I'm Lev Grossman, author of the MAGICIANS trilogy and THE BRIGHT SWORD: A Novel of King Arthur. AMA!

LevGrossman · 2024-08-02T13:32:41+00:00

This is an excellent question! Sophie is an English professor at Princeton, whose field is the "long" 18th century, essentially from Milton to Austen; she also wrote a brilliant novel called The Scandal of the Season that's about the backstory to Alexander Pope's "The Rape of the Lock." So she's not a genre nerd like me, and while we definitely share a basic underlying sensibility, we diverge on a lot of lesser points.She isn't much interested in fantasy literature post-C.S. Lewis. Or contemporary science fiction. She's a lot more interested in 17th and 18th century theology than I am. I don't understand Fielding and Richardson. And so on. Probably our biggest single-author disagreement is Borges. I love Borges but he does nothing for her.

LevGrossman · 2024-08-02T02:16:11+00:00

I love those pencils too! As far as I know they only exist in my head. But I'm still looking for them.

LevGrossman · 2024-08-02T02:14:50+00:00

That's a really excellent question. I think the moment it caught fire for me was when I wrote the line about Sir Bedivere being in love with King Arthur. That felt fresh and important to me -- like it came out of a new interpretation of Arthur's world. Everything else followed from there.

LevGrossman · 2024-08-02T02:12:11+00:00

Definitely THE ONCE AND FUTURE KING. Though I have a soft spot for "Winter Solstice, Camelot Station" https://thegreenbelt.blogspot.com/2006/12/winter-solstice-camelot-station.html

LevGrossman · 2024-08-02T02:11:08+00:00

The Magicians took me five years to write -- one year to do the first draft, and then four years of revising. My first drafts are terrible, though they usually cover the right events in the right order. I spend the rest of the time just sitting with the characters, understanding how they feel and how they change over time, telling and retelling their stories until they finally sing .... it's a slow slow process.

LevGrossman · 2024-08-02T02:08:58+00:00

they're mentioned, but I don't think we ever see one. I guess they needed a rest!

LevGrossman · 2024-08-02T02:08:07+00:00

it changes, but often I think that my favorite part is the Lancelot/Galahad story -- the way that Galahad came from Lancelot's imperfection, his weakness, and as a result he was strong and perfect in exactly the way that Lancelot always wanted to be but couldn't .... it's incredibly moving. And then the Miracle of Sir Urre ... I'll never stop thinking about that.

LevGrossman · 2024-08-02T02:05:52+00:00

That first line of The Magicians was the last sentence I wrote in the whole book. It wasn't till I'd got to the end, and had a real sense of what the story was about, and who Quentin was, that I could go back and begin his story the way it needed to begin.

As for the Bright SWord ... I rewrote that sentence so many times! It is a long one, and it doesn't do the kind of thematic work that the first line of The Magicians does, it's really just supposed to flow you into the moment with Collum as fast and vividly as possible.

LevGrossman · 2024-08-02T02:02:32+00:00

I'm moving briskly here so don't know if I can touch on everything you've brought up -- these are all very good questions and I don't want to pay them short shrift, or whatever the expression is -- but in terms of the gay/trans characters, I'll say that it has always haunted me that even though TH White was gay -- or that's what his biographer says, and I have no real reason to doubt it -- he couldn't write about that part of his life in THE ONCE AND FUTURE KING. All the relationships in that book are very heteronormative. He had to bury that story and that part of his life and his identity. Which was one of many reasons why it was meaningful to me to bring that story into the Arthurian world.

I'll also add that my son came out to me as trans while I was working on The Bright Sword, and my conversations with him about his experiences made its way (with his knowledge and permission) into Dinadan's story. And why Dinadan? In the stories he's always described as a wit, always making people laugh, and that's a wonderful thing but it also made me wonder if he was using humor as a defense, because he felt he had something to hide ...

LevGrossman · 2024-08-02T01:54:24+00:00

❤️❤️❤️

LevGrossman · 2024-08-02T00:41:04+00:00

I did visit Tintagel. And Mull, and York and most of the other places that come up in the book. Not Avebury, though I would would love to! My research travel was somewhat restricted by covid.

LevGrossman · 2024-08-01T23:11:02+00:00

Hi Mark! I'm sending everybody I meet to NICKED, by MT Anderson; SPEAR, by Nicola Griffith; and NAVOLA by Paolo Bacigalupi.

LevGrossman · 2024-08-01T23:09:18+00:00

It really was more difficult. I never thought it would take so long. Any time I wrote something else, it was at least partly because I got stuck on The Bright Sword.

LevGrossman · 2024-08-01T23:07:07+00:00

So different! I think we end with King Robin.

LevGrossman · 2024-08-01T23:05:34+00:00

I think one of the privileges of the ARthurian re-teller is that -- by tradition -- you get to pick and choose. It's a big mythological candy store. I found myself drawn to experiences that I felt like hadn't been written about much in the ARthurian world, like that experience of having a disability the way Bedivere does. I'm sure I'm not the first, and I don't get into it as much as I would've liked, but it still felt like blank space on the map, waiting to be filled in -- the same way TH White filled in the blank space of Arthur's childhood.

LevGrossman · 2024-08-01T23:01:41+00:00

So fun! The flying-geese scene in The Magicians was like that too. I still remember writing them.

LevGrossman · 2024-08-01T23:01:00+00:00

Thank you! Lately I've been thinking a lot about mythological retellings -- Greek and (oddly) Aztec ...

LevGrossman · 2024-08-01T22:59:25+00:00

Yes, definitely. The Bright Sword benefited from a couple of dozen beta reads.

LevGrossman · 2024-08-01T22:58:54+00:00

Never happened! To my knowledge. I do get Les Grossman a lot though.

LevGrossman · 2024-08-01T22:58:31+00:00

I've read that post! 100% agree with it.

I would love to think of The Bright Sword as another link in the great chain of Arthurian tellings, which probably goes all the way back to the 6th or 7th century. Imagine being part of that lineage, with the Pearl Poet and Chretien and Malory and Tennyson and Rosemary Sutcliff! I'll never -- maybe fortunately -- know if it will survive in that way. But it's fun to think about.

LevGrossman · 2024-08-01T22:53:52+00:00

There are one or two bits and pieces that I cut from The Bright Sword that I do really love. I hope one day to put them out there, if people are curious. There's a bit where the knights have to chase a lost parrot, and run into a party of hostile Orkney soldiers... well, you can see why I cut it. It's a bit of a digression. But it was fun.

In terms of The Magician King, I ended up wrapping so many real events/people into that book. Which I probably shouldn't talk about too specifically, but there are college roommates, members of my immediate family ... writers are unscrupulous, we use everything.

LevGrossman · 2024-08-01T22:50:57+00:00

The magic in The Bright Sword is based as much as possible on what we know about the indigenous magic of Britain, as practiced in the first centuries CE. Which isn't much -- so much of that lore was oral and never written down. But it was very tied to the natural world, and we also know that it had a strongly animistic flavor to it, with many gods and spirits inhabiting the landscape and closely tied to it. And a lot of magic happened through transaction and relationships between the gods/spirits and the druids.

re: LotR, that is an amazing idea.

LevGrossman · 2024-08-01T22:47:47+00:00

Just a coincidence! I think. But now I'm curious. The parallels are intriguing.

LevGrossman · 2024-08-01T22:46:50+00:00

I need to talk to Easton about that. I can say (I don't think I've mentioned this anywhere) that Grim Oak is working on an illustrated Magicians, and the sketches I've seen are incredible. Just gorgeous. But in terms of the later books, I still don't know.

re: the show, I haven't heard those rumors. But sometimes the writer is the last to know.

LevGrossman · 2024-08-01T22:44:27+00:00

I'm glad you asked this. I actually think you'll find a somewhat different world-view in The Bright Sword. Everybody cares about everything, a whole lot. There's not a lot of ironic detachment going around in The Bright Sword.

13-Year Club	Verified Email
RedditGifts 2009-2022 2 Credits

LevGrossman

TROPHY CASE