Making Magic: The Birth of Lev Grossman’s Magicians Trilogy

Released in the fall of 2009, Lev Grossman’s The Magicians is an electrifying, divisive novel, often misleadingly described as Harry Potter all grown up. It pulls in influences from all across the spectrum of fantasy fiction, and it was a book that I immediately related to when I read it shortly after release. As a recent college graduate slugging it through grad school, facing a sort of directionless future, it struck me deeply; this was a book that got me. It was also, happily, the start of a trilogy, one that just kept getting better as it went.
Now, The Magicians has been adapted into a successful television series on Syfy (with a second season renewal to boot), but the story of where the books came from is as interesting as the author that penned them.
Lev Grossman
Lev Grossman comes from the arts. Born alongside his twin brother Austin in 1969 to poet Allen Grossman and novelist Judith Grossman, he grew up in a household filled with books. Both parents taught English, and an older sister, Bathsheba, would later become a sculptor.

From an early age, Grossman was a reader, and was introduced to fantasy literature through C.S. Lewis’s Narnia books. “The first fantasy I can remember reading was The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe when I was 8 years old,” he told us. “My mother gave it to me. She’s from London and had been moved to the countryside during the Blitz, just like the Pevensies had.” When their father read them The Hobbit, it was all over: they were hooked on fantasy, much to the dismay of their parents.
From that point, he and his brother read widely within the genre: “Anne McCaffrey’s Pern novels made a huge impression on me, The White Dragon in particular,” he said. “Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser stories were very very important to me—a very hard-boiled, disillusioned take on epic fantasy. Tolkien, of course, and Lloyd Alexander, Michael Moorcock, T.H. White. Piers Anthony too—the Xanth novels and the Adept novels.” The brothers diverged as teenagers: Lev becoming more interested in literary fiction, while Austin was more interested in video games, and eventually made that his career.
Despite growing up in a household full of practitioners of the written word, writing as a career wasn’t a sure thing. “At first I was reluctant. My parents were writers, and it seemed like their thing—something very grownup, and adult, and arcane. Not for the children.” Grossman’s initial plan was to become a scientist, but when he entered Harvard University, a freshman English teacher introduced him to Virginia Woolf, which prompted him to change directions.
Speaking with The Atlantic, Grossman noted that it was only well into college that he decided that he wanted to become a writer. “You read interviews with authors and they’re always saying, ‘I was five, and I was already telling stories and whatever.’ That wasn’t me. I only got serious about writing my sophomore year of college. Because our parents are both writers, it was always prominent in the pull-down menu of possible careers.” Throughout college, however, he began writing: he produced over a hundred short stories before giving up: “I realized that a) I have no gift or real love for the short story as a form, and b) the market for short stories is a difficult and complicated and relatively conservative one. It helps to know people, and to have an MFA-type writing style. I didn’t.”
Lev graduated from Harvard University in 1991 with his degree in literature, and immediately began writing a novel. He ended up in Maine and spent some time writing. “[Warp] was a slow process. A real labor of hate. I wrote it over about five years, starting after I finished college. I hadn’t yet found a voice that I was comfortable with on the page, or really a subject. I thought I should write about myself, but the truth is I didn’t know very much about myself at all.” He lucked out: one of his fellow graduate students, Tina Bennett, had become an agent, who agreed to represent his first book. It was eventually rejected twenty times before St. Martin’s Press picked it up.
Warp follows a young Harvard graduate named Hollis,an avid Star Trek fan coasting after college, with no direction. The book didn’t sell well. “Warp flopped. As tiny as its advance was, it did not even earn it back.”

Grossman was undeterred, however, and began working on another novel, a thriller titled Codex, which took him another five years to put together. “In Codex I learned how to build a plot, and got away from autobiographical fiction.”
Lev found that he had trouble selling Codex at first: it was rejected many times before he pulled it off the market and rewrote it, in the meantime becoming the book critic for Time Magazine. The book garnered another 16 rejections before an editor at Harcourt purchased it. Upon its publication in 2004, it became a steady seller. It follows an investment banker who stumbles across a private library of rare books, and finds a medieval codex that pulls him into a deeper mystery involving virtual realities and ancient books.
The relative success of Codex was a huge relief, and it opened up additional doors: Molly Stern, an editor at Viking Books, had previously met Lev, and read his first novel. “What I loved about Codex was the hybrid of the high and the low. There were elements of a real thriller to it. There was a zesty quality to it,” she said. She knew that when he produced another book, she’d want to be among the first to read it.
Quentin Coldwater

Grossman set off on his next novel in the spring of 2004. He had been reading a then-forthcoming fantasy novel called Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, by a new author, Suzanne Clarke, and was hooked on J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter novels, the fifth of which had come out the year before. Collecting disparate story ideas he’d developed over the years, he began writing something new. “My first child had just been born, and I wanted to write something for her,” he said.
While writing, he and his brother often shared what they were working on. “I would never have done my first novel if Lev hadn’t looked at the first few chapters,” Austin said. That book would become Soon I Will Be Invincible, a mashup of superhero tropes in a realistic setting. Reading his sibling’s work prompted Lev to revisit his earlier attempts at a fantasy novel.
Lev began to write in earnest. He was having a rough time: he was depressed, and his marriage had begun to fall apart. The book slowly came together, incorporating many of the early fantasy works that influenced him, tinged with the darkness he was experiencing in his life. The novel’s protagonist, Quentin Coldwater, was, “a reasonable facsimile of myself when I was 17, only slightly exaggerated: intellectually overdeveloped, emotionally underdeveloped, clinically depressed, primarily interested in fictional things rather than real ones.”
In this world, Quentin was a teenager who was obsessed with a fantasy series called Fillory, a facsimile of C.S. Lewis’s Narnia novels, about a group of British children who discovered a portal to a fantastical world. Quentin, aimless and drifting, discovers that Fillory does indeed exist, and that magic is real. He enrolls in a magical university called Brakebrills Academy, where he begins to learn about the magical world, and the dangers that it holds. Along the way, he discovers that Fillory too is far wilder and more dangerous than he ever imagined.
Molly Stern, the acquisitions editor for Viking Books, was indeed one of the first editors to read the book, and she knew that she wanted to publish it. She described it as a graduate seminar on genre fiction, but with a great protagonist: “It felt like a great, and true profile of the miserable, at loose ends young adult. I understood who he was. Putting him into a magical context made a lot of sense to me”
Sterns wasn’t alone in recognizing the potential in the book. “It was understood that I was dying to buy it,” Sterns remembered. “There were a lot of people bidding on it. I knew I had to publish it. It was one of the most important books I ever acquired.” She ended up winning the auction for the book, and immediately told Grossman that she loved it, but that he needed to rewrite it. “The book would not succeeded if we did not believe in Quentin,” Sterns recalled. Grossman reworked the novel, placing a greater emphasis on the characters.
For the book’s cover, Viking’s publicity department discovered a French artist named Didier Massard, who photographed tiny models of trees and nature. Viking’s marketing team showed Grossman his work and asked for ideas. Grossman was drawn to one particular piece, Arbre en Automne (Autumn Tree). The image soon became the cover for the novel.
As the book went to print, enthusiastic response from booksellers indicated it carried all the markings of a major seller. The final Harry Potter novel had been out for two years, and The Magicians had the potential to capture some of that audience. The book was greeted with rabid critical acclaim: The Washington Post called it “a great fairy tale, written for grown-ups,” while Entertainment Weekly noted that it “captures the magic of childhood and the sobering years beyond.” It quickly hit the New York times bestseller list.
The Magician King

While writing The Magicians, Grossman began to play with ideas for a followup. Grossman’s world was enormous, and there was plenty of potential for new adventures. After the success of The Magicians, he proposed a sequel to Sterns, who promptly bought it.
“I realized I did have more to write about. The Magicians is a kind of loose gloss on The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. I started wondering, what would a book modeled on The Voyage of the Dawn Treader look like?” the author said. “Also, I wondered what it would feel like to run a magical land like Fillory, to be king or queen of it.” He also needed to tie up some loose ends: how did Julia get her powers? What did Quentin do after the ending of the first novel?
He approached The Magicians as though it were a fantasy coming of age story told in realistic terms, but in The Magician King, he wanted to apply the same logic to a quest story. “I began tinkering with the hero’s journey—what seemed true about that archetypal narrative, true to my experience, and what did I want to change? And there were places on the map I wanted to get to.”
Quentin’s adventures in Fillory comprised only half the novel. For the other half, he wove in Julia’s story. “I don’t know where that came from. I didn’t see it coming. It’s the only time I’ve ever written something I didn’t plan out in advance. It wrote itself.” As a result, The Magician King took on a different structure than that of its predecessor, featuring two storylines that eventually come together at the book’s conclusion.
To help market the novel, Grossman reached out to Perry Gripp, a musician who created the theme for Buffy the Vampire Slayer, asking if he would be willing to write a promotional song for the novel. As it turned out, the musician was a fan. “I didn’t expect him to say yes, but he did, and he did an amazing job.” The track hit the web in August 2011, just as the hardcover dropped.

It’s not the only time The Magicians acted as a musician’s muse. In May of 2011, Steven McDowell picked up The Magicians and was blown away: “I first read it while I was in law school, and it was like a gut punch. I think it all hit too close to home.” He read it again for a book club, and “was able to see how much beauty is hidden behind all of the depression and self-doubt. There are awesome themes about choosing your own family, the profound way love rewires your brain, and finding your place in a world that never seemed to fit.”
He realized that he wanted to translate it into music. He got in touch with a friend, and the two set out writing an album, swapping demos and lyrics via e-mails. Calling themselves Fiction, they worked on their album, The Science of Fiction, over the course of the summer, releasing it in September of the same year.
The album is a love letter to the novel, capturing the plot through songs such as “Queen of Horns,” and setting some of the broader themes to song.
Quentin did a magic trick and
nobody noticed, it wasn’t important
just some loose change in his hand
And he became lonely by her side
it grew worse when she went away
gave up her body before he could say…
I’m sorry
Songs such as “Brakebills,” “Queen of Clocks,” “Brakebills South” and “Arctic” follow in similar fashion. When Grossman later did a contest to cover Perry Gripp’s theme song, Fiction won handily.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvPcTGF5o1Q
Like its predecessor, The Magician King garnered positive reviews. NPR called it, “a spellbinding stereograph, a literary adventure novel that is also about privilege, power and the limits of being human,” while the Chicago Tribune noted that “Grossman has created a rare, strange and scintillating novel.” Like its predecessor, it sold exceptionally well.
The Magician’s Land

In the aftermath of the release of The Magician King, Grossman noted he had plans for a third “and probably final” Magicians novel. “I know how it starts and how it ends, and a certain amount about the middle bits. Damn those middle bits,” he said. With the ending of the second book leaving plenty of room for a sequel, be began to get to work. “It was a three-act drama. Once I’d done two, a third felt kind of inevitable. The Magician King took Quentin to a very dark place. It’s The Empire Strikes Back of the piece. There was a lot left to resolve.”
The novel picked up in the aftermath of its predecessor. Banished from Fillory, Quentin returns home and picks up work as a professor at Brakebills. When he discovers Fillory is dying, he must find a way to save the place he loves the most.
“I wanted to raise the stakes as high as they would go,” Grossman recalled, “In a way it was a response to The Magician’s Nephew, and also The Last Battle, which are the creation myth and the apocalypse of Narnia. I wanted to write about the end of the world. I also wanted to write a happy ending to the story, one that felt real and not pat or cloying. I thought that after all the characters had been through, the most shocking thing I could do was end with them happy. Some of them anyway.”
To help promote the book, Grossman once again turned to the web for help. He put out a call for videos, of readers . The final product included such authors as Gregory Maguire, Peter Straub, Terry Brooks, Charles Stross, Patrick Rothfuss, Neil Gaiman, Erin Morgenstern and others, in addition to a number of readers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wegjCSqWN4
Just weeks before the novel arrived in stores, Grossman’s father Allen passed away at the age of 82. Grossman has long noted that his and his brother’s forays into speculative fiction were contentious for their parents, each traditional “Literature” academics. “’Fantasy writer’ was not on that menu [of careers],” Grossman said. “As far as my parents are concerned, that’s an act of treason.” His father’s illness helped to inform some of what went into The Magician’s Land: “In some ways, I was rehearsing it, getting ready for it. There’s a lot of fathers and parents in The Magician’s Land, much more than in the earlier books. But Quentin’s dad isn’t like our dad. Our dad is a magician, he’s like a scary powerful magician, whereas with Quentin, I wanted to play with this idea: It’s a central trope of fantasy novels that the hero’s parents always turn out to be secretly somebody special. They’re kings and queens or they’re magicians or they’re amazing people. I wanted to stick that stake in its back, to find out, well, what does it feel like to find out that your parents are exactly who you thought they were? You’re not chosen at all.”
The Magician’s Land hit bookstores in August of 2014. Like its predecessors, it became a bestseller, debuting at the top of The New York Times Bestseller list.
TV
Several months after The Magicians hit the bestseller lists in 2009, Grossman got the first of several calls about the possibility of adapting the novel for TV. While there was interest, nothing quite clicked for Grossman until 2011.
That year, the first concrete steps towards a Magicians television show began. The Fox Network brought in Ashley Miller and Zack Stentz, who worked on films such as Thor and X-Men: First Class, and “went as far as creating a highly ambitious pilot script,” according to Grossman, who noted, “it was a very different take on the books from the [Syfy channel’s] version, though I think equally as good. But it didn’t get greenlit, and it ended there.”

While Fox decided not to pick up their version of the show, others were interested. In April 2014, Syfy announced it would be developing The Magicians. Months later, they began filming a pilot episode. Grossman was excited: “People are going to dress up as Quentin and Alice and Eliot and Julia. Someone is going to build Brakebills (or more likely find some place that already looks like Brakebills). Big expensive computers are going to make it look like magic is happening.” The network cast Jason Ralph as Quentin Coldwater, Stella Maeve as Julia and Olivia Taylor Dudley as Alice.
Filming on the pilot began in New Orleans in late 2014, and in May 2015, the network officially picked up the show for a 12-episode first season, which began airing in January 2016. It was part of the network’s efforts to revitalize its programming; they picked up James S.A. Corey’s The Expanse, as well as several other original programs, around the same time.
Grossman remained attached to the show as a consultant: he read over drafts and provided insight into how the stories came together, but noted that he had little involvement other than that.
As with any adaptation, there are changes that occur when a story jumps from one medium to the next. One character, Janet, was replaced with Margot (portrayed by Summer Bishil), while Julia’s story from The Magician King was brought forward into the first season.
Grossman is pleased with what he is seeing on the screen. “I’m a huge fan of the show. I get psyched every time they send me a new episode to watch. It’s dark, it’s smart, it’s weird, and it’s very funny.”
In December 2015, Syfy aired the pilot, “Unauthorized Magic” alongside the debut of The Expanse, and later put it up for viewing on YouTube and a variety of other digital platforms. The show officially debuted on January 25, scoring positive reviews. On February 8th, Syfy announced it had picked the show up for a second season, to air in 2017:
“Thanks to an extraordinarily gifted creative team of executive producers and our partners at Universal Cable Productions, The Magicians has become a buzzed-about hit, enchanting fans of the novels as well as attracting new and younger audiences to Syfy.” —Dave Howe, Syfy president.
For his part, Grossman notes, “it’s a strange experience having your books adapted for another medium, especially if you’re not the one doing it.” The written word and visual mediums don’t line up one to one, and it pulls together additional interpretations from everyone else involved. Whereas literature is largely the result of a single creative mind, television expands to dozens, if not hundreds of other individuals. “It’s unsettling to see something as personal as a novel be altered by other people,” Grossman continued, “But it’s often pleasantly surprising too. They take the characters and the story to places I never would have thought of in a thousand years. I’m enjoying the ride very much.”