be a way to like reinvigorate your relationship to this world that you've lived in for a long time. And I was just wondering how it felt to do that? And whether that gave you a new perspective on the world you'd created?
I just got the chance to chat with Elizabeth Eulberg on Saturday, and she was talking about a retreat where it was like crowdsourcing whether this would work or not in your series. And she was saying it was amazing to sit back and watch a group of people be able to be almost like a writer's room, to some degree, that you could bounce off people and see what was working or not. So it seems like collaboration has become a real important thing for you.
Cassandra Clare: Yeah, and I'm really lucky to have that group of people and these retreats that we go on to be able to do this kind of stuff because it's true, any of us can be like, "I have this problem." And everyone else is like, "Okay, let's crowdsource this problem." And we know each other's work so you don't have to catch anybody up.
I'm like, Magnus and Alec, they just had a baby. Do they need to get a Pack and Play? [Laughs] And everyone's like, "Alright, that's not a real question." You know, everyone jumps in, they've got thoughts that we toss things around and like, "Yes. No. That's good. What about...?" I think that saying it's like a writer's room is a really good way of putting it because you're bouncing ideas off each other and sort of picking the ones that work and then embroidering on those.
So yeah, absolutely, it's one of the things that keeps you having a fresh perspective on your own work. And when I've done these short story collections, we were working on one that was about The Shadowhunter Academy and my friend Robin Wasserman (author of Girls on Fire and the forthcoming Mother Daughter Widow Wife. Listen to her First Draft episode here), who actually is a TV writer, is very good at this stuff. I talked to her like, "What kind of story would you want to write?" And she was like, "I really want to write about Alec's father." I was like, "Really? Robert? I don't know. Robert's kind of a jerk."
And she was like, "It is because he is a jerk that I like him." And I was like, "Okay, go free. Write a draft, send it to me, I'll look it over, I'll make changes. We'll kind of go from there." And she sent me this draft that she had written and I was just like [weepy sounding], "Robert is so sad. He's just so sad. This is terrible. What an amazing guy." She really turned up this stuff that really humanized this character.
And I thought, "Wow, I have a fresher perspective on the character." And she had clearly done what I think is the good way of doing that kind of work, which is drawn on this stuff that was in the books that hinted at Robert's past, and his relationships in the past, and what might be his vulnerabilities and whatnot. And she'd kind of expanded and amplified those. But I do remember when I got it, I thought, "Oh, I'm not sure that without Robin having written this, I would have taken more time to think this much about this character."
Sarah Enni: Right, right.
Cassandra Clare: Cause he was a minor character, Alec's dad. So I think it's really informed all of my writing about Robert since then.
Sarah Enni: It reminds me of a TV writer friend that I have was helping me on a terrible pilot that I wrote, but he was like, "You have to keep in mind that when you write a pilot, imagine the actor who gets hired to play even the smallest role, and memorizes those lines, and does the work of stepping onto set and only thinking about what matters to that character. And you have to give that character respect basically, cause it's gonna be somebody else's job."
And I was like, "Oh dang. That's a good point." But I took that to my writing going forward and I thought it was really useful.
I want to talk about The Magisterium and then come back to Chain of Gold. But speaking of collaboration, do you mind pitching this series for us? This middle-grade series.
Cassandra Clare: Magisterium is a series that's co-written by me and Holly Black, our first co-written project. And it is about a young boy named Callum who knows that he comes from a long line of magicians but has always been told by his father that magicians are horrible, they're evil, they're terrible. You want to avoid them as much as possible. But all children who have magical ability, in this version of the world, must be tested when they're twelve to see what level of magical ability they have.
And if they have magical ability, they have to be taken to the Magisterium to be trained. Because uncontrolled, magical ability is dangerous. So Cal sets out to go to this test, which is called The Iron Trial and fail it. He wants to fail it and he sets out to fail it. And what happens after he sets out to fail it and how that goes is the kickoff for the story of The Magisterium.
Sarah Enni: I love it. I want to ask about how the project came to be. How did you and Holly decide to work together?
Cassandra Clare: We'd been wanting to work together for a long time and we couldn't find the right project. And we were in an airport, we were actually on a book tour, and I was reading Rick Riordan and I was like, "Oh these books are so good." Forgotten how much I love middle-grade. I spend a lot of time reading YA cause it's what I work in, and I want to be aware of what's happening in the field. But I had taken the opportunity to treat myself to the Percy Jackson books and I was really enjoying them.
And I was like, "I just love this middle-grade sensibility. It's really charming to me." And Holly was like, she was really an un-caffeinated, she was like, "Oh, middle-grade." And I was like, "Yeah, I'd love to write this kind of book, but you know, I just don't know if I have a middle-grade voice." And she was like, "I have a middle-grade voice." And I was like, "Well, good for you."
And she was like, "No, I'm saying we should do this together and I can show you." And I was like, "Okay, let's talk about it." So we started talking about like what would we do if we did a middle-grade project? What ideas did we have? And Holly was always super interested in the idea that's actually the twist at the end of Magisterium, so I can't really say what it is. And I was always super interested in the idea of a kid who set out to fail a test and because they failed it really spectacularly wound up in this situation.
I had read something, I had been listening to something about scientific testing. And they were talking about in the 70's everyone was obsessed with testing people for telepathy and clairvoyance and other stuff like that. So they'd hold up a card and be like, "Can you see what's on the card?"
And the normal just randomly guessing rate is 25% so they would look for people who had either like a 90% success rate or a zero percent rate, a total failure. Because total failure actually means there's something unusual going on.
Sarah Enni: Oh? Huh.
Cassandra Clare: And I was like, "Okay, so total failure actually means something." So I'm really interested this idea of failing so spectacularly that everyone's like, "There's something special about that guy." So we combined our two ideas and we kind of created the idea of Cal and we were just talking the whole way to where we were going on the plane. And by the time we were there we had the idea.
Sarah Enni: Wow, that's amazing. And what was it like to not only experiment with a middle-grade voice, but to collaborate in worldbuilding? And this was like a whole new blank slate, but you did have a 50/50 partner in it.
Cassandra Clare: Yes. It was lovely having a partner for the worldbuilding. I remember we were on a tour and then after the tour was over, we went to Mexico to do a writing retreat. And Holly was like, "Let's have a whack at this and just see how this goes." She gave me a computer and was like, "Just try to write some stuff." So I just started writing Magisterium's beginning stuff. I gave it back to her and she was like, "This is fine! It's fine, you have a middle-grade voice." And I was like, "Wait, I need more guidance!" [Laughs]
But she did. She definitely helped me out in places where I think I was veering away from like the concerns and focus of middle-graders, you know? And it was also really great to have somebody else to bounce ideas off about how the magic worked, and the world worked. And you know, how did they around? This school is underground, it's in a series of caverns. And how do they get around? Oh, what if they get around on the underground rivers?
It's the fun kind of imaginative play that adults are so often denied. I know a lot of people who like game, and what not. And I think that one of the attractions to that kind of stuff is, even when we play video games and whatnot, it allows you imaginative play that otherwise, our society tells us adults shouldn't engage in. Which is ridiculous.
So one of the great things about being a writer is you do get to engage professionally in that kind of imaginative work. And this was really like imaginative play in a manner that was like creating a tabletop role playing game because we were playing around it, creating this world together.
Sarah Enni: Let's come back to Chain of Gold. So this is the kickoff of a new trilogy, is that right?
Cassandra Clare: Yes.
Sarah Enni: Okay. Can you talk about choosing this time period. And what I'm interested for you, is when you embark on a new trilogy, like a new set of stories within The Shadowhunter world, what do you want to explore with it? Or what different kind of aspects of the world are you getting into? What makes you think this is a new thing that I want to try out in this world?
Cassandra Clare: I think that when I first thought about The Last Hours, I thought about a number of different things. One was I'd never written a book where the characters were the children of the characters from another book. And that was one of the things I loved growing up. I'd read a lot of Tamora Pierce (author of Alanna and Wild Magic) and she does that.
She'll create a couple and then the next series will be about their kids. And I've always loved that. So it was something I've always wanted to do. So being able to create a story about the descendants of Will and Tessa and their friends was definitely something that intrigued me. And I also really love this time period and I feel like it gets kind of undersold. There's the time period of the Victorian era, which we know from Dickens, and has a real specific aesthetic.
And then we jumped from there to almost kind of Downton Abbey, which is later. It's like 1913, we're almost in the war. There's another very different aesthetic to that. And this was a quiet time kind of, it was called the Belle Epoque, the beautiful time because it was peaceful and there was a huge flowering of like art and culture. And so to me it's always been a really fascinating time period. And I thought it would be really fun to set a series then.
And I played around a little with the idea that it was a quiet time. At the beginning of the books they're all talking about, "Oh, we haven't seen demons in years. We're not seeing supernatural creatures. London's totally quiet." And I wanted to experiment with the idea of a generation of Shadowhunters who were totally unprepared for combat, and for loss, and what it actually means to be on the front lines of demon slaying. Because there was this whole generation of kids who went off to World War I with no idea what they were going to be facing.
Sarah Enni: Right. And it did feel like an interesting twist to get into the book and be like, "Oh, they're really wrapped up in...
Cassandra Clare: Social stuff.
Sarah Enni: Modern, mundane stuff. And I forget who it is that says Shadowhunters aren't meant for times of peace. And it's just like, "Oh yeah!" [Sings in deeper voice], "Dum-dum-dum." [Both laughing] It's like, "Here we go." Before we go further, do you mind pitching this book specifically for us?
Cassandra Clare: Oh, all right. Sure. So Chain of Gold does deal with the children of the characters from Infernal Devices, but if you haven't read Infernal Devices you can easily read this without needing to know anything. And the main character, Cordela Carstairs, who we have here on the cover comes to London because her father is in trouble with the clave and her mother is panicking that their whole family is going to be basically destroyed if he's found guilty of what he's accused of and punished.
So she throws herself into this sort of social scene in London in the attempt to find someone influential who can help her save her father. But just at that moment, after a long time of peace, demons reappear in London. So she's now fighting a war on a double front. And there's a big cast of characters. I really love writing about groups of friends and the bonds of friendships that hold them together and push them apart. And there is a love story. She's been in love with her best friend's brother, James Herondale for her whole life, but he unfortunately is in love with somebody else. So what's a girl to do?
Sarah Enni: Yeah. And I want to ask this question being cognizant of spoilers and whatnot, but obviously the time period is important and it does have thematic resonance throughout these books. But is there anything [pauses and sighs] and family and friends, I'm just interested if there's anything else that's kind of pulling you towards different themes?
Cassandra Clare: I think there's sort of a double theme. To me there's a theme of secrets in these books especially that it sort of spikes into the second book that I'm working on right now, or actually just turned in. And so a lot of these people are keeping big secrets from each other. Matthew is keeping a huge secret. James is keeping this secret about his heritage and his abilities. Lucy's keeping secrets. Cordelia has secrets. Her brother Allister has this big secret.
Everyone's keeping secrets. Some to protect themselves, and some so as not to hurt others. So they have a range of reasons for doing so. But my thought was, "What if there's this big group of people and they're all sort of keeping these secrets from each other, for reasons that are good, and reasons that are bad? And the pressures of what happens is going to break open all of those secrets." And, "What is the cost of secrets? How do you rebuild after secrets have been revealed? And what does it mean to trust and forgive?"
Sarah Enni: Yeah, I love that. That's just light topics.
Cassandra Clare: I know! A lot of heavy duty emotional stuff. I've been in the second book and been like, "And now the explosive reveals of some of these secrets are coming home to roost." And you're like, "Oh God, this is just blowing up." But also the cost of keeping secrets because there are people who are not telling something really important. And because of that, things go badly because people are missing that key information.
Sarah Enni: Right, right. And I'm thinking of, even in the beginning of this book, there are characters who, the way they are in the world is because they're tortured by something obviously.
Cassandra Clare: Right, by terrible secrets that they're keeping.
Sarah Enni: Causing scenes at balls and whatnot. So I want to ask about the Sword Catcher and moving to adult a little bit, but was there anything else about Shadowhunter world or Chain of Gold, in particular, that you wanted to talk about?
Cassandra Clare: I think that for me, writing Cordelia was really fun because she is half Persian and so I was able to draw a little bit on my experience being born in Iran and kind of remembering little pieces. So it was really fun to get to dig into that aspect of her life and her culture and revisit food. And, my whole life it was an important thing for my family who, my parents are not Iranian but lived in Iran for a long time. both spoke Farsi fluently. And then their kid was born there, wanted me to have a knowledge of the literature and the language and the food of Iran. And so that's always been a part of my life and it was really fun to get to kind of explore that with Cordelia.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. And Cordelia also finds herself a little, you know, my heart was kind of breaking for her because she has had such a wonderful wealth and breadth of experience, but she shows up to this particular time in London and the only thing they care about is knowing the exact way to be in this part of London. And so her international travels are working against her in this way.
Cassandra Clare: I know it's such a tough scene. I remember. And actually that was a really interesting piece of calibration with my friends cause I was working on that scene with Cordelia and I remember I wanted her to stumble, to have a moment in which she couldn't relate. And it was actually my friend Kelly who was like, "Well, she's had this amazing life traveling all over the place." Not necessarily for a good reason maybe, but you know, her experience is very different.
And what if the other girls are, you know, she says something about it and the other girls are like, "She's showing off." And I was like, "Oh yeah. That's exactly the kind of thing that I was thinking about." So I think that's one of the many ways that having a critique group that you can bounce off, cause you're like, "I'm looking for this one very specific thing." And a lot of times people can be like, "Oh, like this kind of thing."
Sarah Enni: And also, when I've done that with friends, it's so sad, but sometimes someone will be so spectacularly wrong, that you're like, "Great! I know what it's not"
Cassandra Clare: We call that 'The Bad Idea.' Sometimes it's on purpose, sometimes it's not. But sometimes it'll be like, "Well here's the bad idea, Cordelia whips out a fireplace poker and hits someone over the head." And I'm like, "Yeah, no, I'm not doing that. But you have definitely given me an idea of the direction not to go in. So thank you." [Chuckles]
Sarah Enni: Narrowing it down. So funny. I really want to talk about Sword Catcher and the... well first of all, do you mind just, whatever you can tell us, about this project.
Cassandra Clare: Sword Catcher is an adult book. It's a high fantasy set in a fully realized secondary world. So no connection to our world. And the world itself is called Dannemora, but most of the action takes place in a city called Castellion. And it came out of a lot of research that I was doing.
A lot of times as a writer, you do a ton of research and you don't know why. You're just like into a topic and you're like, this topic will eventually become something, but I don't know what. So I was doing a huge amount of research into the history of the Silk Roads. Just fascinating time period and just really interesting stuff. So I was reading and reading, reading, reading about Silk Road. Silk Road travel, trading, maritime trading.
And I suddenly got this idea of what if I were to set this secondary world fantasy in a port city where the Silk Road, or basically the equivalent of the Silk Road's dead end in the city. And then the maritime trade comes from the port. So this city is a melting pot of every culture in this world. It was just an opportunity for me to kind of create a secondary world fantasy city that I hadn't quite seen before. A lot of them are very Western influenced and I wanted to create something that was a bit more of a mixture.
So you have what's clearly a city that's inspired by sort of 13th, 14th century France, but it's this big maritime city with basically an enormous immigrant population. So you have dumpling shops, and you have tea shops where they make their tea in samovars, and you have different neighborhoods that are clearly the neighborhoods of all of these different ethnicities, and races, and religions that exist in this world. For me that was a really fun thing to be able to create and concentrate on how to build a world out of the idea that what is important here is trade and an internationality.
Sarah Enni: Yeah, it's like moments of realizing what a nerd you are, but I was talking to someone recently about how I love high fantasy and part of it is that geopolitics is always a part of it.
Cassandra Clare: Yeah, it's fun.
Sarah Enni: And half of a chapter will be like, "Well how do we convince farmers to replant half of their food?" You know what mean? And I'm like, "I love it!"
Cassandra Clare: I know, I love that stuff too. And it centers on two main characters. So one is a girl named Lynn and she lives in Castellion and she's a member of what is currently called the Askari who are the only people who have anything that's really close to magic. They have kind of a very low form of magic that is in language. So manipulating words. I'm Jewish and this is sort of an expression of Jewish magic. Jewish magic is very much encoded into language and words and how you use them. Every letter has a value, combine those values together specifically you get a spell.
So, I was sort of working with that and the idea of what it meant to her to be a Jewish person in this city and how this magic worked and what it means. As an aspect of Jewish history to be both highly valued for your skills and yet also to be forced to be separate. So that was another really interesting thing for me that I wanted to kind of poke into.
So, yeah, I mean, I've been working on it and it's been really, really fun. It's got a lot of sword battles, and people in disguise, and daring do, and sexy business, and romance and fun. And also geopolitics. And criminals. I love criminals.
Sarah Enni: Well, and it's so interesting to hear you talk about with Chain of Gold, wanting to explore young adults but also their parents who we're already familiar with, and met as young adults. But to want that intergenerational element and now Sword Catcher is an adult fantasy. I'm interested in what was it that made this story adult or what drew you to like... Why now, I guess?
Cassandra Clare: I think it was the idea of the book. And then I realized that, for me, it wasn't a YA book. When it came into my head and I began to think about the characters, create the characters, how do they work? And I was like, "This is not a YA book." Because to me what makes a YA book is, "What are the concerns of the characters? Are they young adult concerns? Is that what they're thinking about?" Because you could write a book like Prep or... [pauses] what am I thinking of? I always blank.
A High Wind in Jamaica, The Greengage Summer. These are all books that are about teenagers, but they're clearly told from the point of view of people looking back. They're like, "When I was a teenager this happened to me." So YA books happened in the moment. You're a teenager and these are the things that are happening to you in this moment.
And they focus very closely on what are your concerns when you are that age, which are a lot about identity. "Who do I want to be? Who do I want to be when I grow up? What kind of person I want to be? Who am I now? How do I define myself? Do I define myself in relation to my family? Do I define myself in relation to my friends? What about romance? Is that something I'm interested in? If so, what kind of form is it gonna take?"
So for me, these characters were clearly not in that emotional space. They were the emotional space of, "I have this job. I am this person. I do this work". Like Lynn is a doctor, and I was like, "For her to be a sixteen-year-old doesn't really make sense." One of the challenges for her is she's their most skilled doctor, but she's a woman. So there's difficulty there. Unlikely she would be their most skilled doctor at fifteen-years-old.
So even if she were, the questions about your profession are something that fit into adult. Like when I was sixteen I was not thinking about my job, and how I did my job, and what did I want out of my job, because I was still in a place where I was thinking, "What job do I want?"
So to me these are adult concerns. A lot of these are about people who work together, who have jobs, who have positions, some are princes and kings, some are doctors and criminals, but they are established as who they are within the framework of the city.
To me, when I was looking at it, I was like, "This is an adult book because I don't see how I could really sell this as YA. These aren't YA characters and that's not really fair on your readers." But I was happy to write adult because I'd already written middle-grade, and I'd really enjoyed it. And it felt like it would be a fun way to stretch myself. So that was how I presented it to my agent when I came with a proposal.
Sarah Enni: And what I'm interested in, now that you're possibly at the end of it? Are still writing it? Or...?
Cassandra Clare: In the middle.
Sarah Enni: Okay. What's surprising you about writing adult, if anything? What have you been able to explore or what's been fun?
Cassandra Clare: I mean, sometimes I'm like, "Oh my God, I'm allowed to do this!" Which is kind of funny. I think that [sighs] I don't know because I feel like there's a lot that you can do in YA, and I certainly don't wanna imply that I've ever held back on depth or complication or that kind of thing when writing YA. Cause I've never done that. I think though it does allow me to explore things that I wouldn't explore in YA because I don't see how they fit. Like characters having kids and what it means to them to have children and what it means to their identities, to become parents. Something like that is not really a YA topic.
So I'm like, "Oh okay. So this is actually a perfectly legitimate topic for this age group of people and what their concerns are." And it's been fun for me too to be able to dig into the idea of, I mean, I don't even know if I want to say jobs. I mean one of the characters is a prince. One of the characters is his bodyguard. One of the characters is Lynn who's a doctor. Several of the characters are various kinds of criminals. And I'm like, "Is being a poisoner a job? I don't know, do you get a benefit?"
[Both laughing]
Cassandra Clare: But I'm like, "Well, I guess as long as you take your poisoning really seriously." But I will say that one of the things that you're always dealing with in YA is, "How do these kids have freedom to do what they need to do?" And this was indeed a huge challenge with City of Gold because we know these kids' parents, we know they're nice people. There's no reason for them to lie to their parents except to be allowed to do things that are dangerous.
So there's a lot of carefully balancing how much their parents know and what they don't know and why it's important for them to conceal things and whatnot. So it was actually kind of a fun experience to have characters who don't answer to anybody.
When you're a teenager, it is part of your life that you answer to other people. And that you have to address because it is a concern of being a teenager. But it is kind of fun when you are with people who don't answer to anybody.
Sarah Enni: Yeah, I love that. And we have to wrap up here but just real quick, as quick as this question can be, but a totally secondary world as well, though it seems like it was rooted in some historical and a lot of research. It seems like you can't help yourself but research a lot of things which is great.
Cassandra Clare: I love to research.
Sarah Enni: What has that afforded you as far as coming up with a whole world unto yourself?
Cassandra Clare: I think it affords a certain freedom. It also requires a lot of work and research. But it certainly affords you the ability to invent things out of whole cloth that are super fun. In this case, a specific kind of magic. And a specific way that the geopolitics work and function in this country. And the idea of just this kind of city that didn't really exist. You could say that it's a little bit like Constantinople was.
But there was never any city that really had all of these things that Castellion has, these geographical advantages. So you're kind of rewriting history in a way. You're writing an alternative history. Like, "What if there had been this thing? How would this have changed the way things played out?" And that can be really fun. And I think just being able to create your own landscape from the ground up.
I got to do a little bit with creating Alakonte, which is the homeland for The Shadowhunters cause it's not a real place. And I enjoyed it so much that I remember thinking, "I think I would like to write high fantasy." Because it's so much fun to be able to dictate the geography and architecture and culture of a city.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. It's always fun when you get to flex the fact that as authors, we're gods of our own worlds.
Cassandra Clare: Yeah, I know exactly. I'm like, "I can do whatever I want. I can put a big skyscraper in the middle of this town and no one can say anything."
Sarah Enni: I love it. I like to wrap up with advice. So I would love to just ask maybe people who are interested in writing urban fantasy or especially, that kind of lends itself to series writing and things like that. So I'd love to hear what advice you give for people who are maybe just getting started on that path.
Cassandra Clare: I think when you're writing series, or if you're writing something that has series potential, and I think that's a lot of what we see. You know, you read a book and you don't want to lock yourself in, but you also want to allow for the possibility that there could be more. So I always do suggest that people leave little questions dangling, tantalizing and unanswered, and think of them as little hooks for you to come back and hang a story on later. And so that is always really fun.
You know, someone looks at a photograph and says, "Oh yes Quentin, that was a saga!" And then you're just never gonna address it again, but you could come back and address it later. So for me, I've definitely done that with my books, kind of thrown in a thing and I'm like, "If it happens and pays out that I get to come back and address this again, then it will be really fun to get to do that."
And so that would be my advice if you're thinking about writing a fantasy book, quote unquote, with series potential. Because often I do see that's what agents and editors are looking for. That's the kind of stuff you want to do, and it can be really fun to do it.
Sarah Enni: Yeah, those kind of golden moments often can come back and save your butt later.
Cassandra Clare: Yeah true! Cause you're like, "It was Quentin! He did it! Remember him?"
[Both laughing]
Sarah Enni: I love that. Well this has been so much fun. Thank you for giving me so much time today. I appreciate it.
Cassandra Clare: Oh, It was lovely. I always enjoy talking about writing.
Sarah Enni: Thanks.
Sarah Enni: Thank you so much to Cassie. Follow her on Twitter @CassieClare, and Instagram @CassieClare1, and follow me on both @SarahEnni (Twitter and Instagram), and the show @FirstDraftPod (Twitter and Instagram).
Hayley Hershman produces First Draft and today's episode was produced and sound designed by Callie Wright. The theme music is by Dan Bailey and the logo was designed by Colin Keith. Thanks to production assistant Tasneem Daud, and transcriptionist-at-large, Julie Anderson.
And, as ever, thanks to you researchers with no apparent reason, for listening.
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