Lev Grossman is a novelist, a senior writer and a book critic for Time Magazine and a contributor to techland.com. His most recent novel, “The Magicians,” follows a teenager who discovers that the magical world he thought only existed in books is real. On Saturday, he will discuss fantasy writing on a panel called “Fiction: Writing the Fantastic.” He spoke with the Daily Bruin’s Alex Goodman.
Daily Bruin: For a lot of English majors, you’re living the dream. You’ve made writing your career. How do you make something like that happen?
Lev Grossman: It happened extremely slowly, and the fiction side of it is just being extremely stubborn and refusing to give up. There were a significant number of people when I was an undergrad who were more talented than me, who were better fiction writers than me. Some of them went on to get published and do really well ““ Colson Whitehead was in my class ““ and some of them didn’t. And it wasn’t because they weren’t talented, it’s because they got distracted and they did other things. I was just one of those people who didn’t give up.
DB: But you do feel that a person can make it as a writer through effort? It’s not like you just need to make the right connections?
LG: I happened to be (at Time) when the old (book) critic, who had been there for 30 years, retired and they needed to find somebody new. So in a way I got colossally lucky, but in a way I spent many, many years making that luck, and if I hadn’t had everything in place but those things, those things would have been totally useless to me. That is not to say that you don’t need to have a stroke of good luck or a good connection, because you do, but generally those things actually happen if you’re ready for them.
DB: You’re also in the middle of the move to online journalism. Do you think that this is going to be a writer-friendly environment?
LG: It is writer-friendly in that there are a lot more opportunities to be expressive and develop a personal voice. Thirty-five years ago at Time, there were no bylines, so you wrote an article and your name wasn’t even on it. Even when I got to Time, which was in 2002, the style in which Time was written was very formal and rigid, and you couldn’t mess around with it. It was the Time style, and it was considered an honor to write in the Time style. … Now, when I write for Techland, no one even edits me, I write exactly what I want and I use slang periodically. I use some fantasy ““ that wouldn’t have been an option for me even 10 years ago. So it’s incredibly writer-friendly. Unfortunately, the entire industry in which all this writing takes place is going through a really painful transition … and not a lot of hiring is getting done.
DB: This Saturday you will be on the “Fiction: Writing the Fantastic” panel at the Festival of Books. What will you be talking about?
LG: I’m interested in talking about why fantasy gets so little respect, and it’s so rarely assigned, for example, in university courses. More and more science fiction is being let into the fold, writers like Philip K. Dick, they’ve got Modern Library editions of their books ““ you never see that with fantasy. Fantasy is still kind of culturally radioactive.
DB: Why do you think fantasy is so underrepresented?
LG: Fantasy is powerfully associated with children’s literature and young adult literature, which makes it somewhat embarrassing for grown-ups to read it, even though I think there is a lot of extremely grown-up fantasy out there. It’s really powerfully connected to folk culture, that’s what it draws on for its resources, which makes it seem sort of naive and not intellectual. I would imagine some of the vibe comes from that, but I don’t really know.
DB: In April of 2009, you wrote an article in Time Magazine called “Zombies are the New Vampires.” Now, a year later, the “Twilight” series is as popular as ever, and there will be a panel discussion at the Festival of Books called “Blood, Fangs and Temptation: Everything Vampire.” Why do you think that trend has had such staying power?
LG: It obviously does have enormous staying power. It’s much less of a fad and more of a movement than I think I realized when I wrote that. I think America is still a very puritanical nation in some ways, and there’s a powerful desire to write about sex and eroticism that we can’t always do up front ““ we can’t always write about sex explicitly, but people still want to read about it. Vampires are a great way to encode sex into a book without making it explicit.
E-mail Goodman at agoodman@media.ucla.edu.