In this exclusive Q&A with author Lev Grossman, we learn about the characters in The Magicians who surprised him the most, one of his formative reading influences, and what's coming next.
Juniper: The Magicians has become such a defining fantasy series for so many readers. Looking back, is there a character from The Magicians who surprised you most? Someone who became more important, more complicated, or more beloved than you expected?
Lev: Julia definitely took me by surprise. She wasn’t supposed to be a character at all. She was supposed to be like Rosaline in Romeo & Juliet—Quentin’s crush whom he immediately outgrows and is never heard from again. Except that she refused to leave. She kept insisting that she was a hero too, with her own voice and her own story to tell. And she was right.
Or Penny—he was meant to be incredibly unappealing, but after the show came out he became a fan favorite. That happened because they cast Arjun Gupta, and he’s so handsome and charismatic people couldn’t help like him. Including me, in spite of myself.
Juniper: Quentin’s relationship to Fillory is so layered. When you were writing the series, what interested you most about that tension between the fantasy world we dream about and the reality we actually get?
Lev: It’s hard to put my finger on it, except to say that my whole life I had always tried to make my life feel like a story. Stories were always so satisfying and compelling and tightly plotted. But my life wasn’t like that, it wouldn’t behave, it insisted on being pointless and disorganized, with so many boring and depressing bits. For a long time this was a mystery to me, and the source of a lot of angst. I couldn’t get past it.
My life still isn’t like a story, but writing The Magicians at least helped me make some peace with it.
Juniper: One of the things that makes The Magicians so enduring is that it doesn’t just celebrate magic—it interrogates it. When you were building the series, did you always know you wanted magic to feel as emotionally messy and morally complicated as the people using it?
Lev: One of the basic formative reading experiences of my life was Watchmen, by Alan Moore. Watchmen was so brutally clear-eyed in the way it treated superpowers and superheroes, in a way that tore up the mythology but which somehow, at the same time, paradoxically, made it feel incredibly real. When I wrote The Magicians, I wanted to do a Watchmen but for magic.
Juniper: The trilogy evolves so much book to book. Did you always know where Quentin would land by the end of The Magician’s Land, or did that ending emerge as wrote?
Lev: I had no idea. I was initially completely resistant to the idea of writing a trilogy at all. I thought the story was over at the end of The Magicians. But people kept pointing out that the characters still had a lot of growing up to do, Quentin in particular, their arcs were not complete. And they were right. And when I started wondering about what happened to them next … they started making more story.
But I never thought past whatever book I was working on. I didn’t want to keep writing just to fill out a trilogy, I wanted the characters to demand more story. Which they did, right up until the end of Magician’s Land. I haven’t heard much from them since.
Juniper: You’ve said there’s a very real connection between Harvard and Brakebills. What parts of that world came most directly out of your own experience of being surrounded by brilliant, intense, ambitious people?
Lev: I don’t want to mythologize Harvard too much. People there did tend to be quite focused and intense, and ambitious. And a lot of them had hidden talents which would come out as you talked to them—they’d be chess champions or harp virtuosos and so on. Often they were very dramatic, they acted like fictional characters. There was a lot of good material there.
But I don’t want to lean on that too much. Brakebills is very much a fantasized, heightened version of Harvard. And the actual reality is that there’s a lot of ordinary people at Harvard, and a lot of brilliant intense people elsewhere in the world. I meet them all the time.
Juniper: The SYFY adaptation introduced the story to a whole new audience and ended up having its own identity alongside the books. What has it been like to watch readers and viewers connect differently to the same universe?
Lev: It’s strange and wonderful. One can make much of the differences in story between the books and the show — I have made much of it from time to time — but what stayed 100% true to the books is the characters. They stayed absolutely themselves, from page to screen, which is down to the show’s incredible writers and showrunners and actors. When people connect to the characters in the show, which is what it’s mostly all about, I feel like they’re connecting to the books too. It’s a good feeling.
Juniper: Which authors (inside or outside fantasy) are you especially excited to read right now?
Lev: Let’s see! Writers I always read with pleasure include Kate Atkinson, Tana French, George R.R. Martin — he will get there—Joe Abercrombie, Robert Harris, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Nicola Griffith, M.T. Anderson … there’s a million more I’m forgetting.
Juniper: For readers who fell in love with you through The Magicians and have followed you into The Bright Sword and now The God of Sleep, what can you tell us about what you’re working on next?
Lev: I’ve just finished co-writing—with Lilah Sturges—the script for a good-old-fashioned Star-Wars-esque space opera graphic novel called The Heavens. Now we’re waiting for the art, which I’m dying to see, but graphic novels take ages, so the whole thing won’t be out for another couple of years. I’m also co-writing the pilot for a show based on The Bright Sword, which I probably shouldn’t talk about, since it’s not announced.
I’m also working on a novel about a watchmaker who is also a god. And a detective. That one’s still coming together.