3 Key Takeaways: Cassandra Clare’s Shadowhunters/Mortal Instruments

This is part of my ongoing video series of Three Key Takeaways from books I’ve read – the lessons we should take as authors from what worked and what didn’t work. You can view the original video here with the transcript below: https://www.tiktok.com/@rhiannondaverc/video/7360655434413329696

I’m a professional ghostwriter and these are my three key takeaways from the Mortal Instruments series. 

So, whether you love it or hate it, the Mortal Instruments series and the Shadowhunters world in general is extremely popular. It has sold extremely well and so I think there are a lot of lessons we can take from it.

For the record, I am on the side of loving it. More so some of the other trilogies around the Mortal Instruments series but I do love the series. I love the characters and I think that Cassandra Clare has made some very astute business decisions when it comes to this series so let me take you through those right now.

So my first key takeaway for the Mortal Instruments series is to plant seeds and plan ahead. What I mean by this is that instead of writing one book and seeing where it goes, if you are writing fantasy especially, if you’re writing young adult, if you’re writing any book where you feel it has the potential to become a series, don’t just plan one book, write that one book and then think about sequels afterwards. What you want to do is think about the overarching goals of the series.

Where are those characters going to end up in book three or five or ten or wherever you want to take them. When I’m doing series, either for myself or for my ghostwriting publisher clients, I try to look at it in terms of a cycle of five. So just how a TV show would have a season with a certain number of episodes and at the end of that season there would be a season finale leading into the first episode of the next season.

I like to think of books the same way. So whether you’re doing trilogies, whether you’re doing groupings of five, what’s important to think about is how are you going to not just make people pick up the next book but take them through a whole overarching story arc across three books, across five books, and then how are you going to make them pick up the next series of books. And I usually do this by having something revealed in that season finale which is actually going to be the basis of the next season.

Now Cassandra Clare very clearly planned ahead what she was going to do with the whole Shadowhunters universe. She said in interviews and it’s been revealed many times that she knew where she was going with the story as a whole and she planned from the start for it to be a lot of books with a lot of spin-offs in different directions. That is a great business decision because it means that if someone is a fan of one Shadowhunters book they are very likely to buy all of them.

If they are a fan of the whole of Mortal Instruments they’re going to buy every series that Cassandra Clare puts out. In fact if you love the Mortal Instruments but then you’re not so much of a fan of the Infernal Devices, you’d be wrong, but you might still pick up the next series that she puts out because you liked the first one so much maybe the second series was a blip and the third one is going to be just as good as the first so you’ll still keep buying the books. That’s smart and the fact that it’s all interconnected and it all makes sense and it’s all leading to certain conclusions that are very clearly planned from the beginning – it means that she was able to plant seeds early on that then sprouted later in the series which shows us the continuation of the story. It gives us a much grander vision of the world as a whole and it results in a much more compelling book series that we are going to keep picking up.

My second key takeaway from the Mortal Instruments books is that when you are trying to follow on from a successful series – which, you know, by the grace of god may we all get there, right? When you’re trying to follow on from a successful series you can actually go generations before and generations after your main characters – you don’t have to follow on directly from where you left off, you can have their children or their children’s children; you can have their grandparents or their great-grandparents. This is what she’s done within the Shadowhunters universe with the other series, there are some set in the future from the Mortal Instruments, some set in the past from the Mortal Instruments, and all of these stories weave together in ways that again make it all make sense and they’re all interconnected and we have certain characters who have either immortality or very long lives who are woven throughout all of the stories in order to keep that level of consistency and familiarity going. Now if you’re not writing fantasy it’s probably quite difficult to have an immortal character in there but still you can think of ways to keep a certain theme going, like for example maybe all of your characters live in the same place, whether that’s the same town or quite literally the same building. You can have them all be part of the same profession or race, like we have in the Shadowhunters books, they are obviously Shadowhunters. The point is there are ways that you can take your story in different directions you’re not limited to just always going forwards forwards forwards – you can take big skips and big leaps and you can go back. My third key takeaway from the Mortal Instruments series is pay attention to your fan favorite characters.

Now if you watch the TV show and then read the books you’d probably be really surprised at how little of Magnus and Alec there actually is in the books. They were really kind of part of the background furniture for a lot of their romance whereas in the tv show they were definitely front and center. Now, why is that? It’s because fan reaction to Magnus and Alec was really strong. People have loved them since the outset and so in response to that we don’t just get them coming out to the fore in the tv series, we have a whole book which is just for Magnus’s adventures throughout time including his time with Alec. We have them both cropping up in books like Tales from the Shadowhunter Academy and Ghosts of the Shadow Market. They have more and more appearances as time goes on because they are fan favorites so rather than just sticking with what she thought would be the favorites, Cassandra Clare has actually listened to the reactions and focused and leaned in to what people were enjoying more.

Does that mean she compromised her vision for the series? I don’t think it does, because all she’s doing is focusing on certain characters as opposed to other characters who were present in the same universe. I think she could still tell the same stories but using those characters as a focal point rather than maybe other characters that she thought she was going to use or maybe she planned that from the start to be Magnus and Alec because she foresaw that they were going to be more popular, I don’t know, I wasn’t there! But the point is: listen to what your fans are telling you. It’s often said, and I believe it’s true, that reviews are for readers not for authors. However, I do recommend every once in a while having a little dip into your reviews and if you struggle with criticism or if you struggle with the pain of someone not liking your work you can filter by five stars and just see what people are loving and do more of that. Sometimes you’d be surprised as to which characters end up being the favorites.

For me in my Crowhill Cove series which just came out last year, Ace and Brody were my favorite characters. I really thought they were the strongest book, the strongest romance, but everybody else in the universe seems to disagree and actually Olly and Keaton are the most popular. So, it just goes to show people will have different reactions to your work than what you think they will have and if you listen to them, give them a bit more of what they want without compromising your creativity and your artistic direction, you’re going to have more success. That’s why I have a book coming out right now serialized on Substack which has Olly and Keaton’s story told in a new way. Shameless plug!

Anyway, those are my three key takeaways from the Mortal Instruments slash the Shadowhunters universe. Let me know if there are any other major young adult series you would like me to tackle because I love diving into these kind of things and I would like to do more just like this.