Paul Talada
asked
Lev Grossman:
The Magicians is a fantasy book, but it's so grounded in reality. When and how did you decide to take the series in a if magic was real it would be like this direction?
Lev Grossman
That was there from the start. It may be the whole point of the series. Partly it just had to do with the way magic was described -- I wondered what would happen if I experimented with how I wrote the magic. What if you described magic in a very precise, everyday, realist way, like you'd describe a chair? How would Hemingway have written magic? How would Woolf have done it? I wanted to play around w/ using realist tools to describe fantastical things.
I also thought that probably most people who learned magic would also be fantasy fans, and thus more self-aware than you generally see in fantasy novels. That's where the whole Fillory/Plover dimension comes from.
I also thought that probably most people who learned magic would also be fantasy fans, and thus more self-aware than you generally see in fantasy novels. That's where the whole Fillory/Plover dimension comes from.
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