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Tuesday, July 29, 2025

Stirring the ingredients for success

 

“Creating characters is like throwing together ingredients for a recipe. I take characteristics I like and dislike in real people I know, or know of, and use them to embellish and define characters.” – Cassandra Clare

 

Born to American parents in Iran on July 27, 1973 Judith Rumelt started writing as Cassandra Clare while still in high school.   By the time she finished college in the late 1990s she was writing under the name full time, beginning with a series of magazine jobs and then switching to YA fiction in 2005.    

 

She is perhaps best known for her bestselling series The Mortal Instruments, which include her mega-bestseller titles City of Bones and City of Ashes.  Her newest works are the novel The Ragpicker King in The Chronicles of Castellane series – on the market since March; and the collection Better in Black: Ten Stories of Shadowhunter Romance, scheduled for December.

 

A prolific writer, she has three dozen novels on the market or scheduled and also has written more than a dozen shorter works of fiction, all highly acclaimed and most as award winners.  Clare said her recipe for “lots of writing” is simple:

 

“Write every day. Don't kill yourself. I think a lot of people think, 'I have to write a chapter a day' and they can't. They fall behind and stop doing it. But if you just write even one hundred words a day, it's not that much. By the end of a month, you'll have three thousand words, which is one chapter.  And write what you love - don't feel pressured to write serious prose if what you like is to be funny.”

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