OFFICIAL BIO:

Lev Grossman is the author of the bestselling novels The Magicians and Codex. A well-known cultural commentator, he is the book critic for TIME magazine and has written for numerous other publications, including the New York Times, The Believer, The Wall Street Journal, The Village Voice, Salon and Wired. His latest novel, The Magician King, is out from Viking now.

---

We at Geek Speak heartily recommend these TIME pieces by Lev Grossman:

The Boy Who Lived Forever -- inside the alternate universe of fan fiction, where Harry Potter's story never ends.
Comic-Con Royalty, Part Two: The King -- Joss Whedon at San Diego Comic-Con.
It's Twilight in America: The Vampire Saga -- revealing how a Mormon housewife's vampire saga became a universal obsession.

And on August 20, at Renovation -- the 2011 World Science Fiction Convention, held  in Reno, Nevada -- Grossman was presented with the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. (Past winners include Orson Scott Card, Cory Doctorow, John Scalzi and friend of Geek Speak, Seanan McGuire.) Congratulations, Lev!

Here, he talks Fillory, Quentin, criticism and all things magical, upon the release of his new novel, The Magician King...

---

GS: To start with, why don’t you tell our readers a little bit about the world of The Magicians and The Magician King?

LG: The world of The Magicians and The Magician King is exactly the same as ours, with two exceptions. One, for reasons too complicated to explain here, C.S. Lewis was never born in that world. Two, magic is real: it’s practiced by a very small and secretive group of people who study at a system of highly selective magical colleges.

GS: Where did the idea for Quentin and his adventures in Fillory come from? Was it a recent development, or an idea you've had in the back of your mind for years?

LG: I wrote the first chapter of The Magicians in 1996. I’d just reread A Wizard of Earthsea and was thinking about how much I loved the chapters that took place at the school for magic on Roke, and I thought, wouldn’t it be nice to write a whole book that happens at a school for magic? Of course the next year Harry Potter was published. I didn’t come back to the idea until eight years later. I was thinking how much I loved those books, and the Narnia books, and I wondered if I could write something in that vein but for adults, with adult language, and all the harsh realities of adult life. The Magicians was the result.

GS: For all that you were aiming the book at adults, it feels like the audience could be broader; one could argue that the audience should be anywhere from young adults moving past the inevitable Harry Potter phase to adults who themselves grew up on stories such as Narnia and the like, or even to adults who dismiss the fantasy genre entirely.

LG: One could argue that! And I did, when I was trying to explain what I was doing to my agent. But the truth is -- and I find this is true for most writers -- I wrote the book I wanted to read, and I hoped that if I wanted to read it other people would too.

GS: The Magician King switches between the current plot with Quentin and co. and flashbacks of how Julia got to where she was. When writing The Magicians, did you always know you wanted to take a deeper look into Julia's background, or did you realize how that would work with the new book after starting it?

LG: The Julia parts of the book were a surprise. I always knew I wanted to have her story in there. I figured I would give her a chapter to tell it in. But she had a lot to say -- there was so much anger and bitterness there. Her story wound up being as long as Quentin’s.

GS: When writing a story about magic, and magical fantasy lands, the rules governing such are pretty much whatever you define them to be -- does that make it easier to write overall, or actually more difficult?

LG: The weird thing about fantasy worlds is that they do have rules. They’re not the laws of physics, or not exactly. They’re projections from your subconscious, and subconsciouses are as brutally rule-bound, in their own way, as reality. The key thing when you’re building a fantasy world is to define your rules, at least to yourself if not to the reader, and to stick to them. Otherwise none of it feels real. (The great exception to this meta-rule is of course C.S. Lewis, who was a sloppy worldbuilder. And yet Narnia feels utterly real. I don’t know how he did it.)

GS: How have you grown and changed as a writer in the decade+ between your first published novel and the recent adventures of Quentin?

LG: In every possible way.

GS: What is your writing process like? How hard is it to find time to work on your own books while having your "day job" working for TIME magazine?

LG: I’m a binger. I know some people write every day, but I can’t do it. I would love to, but with a full-time job and two daughters it’s not possible. It used to be that TIME worked on four-day schedule, and I would have the other three to write. But that changed a few years ago. Now I take time off: two weeks here, two weeks there, and during those weeks I just write flat out.

GS: Do you ever worry that your position as both a book critic and a published author opens you up to retaliatory reviews from those you’ve previously panned?

LG: It has probably happened. But honestly, if I worried about that I would never get out of bed in the morning. Which come to think of it I sometimes find pretty difficult.

GS: What book sticks out in your mind as the worst you ever had to review?

LG: You’re baiting me, aren’t you? Nowadays if I hate something I just don’t review it. I wish I did that back in the day, too, but when you’re starting out you just can’t refuse some freelance assignments.

GS: As both a novelist and a book critic, you have a better view into the industry than many others would have. Do you think it is easier or harder in this day and age for a new author to get published? What would your recommendations be for any aspiring writers out there wanting to break into the business?

LG: More books are published now than ever before. So in that sense it’s easier to get in the door than it ever has been. The hard part is really getting a publisher to support you and invest in your book and work with you to get you noticed. If that’s important to you, you can game the system a little. Spend some time watching what gets published, figure out what publishers like, and become that thing. Or at least pretend to be it for a little while.

GS: Through your work as a journalist, you've had the opportunity to interview a wide range of people yourself. Who was your favorite interview and why?

LG: There have been a lot. I’ve been interviewing people full-time for 10 years. It might have been John le Carré. Incredibly smart, charming man. Dashing might be the word. He’s like a jolly James Bond. He lives in a remote compound on a cliff in Cornwall. We got drunk over lunch.

GS: How much of your own life have you injected into your work? Do you think it’s possible to write fiction without drawing on your own experiences, no matter how fantastical the setting?

LG: I’ve been everywhere that Quentin has been, except for the magical places. I suppose everything in the books must have started as something that happened to me. Or at least something that I’ve read about. Sometimes I get the two confused.

GS: You've created an incredibly rich world in the Magician books, with the "real world" and Fillory being just parts. What is next for you in this world? Will there be a third book following the adventures of Quentin in or around Fillory? Or perhaps either someone or somewhere new?

LG: I could tell you, but then I’d have to magically erase your memory. All I can say is that the action will go back to Brakebills, at least for a while.

GS: Have you had any demands for you to actually write the full five-book "Fillory and Further" series? Would you ever want to?

LG: It comes up once in a while. I wrote the first chapter of the first book. I really loved it. But I’ve got to take care of some other things first.

GS: How did you feel upon first seeing the fan-made song “I Wanna Be a Magician”, by Parry Gripp? You’ve been filked! Quite an honor for any genre author…


LG: The Parry Gripp thing was a pretty major deal for me, I have to tell you. I’ve been into Nerf Herder since 1997 or so. I’ve spent hundreds of hours listening to Parry’s music. So to hear him singing about the Cozy Horse and the Questing Beast and all that… there are no words.

GS: Do you have a favorite genre author yourself? Which novelists inspired you to break into the SFF field?

LG: All of them? The writer who really pushed me over the edge was Susanna Clarke. Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell came out in 2004, and I started The Magicians a couple of months after I read it. But before her there was C.S. Lewis, Ursula Le Guin, Anne McCaffrey, Fritz Leiber, Larry Niven, Iain Banks, T.H. White…too many to name.

GS: And now, come on… you can tell us. You practiced some of the intricate hand gestures necessary for Quentin's magic yourself in front of a mirror, didn't you?

LG: That’s between me and the mirror.

The Final Five with Lev Grossman:

Trek or Wars? Wars.
Marvel or DC? Marvel.
Vampires or werewolves? Vampires.
Dragons or unicorns? Hippogriffs.
Time travel: pro or con? I’ve used it, so I’ll have to say pro. But only when absolutely necessary.

  -- K. Burtt

Geek Speak Magazine would like to thank Lev Grossman for his participation in this interview.

Further Reading: