Recap of Cassandra Clare’s London event

Happy Friday! While on her UK tour to promote Sword Catcher, Cassandra Clare naturally stopped in London for an event. On 25th October she was at St James’s Church once again and talked about Sword Catcher, her writing process, the Mortal Instruments character she feels particularly connected to, and much more. I of course had to travel to London to see Cassie and I have written another recap of this event (apologies for the lateness, life happened). Beware of mild spoilers.

• In about 2017 Cassie was travelling through southeast Asia, Turkey, and Europe with her husband and she was reading the book ‘The Silk Roads’ by Peter Frankopan. Cassie was fascinated by the cultural exchange because cultures do mix and it’s not actually a modern thing, but people have been travelling and exchanging ideas and thoughts for millennia. This gave her “the idea for a fantasy setting of a city where everybody comes.” Cassie was fascinated by big cities of the Silk Roads like Venice or Istanbul, which were centres of trade and culture and where everybody from all over the world came. Many cities in fantasy novels are monocultural, but Cassie wanted to mix cultures in one big city that also happened to have magic.
• Castellane was inspired by Venice and Castellane’s political system was based on Venice’s. She read a book called ‘City of Fortune’, about the history of the city, and “it was just so interesting to me”. A couple of things were taken from Venetian history. There were stone lions in Venice with open mouths and the Venetian people could report their neighbours doing something shady or committing a crime by putting a piece of paper into the mouths. The government would pick up the paper and the people would get investigated.
• We also found out that Cassie had a hamster called ‘Hamster’ as a child. 😀
• Cassie had the idea for the setting and the idea for a ‘Sword Catcher’ and she then realised that these two ideas belonged together. She watched a documentary about Saddam Hussein’s son’s body double: he was resembling Udai so his looks were surgically changed to make him look like Hussein. He was taught to walk and talk like Udai and he was doing public events where Udai might get assassinated because the latter wasn’t very popular in his country. The body double hated Udai, but he was pulled from poverty to live in this fancy situation. He had anything he wanted, except an identity. Cassie wondered what it would be like to be in that person’s head. Nobody ever uses Kel’s real name in the book, he’s either pretending to be Conor or Conor’s cousin. No one knows Kel’s real name, his history, he’s not allowed to want anything. Kel’s life is both privileged and limited. He doesn’t have an identity on his own and “he doesn’t even know who he is without Conor.” Then Kel meets the Ragpicker King who offers him a job (to spy on the palace) and the question of whether there could be more to Kel’s life arises.
• Cassie usually starts with characters when she is creating, and the story builds around them. It was more interesting to have Kel as the ‘Sword Catcher’ to somebody that he loved instead of somebody that he hated. The stories that Cassie read about body doubles were different, they were not fond of the person they were pretending to be. Kel was taken as a child, though, and he grew up with Conor, they slept in the same room, so he would love him and consider him more than family. The relationship between Kel and Conor became a big focus. Conor also has been brought up by terrible or neglectful people. There are things he cannot do, but he also hasn’t been given a lot of guidance about how to be a good person. The best thing about him is that he loves Kel. It has made him more human. “Lin’s goal in life is to be a doctor in a society that doesn’t believe women should be allowed to be doctors. So they are all tied in one way or another, but these are all very adult ways to be fettered. Conor is fettered in the manner that he is going to be forced to marry someone he doesn’t want to marry. Lin’s stuff is about her career and her job. There was no way that Lin has gone to six years of magical medical school, but she is only sixteen years old. She would have had to start when she was ten, so she’s clearly not a teenager.” As the characters evolved, Cassie realised that they are older. The things they are interested in are not the things Cassie’s teenage characters are interested in. “When you’re writing YA there’s often a lot of firsts. There’s first kiss, first love, first loss, first grief, first moral conundrum.” This was not the case for the Sword Catcher characters, they face more challenges, but they have lived more life.
• The Ashkar and their magic were always part of the world-building. They have this power, but they are not the most powerful people in this world, it’s actually the opposite. There are restrictions and the Ashkar are oppressed, because the majority culture fears them.
• Sword Catcher addresses lots of different concepts (prejudice, misogyny and more), but then there is also the modern concept of “love is love”. Conor can marry anyone he likes, a princess or a prince. He only rejects a prince because he is too tall, not because he is a guy. Sexuality is a non-issue in the book.
• Was plotting an adult book different? Cassie asked herself what everybody wanted more than anything else. The answer was power, which comes from trade. The city is run by twelve Charter families and each has a different charter that entitles them to the money that is made by trading (silk, spice, wine, etc.). Power is always moving, so the families can never feel completely secure.
• We’re quite far along into The Ragpicker King because the original version of Sword Catcher was actually 430,000 words long, so Cassie had to make a decision what’s in book one and what’s in the next book. The Ragpicker King is meant to be published “at the very beginning of 2025.”

Audience Q&A

• The different cultures in the book have different naming conventions. Castellan is based on Occitan, so it’s based on medieval French naming conventions. There are also analogues to Korea, China, ancient Persia and they all have their own specific naming conventions and honorifics. Cassie enjoys watching K-dramas and there are many different ways of addressing somebody. It tells you a lot about that culture.
• How did it happen that Cassie named a character after a Rick Riordan character? (Nico di Angelo & Filomena di Angelo) First it was Rick Riordan who asked Cassie to use Magnus’s name for his title character Magnus Chase and he actually dedicated the first book to Cassie. Later when Cassie was creating an Italian character [in The Last Hours], she thought he’d enjoy it if Cassie used Nico’s last name. Before the book was published, she actually told Rick what was going to happen to this particular character and Rick laughed.
• Does Cassie approach characters or worldbuilding first? Cassie starts with a contrast in a character first. The character goes one way, but there is also another direction they are going to. There is Jem, he is a sweet and kind person, but he is also a drug addict. Julian loves his brothers and sisters, he is like their father, but he is also a pathological liar. Matthew is fun, he tells amazing stories, Matthew is an alcoholic. “There is always something that takes the character in this other contrasting direction.” Those are the things that interest Cassie and people.
• Sword Catcher cover by Jim Tierney: the top of the cover shows Marivent, the palace up on the Hill, over the rest of the city. The bottom is the Black Mansion, where the Ragpicker King lives, and it’s at the bottom of the city. The mansion is in the so-called Warren, a maze with lots of criminals. The people on the Hill look down upon the city. There is a saying in Sword Catcher: ‘There are two kings, the king on the hill and the king in the city.’ This refers to both the actual king and the Ragpicker King. The cover represents both kings.
• Which character has a really special place in Cassie’s heart? Simon, and not because they share the same last name; that actually came later. Cassie and Simon are both Jewish and she can relate to Simon’s reaction (and enthusiasm) to the Shadow World. She would actually react the same to such a revelation. Just like Simon, since he is a regular person, she would also be killed almost instantly.
• What made you change from YA to adult fantasy? According to Cassie, many people think it was the sexy business, but then they ended up being disappointed because there is not a lot of sexy business in Sword Catcher. So it was not that. “There is lots of sexy business in book two, so something to look forward to.” When Cassie first wrote City of Bones, she did not think of it as YA. At a meeting with a publisher, they told her that young adult fantasy would not sell and to age up the characters. Cassie thought about it, but it seemed “so wrong.” Obviously, she did not listen to them in the end. She enjoys writing about that age group; people figuring out who they are always appealed to Cassie. Sword Catcher was also supposed to be YA, but when Cassie showed Holly [Black] the outline, Holly told her that the characters were adults: “All of their problems are grownup problems.” “You have to go where the story takes you. You never want to change your story based on marketing.”
• A place Cassie would like to visit in Castellane and why? [Question by yours truly] In the harbour of Castellane is an island called Drowned Tyndaris, a city that was once part of Castellane and then a tidal wave wiped out the city. When the tide is low, you can see it and its remains. At high tide, the city disappears. Cassie would like to go there, because she likes the idea that a city appears only sometimes. We do visit Tyndaris in the second book and the things on Tyndaris are really interesting.
• From first to last draft: what was the biggest cut/change Cassie had to make? At the beginning Cassie wrote 100k words, but then realised they were all wrong, so she had to throw them all out. “It was one of the worst things I ever had to do. That’s a whole book, that’s City of Bones.” She still feels sad, but “sometimes you have to murder your story to make it work.” The story ends on a cliffhanger, although Cassie initially wrote more, but her editor told her to make a cut. That last chapter, in which there was a meeting of different characters, is now gone.
• There are so many Jewish ‘easter eggs’/hints/references in Sword Catcher – what did Cassie want to tell with the Ashkar’s story? Jewish history and mythology were handed down to Cassie through her grandparents and her great-grandparents. When writing about the Ashkar, Cassie wanted to convey that “this is a people who are in a place, but they are not of that place. They are in Castellane, but they are not wholly Castellani. They have a different set of rules, a different set of laws that apply to them. They are very aware all of the time that they are a people who live in a precarious situation. This is very much based on my own family’s history as Eastern European Jews, which is that where they go and find a place that is welcoming, and they might wake up the next day and that place might not be welcoming anymore. I think you see that very much with Mariam who comes from Malgasi where it was a place it was fine to be Ashkar until one day she woke up and it wasn’t. She carries that with her into Castellane. One of the most significant relationships for me in the book is the relationship between Lin and her grandfather Mayesh. Mayesh is the counsellor to the king and Lin is angry at him a lot of the time because Mayesh is almost never with the rest of his community. […] He advises the king, and this comes from Andalusian, Spain where they used to have a Jewish advisor to the ruler, because Jews were considered to have a certain kind of wisdom that was valuable. In that context in Castellane there is always an Ashkar advisor to the King and that is Mayesh and he has a kind of freedom that no one else in the walled city has, but he also has this extreme responsibility he is always aware of. So she shouts at him, she is angry with him, “Why are you not here with your people, why are you always with there with the people that are not us?” And he says, “I am not just a counsellor, I am a mirror. I reflect our humanity to the king that he always must remember that we are people.” The Ashkar are not Jews, they are Ashkar, but what I wanted was to create a people that – in the same way that when I was growing up and I read fantasy, I could tell that a lot of it was very ecumenical, but some of it was very based in sort of a kind of Christianity that I didn’t feel that I had access to or was welcome in and I wanted to create a society that would feel welcoming and resonant to people who were Jewish. […] I think the idea of being an oppressed people or the idea being an immigrant is relatable to so many people. I’ve definitely had, mostly Jewish readers come up to me say, “Oh, I recognise this or I recognise that.””
• Who from The Shadowhunter Chronicles would be best friends with the characters from Sword Catcher? “Jace would do very well in Castellane because he is fairly unflappable. The strange debauched partying wouldn’t really bother him and also he’s good with weapons and that’s very useful in Castellane. […] Conor and Matthew would get along really well. Although Conor kind of has an ongoing drinking problem and Matthew has solved his, so maybe they shouldn’t hang out. But first two books of Last Hours Matthew would have a good time with Conor. […] Lin would get along with Emma or Cordelia. They share the same kind of stubbornness […] Cordelia has this real desire to be a hero and she really sees herself as shouldering this responsibility and this burden to save people and we see that with Lin that expresses herself first in her being a doctor and being like “I will save people, I will save people with medicine” and then by the end of the book, she makes this really big decision that is going to have a lot of ramifications in the second book in which she makes a very conscious choice to do something really big in order to save somebody.”
• Difficult to change from Shadowhunter universe to the Sword Catcher universe? “It is always difficult to start a new world, it’s always for me a challenge to start a new trilogy in Shadowhunters and get used to a whole new group of people and their new relationships with each other and their new story. So this was an even bigger step and I think that part of that that’s probably why I wrote the 100,000 words and threw them out. I also realised that this was a very different kind of book. It has so much political intrigue, it’s so structurally complex that in order to write it, I had to find a new way to write that wasn’t the way I wrote the Shadowhunter books, so I wound up doing a lot of sort of visual stuff. I did cards that I wrote all the different scenes onto and then I would mark the cards with different colours depending on the characters that were in them and sort of where in the narrative the scene was and how it moved the narrative along. Then I imported that into Google slides and then I would keep modularly moving the scenes here and there and trying to figure out like this exact sort of almost mathematical structure and the Shadowhunter books are more sort of free form than that. So yes, it was complicated and I had to kind of teach myself how to write a different kind of book.”
• When Tessa and Jem die, are they going to be reunited with Will in the afterlife? The question is, “Are they ever even going to die?” We don’t know the answer to that, “but I will say that in The Wicked Powers Tessa and Jem have an encounter with Will. (!!!) I’m not going to tell you how or how this is even possible, just know that it is.”
• One particular death that stayed with Cassie? “The only thing that ever made me cry was the end of Clockwork Princess and I cried when I was writing that. And I think it was the part where Tessa realises she can’t remember the colour of Will’s eyes anymore. […] The one [death] that for me was the most visceral is the death in Lord of Shadows. I knew it was going to happen, but I had to write the book as if wasn’t going to happen because it has to be such a shock to the characters. […] The death in Lord of Shadows is someone who’s barely had a chance to live at all and dies in the arms of the person who loves them the most. So that one was pretty bad. That was hard.”

Although the event ended on a somewhat sad note, there was much excitement, especially after the unexpected The Wicked Powers reveal, and I had a fantastic evening! Thank you to Chaya for moderating and thank you to Waterstones. It is always a pleasure to come to St James’s Church for a Cassandra Clare event!

Sword Catcher is now available wherever books are sold. Grab a copy if you haven’t already and happy reading!