Hello, everyone! Lev wrote back to me this morning with the answers to our interview questions. I’m including them below the cut since there are some book-related spoilers. We’ve been invited to ask follow-up questions as well, so please send me an ask if you’d like me to pass on anything additional. (Also: SQUEE!)

At the end of THE MAGICIAN KING, there’s a conversation where Ember says to Quentin, “the hero pays the price.” Sacrifice is something of a running theme in the MAGICIANS trilogy, and there are several characters who I think could be categorized as a hero based on that definition. Alice becomes a niffin to save Quentin, Julia suffers horrible trauma to save Asmo, Jane loses her family, even Penny loses his hands…how conscious a decision was it on your part to craft a story with so many potential protagonists and heroes?

Not very conscious. But I was very conscious that I didn’t want Quentin to be the hero in the chosen-one sense. So I wanted him to know, and really feel, that those around him were at least as heroic as he was, if not moreso, and they were all the heroes of their own stories, and the fact that we were seeing this from his POV was really just an accident. Quentin isn’t so much an anti-hero as a non-hero. And I wanted the reader to feel that. I wanted the hero-ness, or at any rate protagonist-ness (protagonicity?) to be spread evenly over the whole ensemble, the way it is in real life.

Another recurring theme involves the concept of losing one’s humanity. It happens to Martin Chatwin, to Alice, to Julia, and to Quentin (albeit temporarily), and yet it takes very different forms for each of them and has very different consequences. What does it mean to lose one’s humanity?

People are so emotionally volatile. I know I am, but I think everybody is. And when you pass into a state of extreme emotion – rage, depression, grief, desire, hatred – you sometimes feel less than human, or more than human. You feel like something else. And in the Magicians books, sometimes, I show that by having the characters literally become something else. One of the things I love about fantasy is that you can make that transformation happen on the outside, physically, the way it feels on the inside.

I’ve had a lot of questions from the tumblr folks about Martin Chatwin. There are a number of parallels between Martin and Quentin, and I’m wondering first what those parallels mean. There’s almost a Harry Potter/Voldemort dynamic in places - does that have anything to do with the fact that it’s Quentin and his friends who finally defeat Martin, or is it sheer (bad) luck? And how is it that no matter how many times Jane turns back time, Martin always ends up as the Beast?

There’s very much a Harry/Voldemort connection between Martin and Quentin. If anything moreso than in Harry Potter – Martin and Quentin yearn in the same way. I couldn’t say for sure that Quentin, if he were in Martin’s position, wouldn’t have done the same thing Martin did.



I do think Quentin’s powerful affinity for Martin and for Fillory, his deep longing for it, is part of why he and his friends were the ones who finally defeated Martin. Though it’s not the only reason. As for Martin always ending up as the Beast … It’s possible that Jane simply can’t turn the clock back far enough, to before Martin’s transformation. The magic’s range is limited. That’s the Occam’s razor version. It’s also possible that in the Magicians version of the multiverse, there aren’t infinite branching paths, the field of possibilities is finite and constrained. Some things are real and true across all universes, and Martin’s becoming the Beast is one of them.

I want to ask, too, about Alice and niffins. Dean Fogg suggests that you become a niffin when you are overwhelmed by the magic you use. There are so many possible metaphors and parallels between the state of being a niffin and addiction, mental illness, etc. Could you tell us a bit about how you view niffinhood and how it relates to real-world concepts like these?

I can try, though really only in a narrow personal way. As I mentioned above, I’ve always felt in danger of being overwhelmed by my own emotions, and even destroyed by them, by their intensity. That’s just what being a human day-to-day is like for me. And writing is like that but even moreso – when I write (when I’m writing well) it’s at a pitch of emotion which always seems to be on the edge of some indefinable disaster. As if it’s going to be too much for me to contain. (In a lot of ways, in The Magicians books, doing magic is a metaphor for writing.) Becoming a niffin is about losing control, drowning in your own emotions.

Many years ago – about 25 years ago – I read by chance a paragraph in a magazine, a description of a woman having a nervous breakdown while sitting in an airport, and how it felt – it felt like she was turning into a ball of fire. That made a deep impression on me. The paragraph ended like this: “Now she was a ball of fire sitting in an airport. Nobody noticed."

You can probably hear that resonating with the first line of The Magicians. A niffin is what would happen if what that felt like was actually literally happening. It’s an experience that I think has analogues in lots of things – in addiction and mental illness, but also in artistic creation. And in love.

One of the things that comes up a lot in our chats and on tumblr is just how much empathy is infused into the MAGICIANS trilogy. Quentin especially is so deeply flawed (and I’d argue really struggles with empathy himself) and yet you treat him with some kindness in your writing. I think the richness of that empathy it’s a big part of what distinguishes THE MAGICIANS from a lot of other fantasy. At the same time, the characters in THE MAGICIANS go through so much. How do you explore and engage with that empathy in what are so often such difficult situations?

It’s true that Quentin struggles with empathy. I think it’s a side-effect of depression, which makes you very focused on yourself.

In some ways I thought of The Magicians as a kind of corrective to a pervasive lack of empathy in fantasy novels. That’s a huge generalization, obviously, and I don’t even mean it as a criticism. A lot of fantasy has its roots in fairy tales and mythology where the characters just don’t really have interior lives the way real people do. I tried to fix that, to restore their interior lives, and really feel my way into otherwise stock fantasy situations that we otherwise don’t really think about. Like when the Brakebills see their first physical violence, outside of Ember’s Tomb – it’s pretty mild as fantasy violence goes, but they don’t take it in stride, it completely demolishes them. As I think it really would. Except for Anaïs, who is a sociopath.

Related to that last question, I want to ask you about what I think is possibly the most contentious scene in the novels - Julia’s rape by Renard the Fox in THE MAGICIAN KING. Women are often victims of sexual violence in fantasy novels, to the point where it’s almost a trope. Why did you take that path for Julia’s story in THE MAGICIAN KING? What the experience was like for you to write something so traumatic, given how much empathy you seem to pour into your characters in the MAGICIANS novels? And finally, how do you feel about the public response to that part of THE MAGICIAN KING?

I think it’s what would have actually happened. I tried to let that be my guide as much as possible through the whole Magicians trilogy. I think with Julia and her friends chasing gods like that, eventually they would come up against one, and – in the mythologies, particularly the Greek – what frequently happens then is that the god rapes the mortal. To shy away from that seemed wrong, like it would be avoiding the reality of sexual violence, both in myth and in life.

In fact I’ve always been bothered by the way stories like that are written. As if the rape of a mortal by a god would be a beautiful thing – Leda and the Swan. Daphne and Apollo, etc. It’s a story that is frequently aestheticized (cf Yeats, that Bernini sculpture, etc.). That seemed very wrong to me. To be raped by a god would be horrifying. I wanted to re-inscribe that story as horror – restore the missing horror.

It was painful for me to write it. It was awful. Of all the characters in the trilogy, Julia is the one I identify with most closely. There are also people close to me (and close to the books) who have survived rape, and I wanted to respect their experiences and not do anything to betray or trivialize them. Until very late in the process I considered backing away from the scene, and I talked about it with a lot of people, and especially with a lot of women – my wife; my editor, who is a woman, as is her boss; my agent is a woman; more than half my twenty-odd beta readers are women. Nobody ever suggested I take it out.



But I do pay attention to the public response. There are definitely people who haven’t experienced the scene in the way I hoped people would experience it, who haven’t taken away what I hoped they’d take away. I consider that to be, mostly, my fault as a writer. As an author you’re not supposed to say this, but if I had it to do over again I would write the scene differently. I would try to be clearer about why it’s there. And if I couldn’t be clearer, I would take it out.

In contrast to Quentin, Eliot seems to maintain the idea that there’s a self he’s ‘supposed’ to be, a quest he’s supposed to fulfill. How does he manage to maintain that idea, despite everything that happens that would seem to disillusion him? Is he 'wrong’ in contrast with Quentin, whose journey is one of building his own destiny, or are they simply two different ways of looking at the world?



I don’t think Eliot’s wrong. Self-actualization is a terrible expression, but it is the one that best describes what happens to Eliot. He becomes the self he’s supposed to be, not in a destiny/fate sense (I have an aversion to those words), but in the sense that he feels right, that his life matches what he feels inside him, more or less, which is about all that any of us can hope for. I actually think Quentin feels the same way at the end of The Magician’s Land. Though his process for getting there is very different from Eliot’s.

How intentional was it that Richard’s religiously-charged 'tools of the maker’ theory of magic was, in part, correct? You’ve said you didn’t plan much of the later books before you wrote them, but did the conversation between Richard and the other physical kids inform the narrative you later wrote in any way?

I feel like I should be clear about something up front, which is that I’m an atheist and don’t identify, even culturally, with any organized religion. (I’m not even technically Jewish – my mom’s Anglican.) And the maker didn’t turn out to be anything like what Richard had in mind. But it’s true: he’s the one who got the closest. Unlike the others, he’d actually thought seriously about why they have the power that they do, and what he says about that in The Magicians was, in part, me trying to think that through too. Richard isn’t the funnest guy in the books, but it was also important to me that he redeems himself there at the end by going back for the others. He took things seriously.

What was behind the choice to give Quentin 'repair of small objects’ as a discipline? Was it arbitrary (just something not too flashy)? If there’s a deeper significance, what is it?

It was semi-arbitrary. The main point was just that it wasn’t flashy – just part of Quentin’s not-chosen-ness. He’s an interesting person, to me anyway, but he’s not special. I always remember in the Xanth books by Piers Anthony – which are about a country where everybody has a magical talent – that some people got great talents, and some people got really trivial ones. The books were never about that latter group. They mention a guy who could change the color of his urine, that was his talent. What happened to him? We never learn. Quentin’s talent isn’t as minor as that and it does come in handy later (when he’s a god). But it’s not special either.

What were some of your favorite parts of the trilogy to write?

I’ve never been asked that before. It’s a good question.

There are specific passages I remember writing with a lot of pleasure. I loved writing about them changing into animals. I loved writing dialogue for Talking Animals like Humbledrum and Abigail. I remember writing the passage where Quentin comes home drunk and high from being out on the town; and some of Janet’s jokes, and Josh’s; and the moment the pool table bursts out through the window in The Magician’s Land.

Then there are the parts that weren’t exactly fun but were really emotional and satisfying. Janet watching Fillory fall apart, and Quentin putting it back together. All of Julia’s early chapters in The Magician King, which were a huge breakthrough for me as a writer, and which I wrote in big bursts – five or six thousand words a day, which is double or triple what I generally write even on a good day.

And Quentin’s exam in The Magicians, and the house of cards, which was the moment I realized I wasn’t going to throw this book away, that it wasn’t just another false start, it was the real thing.

Despite the fact that Eliot and Quentin are so close, in some ways Eliot’s story gets the least air time in the novels. Have you written anything about Eliot that didn’t make it into the books? You’ve mentioned wanting to write a love interest for Eliot. Have you considered writing another book or story that tracks him more closely? Because I know about 19346984 people who would read it :)

I loved writing Eliot. Why didn’t I write more of him? I don’t know. Part of it was that he gets where he’s going too quickly: he’s more or less who he wants to be by the end of The Magicians. We learn more about him in the later books, but he doesn’t develop much more, so he gets pushed to the sidelines.

Also I just ran out of room – there was a lot of plot to get through in The Magician’s Land, and I would have liked to give Eliot a proper love story, but I couldn’t figure out how to fit one in. But when I do readings from The Magician’s Land, the parts I read out loud most often are Eliot’s.

I don’t have any other Eliot stories in the planning stages right now, though I know there are some untold ones, for example from his year captaining The Muntjac.

What’s the deal with the whales at the bottom of the sea? Who - or what - are they casting spells against?

I honestly don’t know. When I look down there, with my supposedly omniscient authorial eye, I just see darkness.

Could you share a little more about the other discipline classes (e.g., knowledge, illusionist, naturalist, etc.)?

This is a hard one, because like the deep-sea horror, I haven’t worked out the answer. You see a little bit of the illusionists in The Magician’s Land, but each of the disciplines has a deep, dense, idiosyncratic culture. If I ever come back to The Magicians, I’ll get into them more.

As a long-time cellist (going on 25 years!) I really enjoyed the references to Popper and to musical discipline in general. You’ve said you played cello as well - what was that like for you? Did you ever consider music as a professional path, or was it always a hobby?

As a cellist I was a hard worker without a ton of natural musical talent. I had a lot of feeling, and cello’s a good instrument for that, but I didn’t really know how to put the feeling into the music so I just hacked away at it. But I’m proud of having been a cellist. I think I peaked junior year of high school, when I was principal of the All-state orchestra in Massachusetts (the audition piece was the Brahms e minor sonata, which I’ve always loved). And I played the first movement of the Shostakovich Concerto no 1 with my high school orchestra.

But I never considered it as a career. My half-brother Adam is a classical musician – he composes, and he conducts and gives lessons in and around Boston – and I saw how hard he was working. I knew it wasn’t for me. But it was a big part of my identity when I was a teenager.

The magicians fandom has a lot of writers, many of whom are working hard to complete their own goals, whether academic or personal. What words of encouragement would you offer them?

If it’s what you want, never give up. Even if you feel lost, or stuck, even if you’re piling up rejections, if you keep going and keep trying and pay attention to feedback you’ll get there sooner or later. If you feel like it’s taking forever, keep in mind that I was 35, and had been writing fiction seriously for 15 years, before I even wrote the first sentence of The Magicians. And it wasn’t published for five more years after that. It took me that long to find my voice. Chances are you’ll get there faster than I did.

