(excerpt from his NYT Draft essay)
By Lev Grossman, August 16, 2014
"I
wrote fiction for 17 years before I found out I was a fantasy novelist."
"...I was starting
to realize what on some level I must have known all along: Fantasy was offering
me something I needed, something I couldn’t get anywhere else, not even from
literary fiction. That’s when I stopped reading fantasy and started writing it."
"The first time I
wrote a sentence about a person casting a spell, it was like I heard distant
alarms going off. I felt like there must be a control room somewhere with a
bunch of people sitting wearing headsets and looking at a red dot blinking on a
map, and the dot was me, and the people were saying, He’s breaking the rules!
We can’t let him get away with this! I was writing against my education and my
upbringing. I was writing against reality itself — I was breaking rules, and
not just the literary kind but the thermodynamic kind, too. It felt forbidden.
It felt good."
"The thing about
life in the real world is, all your hopes and dreams and desires and feelings
are trapped inside you. Reality doesn’t care — it’s stiffly, primly indifferent
to your inner life. But in a fantasy world, all those feelings can come out.
When you cast a spell, you use your desires and emotions to change reality. You
reshape the outer world to look more like your inner world."
"I felt myself connecting with a much older literary tradition, ...writing
about magic felt like magic..."
Finding My Voice
in Fantasy
By Lev Grossman, August 16, 2014
New York
Times: Opinionator - A Gathering of
Opinion From Around the Web
Draft is a
series about the art and craft of writing.
Lev Grossman is
the author of the “Magicians” trilogy, including most recently, “The Magician’s
Land.” He is also the book critic for Time magazine.
~~~~~
I'm glad I was never a literary writer. Writing--and reading--fantasy has never felt wrong.
No comments:
Post a Comment
I love receiving comments! I also love names, sigs, avatars & other handles.Thanks muchly!