CSA: This is Story Behind the Story. I’m your host Clara Sherley-Appel. My guest today is New York Times best-selling author and former TIME Magazine book critic Lev Grossman. Lev’s popular Magicians trilogy received widespread critical acclaim, and was even adapted into a TV series, which ended this past year after five seasons. 
Today we're talking about his new middle grade novel The Silver Arrow. It's a classic adventure story with modern themes woven in. Our conversation was recorded in early September as part of a live event posted by Kepler's Literary Foundation. 
Hiiii!


LG: Hi!


CSA: Well, Lev, thank you for coming to join us in Kepler's virtual space today. I want to start — I guess that a lot of people here know you as the author of The Magicians which is an adult fantasy novel, and before that you wrote and published two other novels aimed at adults: Warp and Codex. So what made you want to write a novel for kids?
 
LG: Well, that's a good question, and it's a funny thing when an author changes genres, or, I don't know — Moves into a space they haven't been in before, because I know that I always feel a little bit like, it seems unseemly somehow. Like I have a feeling like, ‘What? You're doing…? We just want more Magicians books from you.’ So, you know, so it feels odd. I feel like. And I've done this several times; I wrote literary novels, I then became a literary critic, and then I went back to writing novels, and everybody said, “You’re writing novels now?” And I had to remind them that I’d already written some novels. Cuz nobody noticed when I wrote the first few novels. (both laugh) And now I wrote a novel for children! That said, from the other side, I spend a lot of time as a writer — I spend more time being a dad (I have three children). So this voice, this storytelling voice that comes out when I write for children is a very familiar one to me. It's one I use a lot, and it felt very natural to write something in it. But at the same time, I realized, it comes out of the blue to people who don't know me personally.
CSA: So what's different when you're writing for kids? Then for adults? What do you find rewarding and challenging about writing for each of those different audiences?


LG: I feel like I could answer this question either way cuz there's a ton that's different in this. There's a ton that’s weirdly… the same. When I started writing Silver Arrow, part of me thought, ‘Oh…’ I came in with, what in a Greek tragic sense would be called “hubris”; that pwrite that challenges the gods and foretells disaster. I was like, ‘Oh, well now I'll just have to dumb everything down because I’m writing for kids.’ As it turns out, kids are not less smart than adults. They know much less than adults do, but they are equally as smart. And they also, like…. not just intellectually and mathwise, but emotionally they have the same... They feel rage, and they feel happiness, and envy, and embarrassment. They feel all the same. They're not different feelings that kids have — they had the same feelings as us. So, it was surprising how much of the voice stayed the same. I never found myself dumbing anything down, actually. I never found myself writing anything that a child would not get, because it turns out, they get everything. So that was surprisingly the same. Structurally it's quite different, which is a really boring thing to say, so I'll just say it really, really briefly: a grown-up novel, like one of those Magicians novels — When you're a writer, you don't pay attention to the page numbers, because page numbers change depending on what the font is and the line spacing and whatever. You think about the number of words. There are 145,000 words in a Magicians novel. In fact, all three of the novels are almost exactly 145,000 words. When I began to write The Silver Arrow, I hunted down a pirated PDF of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, just so I could get a word count for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which turned out to be about 35,000 words, so it's a lot fewer words. It is approximately 35 divided by 145… (whatever fraction that is) less words, so there's a lot fewer plots. And in a grown-up novel you have the A plot, and the B plot, and then there is the C through H plots which are kicking around in the background, getting quietly launched and resolved. Structurally, with The Silver Arrow, there's really just an A plot and a B plot, and that's all the plots that you get. In a funny way it's structurally much more simple, but verbally quite as complex.


CSA: Well I want to bring in some... We are already getting some listener questions coming in, so I want to bring in one of those right now. I have one from Sam, who asks: Who is your favorite character in The Silver Arrow? (Clara adds) And in everything you've written also, but The Silver Arrow we’ll start with. 


LG: Let's see… Amazingly, this is a question that I have not ever asked myself. I think that I really enjoyed... There's a snake in The Silver Arrow who is… he is a snake. He is green. He's an eastern green mamba. I didn't realize they were lots of flavors of mamba, but apparently if you're going to be bitten by an incredibly venomous snake in Africa, that's a mamba. But you have several choices of kinds of mambas that can bite you. So this is an eastern green mamba. I became very fond of him because of course he is intensely venomous and deadly. And all of the animals at all times are in the back of their head, they're thinking, ‘I'm hanging out with this guy, but if he bit me I would simultaneously have a heart attack and suffocate, and my flesh would fall off,’ and everything else. And the snake never forgets then, either, and he's a little bit self-conscious about it. Rather shy, and also very proud of how powerfully venomous he is (as well he might be). Something about that combination made him really pleasurable to write for, and I couldn't say exactly why. But I'm going to go with the snake, the eastern green mamba as opposed to the western green mamba which is another kind. A lot of mambas out there.


CSA: I think it's very smart that you didn't pick one of the three characters based on your kids. 


LG: That would have been politically, um, yeah… an unpopular move. 


CSA: So, how was writing magic different when it's for kids, versus when it's for adults. 


LG: That's a super good question, because I… with The Magicians books (not surprisingly) there's a ton of magic in them, and the doing of magic is very central and it's done in a particular way. And when I started writing The Silver Arrow I thought, ‘Oh, well, this will be a break; I won't have to think of lots of spells for people to cast,’ and it won't be this thing of like, if they're getting into any problems, they'll have to cast a spell; They’ll have to figure out some other way to get out of their problems besides casting a spell. But then of course there is, it turns out, magic in the world. It turns out steam trains don't actually talk. Animals don't actually talk. There’s actually a lot of magic going on there, but it happens in a much more, um... People aren't looking directly at the magic. What I like about it in a way is the magic, it's not the most important thing in the room. And actually there's a private joke that happens about four chapters in, where one of the characters reveals that he is in fact a wizard. And it's like, he says it and it’s like, okay, we get that. That's interesting, but it's not actually what's important going on right now. Something much more important is happening than wizards. So I find it amusing that there's a character in the book who's a wizard, and who also is not the main character or even the second lead. There’s wizards, there’s janitors. There’s just lots of different kinds of people. Wizards aren't special.


CSA: One thing I find I'm thinking of as you're talking about this is that, in The Magicians, and in a lot of traditional adult fantasy, the magic is something that humans master and control. And, as you were just saying, in The Silver Arrow, magic is just part of the world, it’s part of the ecosystem.


LG: Yes!


CSA: …which I think reflects a lot of the themes of the book. Was that something that you were thinking about consciously?


LG: Not that consciously. I mean, there was a moment when I was writing The Magicians, actually, when one of the characters becomes aware that magic is a human thing, generally speaking. But somebody becomes aware at some point that whales are also spell casters. There are two species on Earth that cast, that can work magic, and humans are one of them and whales are another. And it's a throwaway. In The Magicians it’s just a little detail which I never really come back to (or I haven't come back to it yet!). But it really stayed with me, the idea of animals working magic, and animals doing spells. It's in the back of my mind, although I have not — it will be something that comes up much more in the sequel — that magic is an animal thing rather than a human thing, and it's a little bit eccentric for a human to do it. And Uncle Herbert does it, but it's mostly an animal thing. It's mostly something that lives in the world of animals in nature, and it's interesting because humans come in and they have a lot of power over nature. They really kick nature off balance. But they they do it by non-magical means, and it's interesting because what you have is a world where magic is there, and magic is powerful, but it's also weak in some ways. It’s very vulnerable.


CSA: So I want to add in another audience question that is relevant to the whole animal thing. This is from Evelyn, who I think you know: ‘Hey love! In The Silver Arrow, Kate talks to reptiles, birds, and all kinds of mammals, and you've mentioned insects for the sequel. Will Katie be talking to any fish or marine animals anytime soon?’


LG: The answer is yes, but, and I'm thinking about the fact that there are no talking insects or fish in The Silver Arrow, and I think it's because I felt like I wasn't ready. I wasn't ready to write an insect, and I wasn't ready to write a fish. It was always really important to me that the animals, that some of the voice of the animal come from a very animal place. Like, it wouldn't just be like they were humans who look like animals; They would really physically be animals. And I can remember sitting at my desk, and when I would write an animal, I would just try to do the animal. (I'm not going to do it right now cuz it would be embarrassing), but I would, physically, like, ‘What would it really feel like to be a porcupine?’ And then when the prospect arose of having a talking insect, I just I backed away. Like, I'm not ready. I'm not ready to be an insect. The day may come. And I feel the same way about fish, which I love fish. (Not many people know that I am an avid snorkeler but they are really exciting and interesting to me.) But I also feel as though they come from a very different place, and I want to honor that when I write my first talking fish, and that hasn't happened yet. But I think it will. I think it will. 
I wrote myself into a little bit of a corner with The Silver Arrow and I don't want to be specific about it, but there may be a submarine in the offing. In fact, it'll be hard to avoid in the sequel, so I sort of set myself up for a confrontation with the talking fish.


CSA: (Clara giggles) Something to look forward to! I'm also personally hoping for a talking Huntsman spider.
 
LG: Man you can't joke about that. (Clara laughs). Have you seen Hunts... You've been to Australia right? You've seen?


(Overlapping each other)
CSA: I have not seen them, I've heard stories...
LG: Oh you can't joke about that.
CSA: Apparently it's...
LG: If you look on YouTube you will find somewhere a video of a Huntsman spider who has caught a snake in his web, and he's preparing to eat the snake because he's just that big and just… he's a powerful spider. And this is not a rare spider, like a mysterious tarantula — there are Huntsman all over Australia. You see them all the time.


CSA: It's like a daddy long legs, but on steroids.


LG: (He laughs) That's right. They’re very large. They're just very large. You see them at the zoo; there's a lot of the zoo, or in the public park. Not because they have a spider area, but just because there are spiders all over everything.


CSA: (Clara laughs) Well, taking us on a different tack, a lot of contemporary fantasy is subversive; It takes tropes from classic fantasy novels and turns them on their heads. In fact, in The Magicians, your best-selling adult fantasy series, it does just that, too. But the Silver Arrow is a much more straightforward fantasy novel, much more like the classic children's fantasy that you or I read growing up. And I think you said in an interview that you wanted it to have a more classic feel. So why is that?


LG: Well, I'm somebody who writes fantasy from a place of deeply loving fantasy, and I feel like I’m fairly fluent in the conventions of fantasy, so I know when I'm taking one and going the other way with it. But I also feel like you really have to… You have to earn it. And you have to really want to overthrow a convention in whatever genre you’re writing, because you give up a lot when you abandon a convention or change it. You have to make sure you're getting a lot, and I found myself too fond of many of the the tropes of this storytelling to mess with them too much. Although I do feel like I try to do it in little ways. I mean, the most important way (the major way) was returning to this idea of talking animals, which is so central to so many books that I love! The Narnia books, particularly the Once and Future King which was such an influential book for me, especially in the realm of this kind of storytelling because there were a lot of animals that talked. And he was very good at this physical thing — the physical thing of turning into an animal. I bet he was acting out those animals at his desk. And yet! It tends to be the case in stories like that, that when the animals meet the humans, the humans are the main event. The humans have come to save the day or, ‘come here to me, last little human. I'm going to tell you about what it's like to be a badger and then you'll be wiser and know things.’ It was very important to me that for animals… that animals are the main event. They are very uncomfortably aware of humans, because humans have really just damaged and scrambled the world that they live in. And so when a human does turn up and join the conversation, the animals have a lot to say to that human, and they don't look up to that human, and the human is in the story that THEY are living (which is as real a story as what the humans are living), humans are not the heroes; humans are the villains. If a human comes along, they have some ‘splaining to do.


CSA: That segues a little bit nicely into this next question I have for you: what were some of your favorite books when you were Kate's age, and what made those books stick with you? 


LG: It's easier to say what they were than to say why they stuck with me. I suppose I should cop to: I am on record as loving the Chronicles of Narnia, and I really did. I did love the Chronicles of Narnia. And I didn't pick and choose — I loved all the Chronicles of Narnia, I even loved The Last Battle, which nobody likes. But I really did. I really did, and do love The Last Battle. I think it's an amazing book. I love Roald Dahl; I loved the Llyod Alexander books, Taran Wanderer and all those. Even though I can remember almost nothing of what happened in them, I remember that I loved them. I loved T. H. White, Sword in the Stone. I wasn't old enough till later, really, to read the other books, like Once and Future King. But the thing I was really obsessed… really obsessed with Fritz Lieber, who is a writer who is not that much red anymore but who, I think for a lot of writers my age, loomed very large. I mean as he was a much bigger deal than, for example, Tolkien, to me. I read Tolkien, but I massively read Fritz Leiber. The stories of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser… something that these books did for me or gave to me: I grew up in a house that was very…I felt very deracinated. My parents were not overly religious in any way. My mother was Anglican, my father was Jewish, but they both let all that go. Growing up in the suburbs where I lived, it wasn't a place… you know, it had some history, it WAS in Massachusetts, but it didn't have that deep history that you longed for in the place where you are rooted. I felt, in short, a kind of absence of mythology. I didn't inherit a legendarium, and these stories that I could use to explain the world and myself to myself. So I think I was very attracted to these fantasy stories, and I'll include the Norse mythology, which was a huge obsession of mine, as a way to access a world that felt mystified. I grew up in a very disenchanted Mall-y suburban world that didn't… I wasn't in love with it. You read a lot of writers who were truly in love with the places that they grew up, and as those places had a mythic feeling to them. And where I grew up really didn't. And yet I needed to feel that there was somewhere that did, and these were books that… they gave that to me. 


CSA: How many times did you try your wardrobe to see if the back went through?


LG: (He laughs) I'm not sure that I was in possession of a wardrobe. But also, the world that I lived in felt very disenchanted to me. I was also really obsessed with Peanuts, and I think that because one of the things that Peanuts did was really honor feelings of sadness and disenchantedness in children. I was a very disenchanted child, and so I wouldn't… I never would have played that game because the furniture in my house never felt like it was going to lead anywhere in particular. Not that I didn't, on some level, truly believe that I was destined for Narnia, but it was very unclear how I was going to get there.


AD BREAK


CSA: If you're just joining me, my guest Lev Grossman is New York Times best-selling author Lev Grossman whose middle-grade novel, the Silver Arrow, came out last month.


So, in another interview you said your novels always start from a feeling of irritation with something you love, some half truth or missing piece that you start to fill in for yourself. And personally I love this because it makes me think of writers as oysters now: they get irritated and pearls come out. So what was the irritant at the heart that led to the Silver Arrow?


LG: Yeah, there wasn't one! This was different. I said that, and it was true of most of my stuff that I write. This definitely came out of a feeling of reading Roald Dahl, reading Enid Blyton, reading T. H. White and having that feeling like, ‘oh, wait, wait wait! I know how to do this!’ I felt like I understood how these stories worked. I felt like I recognized that voice and thought, ‘Wait, I have a voice like that, and I know that I could tell a story like that. I know that I could.’ — Not that I didn't have feelings that I could… there were things that I could… that I wanted to correct, especially about the animals, for example. That idea of humans showing up and the animals are like, ‘oh, the saviors are here!’ That felt exceptionally dated to me. But as we discussed earlier, I really embraced a lot of the traditions, and if anything, I felt an irritation was some of the more recent middle-grade fiction. The Silver Arrow is a little bit of a throwback, in a way, to the kind of storytelling that was done by these mid-century writers. When I read something like 13-Story Treehouse (which is very popular in my house), or Dog man, which I find hilarious — I want to be very clear. I love those books, but there's no part of me that recognizes that voice. There's no part of me that thinks, ‘Oh, I ought to try my hand at a Dog Man-like piece of writing’ — I could never do it. I could never do it in a million years! But every once in a while you read something, and it's not that it irritates you, rather you recognize it and think, ‘There's something like that in me. I've got one of those in here somewhere, and I've got to get it out.’ 


CSA: I want to get into the nuts and bolts of it a little bit, but before we do I think we should have you read a little bit so that we can hear what this book is all about. Can you set up what you're going to read before we get into it? 


LG: Yes, I'm going to read… I'm going to do the thing that you're not supposed to do, which is, I'm not going to read something from the beginning of the book. I'm going to read something from smack in the middle of the book, and I'm reading it because I like it and I want to read it. What's going on, very briefly, is that there's a girl named Kate. She is on a... she's on a steam train, and she is in the company of a small group of animals who she has made friends with. And they are all on their way to various places. And there is a venomous snake (who we've discussed); there's a porcupine; there’s a heron; there is a fishing cat (we can talk about those); and they are all sitting around this baby pangolin, but he doesn't say anything cuz he's just a baby. They're sitting around, and they’re all having a chat, and Kate is getting to know these animals a little bit and she's getting to know and understand a little bit how they see the world, which is different from how she has been seeing the world up until this point. And somebody said something embarrassing, and the heron, who is a very tactful, useful presence. A very kind individual. The heron, also very useful for exposition. The heron says, 
(He reads), “Did you know that baby pangolins are called pangopups?”
“That's a stupid name,” the snake hissed.


(ASIDE:)  You can see why I like the snake, he always says something angry or vague. (Clara Laughs) 


(He continues to read)


“They should call them pangolings,” the fishing cat said. “Or pangolini!”


“Baby porcupines are called porcupettes,” the porcupine said with a shudder of disgust. “I don’t see why humans think they get to name everything. They’re not even very good at it. Electric eels – they’re not even eels…” 


(Aside to Clara:) It's true, they're not eels.
(He continues to read)


“In Australia there’s a spider called a sparklemuffin!”


“And what about hellbenders?” the snake said. “Do they bend hell? Not even slightly.”


(Aside to Clara:) It's my Wallace Shawn voice, I always imagined snakes being Wallace Shawn.
(He continues to read)


“I wish I were called a hellbender,” the cat said. “It’s such a wonderful name. Wasted on a salamander.”


“I don’t understand what just happened.” Kate still felt shaky. “Who were those animals out there?” 


(Aside:) There was a little incident where some animals, that didn't have tickets, tried to force their way onto the train, and they were repelled and it's freaked Kate out.) 
(He continues to read)


“Them?” The porcupine said, “Those were invaders.”


“What were they invading, the train?”


The animals all exchanged a look. “It's like this,” the heron said, “as an animal, you have a place where you live and a place in the order of things. You pray on somebody, somebody else prays on you. It's not always pretty, but it keeps everything in balance. But sometimes an animal leaves its place in the world and goes somewhere else, somewhere where it doesn't fit in. Often it just dies there but because the climate is wrong, or there’s nothing for it to eat. But! Every once in a while, it lucks into a situation where it has lots of things to pray on, and there's nobody to pray on it. What do you think happens then?”


“I don't know.” Kate said. “It gets really fat and happy and dies of old age?”


“It eats everything in sigh!!! It's population explodes till it's the only thing left. The balance is lost.”


“Oh, so those animals who tried to get on the train were trying to do that!?”


“Exactly. It's just bad form,” the snake said. “I hope you quilled them.” 


“I should have!” the porcupine said.


“But some of them, I mean, they were just starlings.” Kate said, “You know, little birdies!” Everybody hissed and growled and squawked at this. 


“Let me tell you a story about starlings,” the porcupine said. Starlings originally came from Europe; That's where they're supposed to live, but then some idiot got it into his head that North America should have members of every bird species mentioned in the works of Shakespeare. 


(Aside) If you peruse the finished book, by the way, you will notice that the word ‘idiot’ does not appear in it. It is not okay anymore to use the word idiot. I didn't know that; especially since Enid Blyton uses it, like, every other word. You can't say that anymore, and I don't use that word anymore.


(He continues to read)


“So some idiot got it into his head that North America should have every member of every bird species mentioned in the works of Shakespeare…”


“Who's Shakespeare?” the fishing cat asked. 


“That is actually kind of a cool idea,” Kate said.


“No! It isn't cool. It isn't cool, it was a catastrophe. This idiot released 60 European starling's in New York City and they mated and bred and now they're all over America. There’s 200 million of them! 


(Aside:) This is true. That actually happened.) 
(He continues to read)


“Okay, but about squirrels though? Little, furry gray squirrels.”


“Oh, they went the other way round,” the porcupine said. “Gray squirrels are from America, but then a tourist bought a few home to England because he thought they’d looked nice on his country estate. Nice! They have a high old time in England: They eat birds, they kill trees, and they've driven the native red squirrels practically to extinction!” 


Kate thought about that. Didn't seem like anybody involved had such bad intentions, really. They were small gestures. She still thought the Shakespeare thing sounded cool. But then look at what happened: everything that was so neatly balanced, was ruined. ‘Couldn't they send the animals back where they come from and start over?’ she wondered, ‘more carefully this time.’ But how would you catch 200 million starlings? She doubted she could even catch one. Or a squirrel. There was no going back. The balance was lost forever. 


(He stops reading)
So I’ll stop there. You can wonder whether the balance ever gets re-found again.


CSA: So there’s obviously a lot of talking animals in The Silver Arrow, which makes sense given the subject matter. When you're writing an animal, what's that like? Is it different from writing from people?


LG: Oh it's different. It's much better. It's much better than writing for people. I love to write about talking animals. I love to be the voice of a talking animal, and I think it's because the animals have a number of qualities which I admire, but I personally lack. Animals, it's my sense, they have a very powerful sense of who they are. They have a sense of presence in the mindfulness sense of the word. Animals are always…they’re THERE. They're not lost in some stupid memory or some stupid fantasy, or some regret about what you said in the sixth grade or something like that. Animals are very much right there with you. When you are there, the animal is there. They're not self-conscious. They don't get embarrassed, and I like that about them. It makes them very… They say interesting things because they're not embarrassed.


CSA: We have an audience question that I think rolls nicely onto this one. It's from Katya: What was the deciding factor in which personality went with which animal?


LG: That's such a good question. I wish you hadn’t asked that question. It goes to the heart of everything that was hard about writing the book. I thought a lot about this question. What animal… and the results were all over the map. Just for example, the porcupine: the porcupine has a prickly personality, and is very irritating and defensive. And I thought, at the time, ‘oh it’s such a cliche! I'm having a porcupine, and he has a prickly personality.’ But the fact is, porcupines, I don’t think have very good tempers. They're very antisocial creatures. Don't hang out with each other. They don't have a lot of friends, they just hang around by themselves. Mambas, by contrast, play against type. They're very shy snakes. They live in trees. They don't really muck around, giving people a hard time. If they wanted to, they could bite a lot of people — but they don't! They hardly ever bite anybody. So there was this nice feeling about the snake playing against type; and then there is the fishing cat. I didn't know that fishing cats were a thing. I had never heard of them until I saw one in a zoo in Australia. My wife is Australian which is why I spent so much time in Australia. And it was just so astounding to me that there was a cat that would dive and swim for its prey. I found that so enchanting but I also thought, they must feel like oddballs, a little bit, in the cat world. Because they do the kind of thing that not many cats like to do. They must be regarded with some suspicion and bafflement by other cats. So the cat, she feels a bit like an oddball. So there was just some thinking through about what the particular circumstances of each animal, what kind of a person they would produce. 


The last one I'll mention is the heron. The heron is a white-bellied heron. They're very few white-bellied herons left in the world. They live in South Asia, and they have been the victims of a lot of poaching and habitat destruction; There's, like, 300 of them left. And they don’t seem like a species that e will be able, probably, to save. So the heron is a good natured heron, but in the back underneath that, there's a great deal, I think, of sadness. And having to work through this enormous tragedy that this animal's experiencing. So you can see I pretty much… I've over-thought each one of them.


CSA: I think that's great though! Right? Like how you get into the head of an animal that is not overthinking anything? Probably, you overthink it! (Lev chuckles, Clara continues) So the talking animals in The Silver Arrow are very different from the talking animals in The Magicians. The talking animals in The Magicians are snarkier and drunker, as a rule. Which one is more fun to write, and which one do you think is a more accurate reflection of what goes on inside the animal's actual brain?


LG: You know, it's tough. My education about writing, how to write talking animals, kind of went through two stages. And one was the T. H. White stage, where I just read the Sword in the Stone over and over again, because he does it so well! And then, one day I was reading one of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy books. Not the first one. I feel like it was probably one of the later ones. I should go back and check. But, in one of them Arthur Dent, the hero (as you probably know) It’s a throwaway joke / line from Douglas Adams (because he was a genius and could just have amazing throw away lines and he could just throw them away!). Arthur Dent goes to a planet where he's living and he learns to speak the language of the birds, and he immediately regrets it because all the birds talk about are windshear, and seeds. That's all they talk about. And they're such bores, and he just wishes that he'd never learned the language of birds. So when I wrote a talking bear into The Magicians (which I think is probably the first talking animal that I ever tried to write), I made him into a little bit of a bore, along the Douglas Adams mode, and I felt as though I could do that because he just got one scene really. (Although he makes a cameo in Magician's Land.) He just got one scene, and it would be okay to have a boring character cuz there’s, like, eight other people in the room. I had to walk things back a little bit for Silver Arrow and make the animals more… They're sort of more… generalists. They have a wider range of interests. Do I think that would genuinely be the case? I don't know. The truth probably lies somewhere in between.


CSA: So we have another audience question from Kerwin: Will you go into mythical creatures like dragons and sea serpents in any of these books, any of these Silver Arrow books? Or are you going to stick to real existing creatures? 


LG: I feel that one of the constraints of the Silver Arrow — and I'm not going to pretend that the Silver Arrow is an example of a great amount of writerally discipline, because there's a talking steam train AND talking animals in them. There's too many things, really, that are talking than should actually talk in real life. So you can see I didn't exercise a ton of restraint, but I feel like one of the constraints of this world ought to be that we only have animals that are real in it. My kids… There was a lot of back and forth with my kids as I was telling the story and working it out, and they contributed a scene where the Silver Arrow pulled up to a station and instead of there being animals on the platform, there was a lot of furniture. There were chairs and umbrella stands and lamps, and each of them had a ticket, and the doors opened, and all the furniture just shuffled onto the train. And Tom and Kate exchange a glance, like, ‘I don't know what's happening here!’ And then all the furniture gets off a few stops later. (He chuckles to himself) Because of my extraordinary writerally discipline, I cut that scene because it felt like… No! I had to draw the line somewhere. And I will probably draw it ahead of any mythical species, much as I love them. 


Minor side note, there used to be a dragon in The Magicians and I also had to cut that, because it had nothing to do with the story; I just love dragons. And so I wanted them to be... However! I did rework that same chapter and put it in the sequel, so there you go. Writing the sequel is the best revenge, and is, I guess, where you put your dragons.


CSA: (she chuckles) Kids in this classic fantasy novel, they're always a little impertinent, and it means that they get to ask all kinds of questions that adults don't. Like, why? Why are we doing things this way? Why is the world like this? Just, why. And I was thinking, the other day, about this, and about how in the Passover story (cuz I'm Jewish), the kid who does this is called the wicked child, right?THe kid who questions ‘why?’ is called the wicked child. But even then, like, I feel like what that does is leave us all cheering the wicked child in the sedar story. So, Kate has a rebellious street — She absolutely does. But she's also very quick to accept a lot of the fantastical elements and the things that are happening to her and her brother once they actually get on board The Silver Arrow. What is it about her or the world that makes that possible?


LG: Well, it's interesting. Kate is quite unlike me, quite unlike the child that I was. I was not the wicked child. I was, if anything, I was he-who-hath-not-the-capacity-to-inquire. I was a very silent child, and I didn't really talk very much, especially around adults. I was not impertinent at all. I was a very pertinent child. Which isn't like Kate. Kate isn't afraid of anybody. At the same time, Kate is very hungry for experience, and disinclined, I guess, to look a gift horse in the mouth. She is very keen; she’s also very present, much like the animals, and she's very pragmatic. She doesn't get lost in trying to sort out the theoretical implications of everything that's going on. She is very good at homing in on problems and solving them, so she's not… she can't… and it's kind of a relief. As a writer, she doesn't walk around through the whole book just being utterly gobsmacked with every new thing that happened. She likes to get down to business and brass tacks pretty quick. So in that place, she's not like one of those... She's not one of your dreamy heroines. There's a reason why her role model in life is a computer engineer, cuz she's a problem solver, and she likes to get into brass tacks. The rest can just… other people can deal with that.


CSA: Do you feel like that ties into the themes of the book at all? Cuz reading this and thinking about that, I thought, you need somebody with a certain amount of responsibility, who feels a certain amount of responsibility for and cares for things outside herself, in a way that some of those classic kids fantasy heroes DON’T, at least at the start. 
 
LG: I have been asked (because this is the kind of question that we are trained to ask about most): ‘What is the message of the book?’ Or, ‘What is the theme of the book?’ And — Spoiler Alert! — books don't have messages or themes. That's actually not… I don't think that, I don't believe that that's how they work. But if they did, one thing that I tried to put in there was the sense that… (and this is something Kate has to work through and work past this piece of advice —) that people not wallow too much in shame and despair. Humanity has done a lot to damage the earth and the biosphere that we and animals inhabit, and yet I feel like I can't emphasize enough how little the animals are interested in human shame, or guilt, or regret. It is of no value to them whatsoever. That self-flagellating school of environmentalism is something that I urge everybody to move past, and Kate is able to, I think, move past it and look towards the future, and try to find the very best future that she can. That's something that's in her nature to do anyway, so she has a little bit of an advantage. I'm a great wallower in shame and embarrassment, so I think it's something that I'm trying to encourage myself to do.


CSA: So one more, and then we'll go to the Q&A and we can really get those questions in there. You recently posted a picture of your daughter, Hally, who you described as a template or inspiration for Kate reading the Silver Arrow. What did she think? 
 
LG: Oh she liked The Silver Arrow. I'm really happy to be able to say honestly that she liked the Silver Arrow! She is a great reader herself. I wouldn't say — I wish I could say The Silver Arrow was her favorite book. I don't think that. Even I have to admit that there are better books out there than the Silver Arrow, but she likes it a lot. She's very fond of the animals. She has that feeling that you have, sometimes, where you feel seen by a book. When there's a moment when Kate, it’s her first morning on the train and she goes to the breakfast buffet (This is a very well-catered book, I feel. Like there's a lot of decent food in the Silver Arrow. That's not a problem.) …And she takes a bunch of food and she takes it to a table by herself and she sits down there with a book, and just reads a book and eats breakfast — I think when Hally read that, she felt very seen by it. She felt, ‘yes! I am also that person. That is what I would do.’ I think that it made her happy***AD BREAK***


CSA: If you're just joining me, my guest today is New York Times best-selling author, Lev Grossman, whose middle grade novel The Silver Arrow came out last month. 


Alright, so, we’re going to go to the Q & A and I'm going to start with some questions that have nothing to do with anything we've talked about, because I think that'll be fun. So Matthew says, you've been a journalist and a novelist. How did you make the shift from one to the other? And was it always your goal, ultimately, to focus on fiction?


LG: It was. It was always my goal to focus on fiction, but it's interesting… And journalism, it was a very secondary thing for me. Something I backed into, and then once I had backed into it, I wanted very much to do it and worked very hard at it. But at first I wanted to be a fiction writer, and I just… I can't exaggerate — and I say this, especially for people who are thinking about, who are interested in writing themselves: I can't exaggerate how unsuccessful I was as a writer for a very, very long time. I wrote fiction for probably 20 years before I ever wrote a piece of fiction that was at all successful, and that was The Magicians, and it came out when I was 40. So, that took a while, and in the meantime I had to make a living because I was not going to support myself on my fiction that may never be read or bought. So I became a journalist and I worked at a magazine. I worked at TIME,. Eighteen, nineteen years I got. And that taught me a lot of important lessons about writing. Magazine writing is very different. You don't use fancy words, and you don't get excited about your own prose, and you deliver it on time, and you write a lead that gets people's attention, and you put a lot of information across in a very clear way. These were important lessons for me, and they made my fiction a lot better. That was a very beneficial thing, and so when I moved back into fiction, really, from having spent this time writing for Time, I took a lot of that with me, and it made my fiction writing a lot better. It seemed weird, I think, to a lot of people — my colleagues and, well, a lot of people — moving from journalism to fiction, but it was where I had been aiming at all along. I just had to go a round-about way to get there.


CSA: All right! We have another, I think, journalism related question from Tanya: Hi, I loved your essay on Leonard Woolf and fantasy and modernism in The Believer. Can you say more about how that essay came to be, and have you written other pieces like it? 
 
LG: I'm grateful to you for bringing up that piece, which I feel really proud of. That was the piece… It had a funny genesis, which was that this was a piece I wrote for The Believer and it was about Leonard Woolf, who was the husband of Virginia Woolf. But before he was the husband of Virginia Woolf, he did a long stint as a civil servant in Sri Lanka (or Ceylon, as it was then known). And he has a strange encounter with a colleague of his, who, basically, was a early fantasy writer, and a really unsuccessful one. And Woolf basically made fun of him a lot, and then went off to become the husband of the greatest novelist of the 20th century! But it was this fascinating encounter, and I remember my mom telling me about it, because my mom is a writer and she reviewed Woolf's memoir when it came out. She read some passages live, which were funny about this guy who wrote books about fairies, and was sort of… Woolf was strangely attracted to him, and also repelled at the same time, and we had a good laugh. But then it must have been 15, 20 years later I found myself…  I could never forget about that guy, and I wondered what happened to him, and so I figured out who he was and I tracked him down in real life and found the shipping manifest that recorded him, and found out where he died and all that stuff. It was something that I really loved doing, and I've only ever written one essay that was really vaguely comparable, and that was about Vladimir Nabokov’s brother Sergey, who was another one of these lost literary figures. Literary adjacent figures: He wasn't a writer himself, but he was a fascinating person, and he was gay, and Nabokov had a lot of trouble dealing with that fact, and initially wrote him out of Speak Memory, his memoir. But you see him come back in Nabokov’s work in tons of different ways, and he had a tragic death: he died in a concentration camp in World War II. I remember tracking him down, which nobody had ever done before. That's the only piece of writing I've ever done comparable to that, and it was incredibly, incredibly rewarding. I remember calling (cuz this was in the 1990s —) I remember cold calling Nabokov’s sister, who was the last surviving Nabokov sibling. This is somebody who had lived through the Russian revolution, and she had gone on. Her last name was then Sikorsky, because she married the helicopter magnate Sikorsky. I remember calling her, and her picking up, and it was the strangest thing — the most wonderful thing! — talking to Nabokov’s sister. It was very rewarding doing that kind of writing, and I wish I had more time for it. But I'm glad you read the Leonard Woolf thing, because I'm very proud of it. 


CSA: So we have a question from Brenda: Rereading the Magician King, and just read about the train scene in the ocean from the mud Jack. Was this a cameo, I guess a backwards cameo, by the Silver Arrow?
 
LG: It was definitely… it was a premonition of the Silver Arrow. I think it was a kind of, um… Yeah, I don't know. It was…yeah, I guess it's probably an advanced cameo. It was probably an echo, although I don't think I realized it when I was writing, of one of my favorite movies and indeed one of my favorite things in the world, Spirited Away, the Miyazaki movie, which has the scene where a train goes over the ocean. I've watched it so many times, and the feeling that it gives me is the feeling that I often drive towards and try to give to readers. I'll tell you an embarrassing anecdote about myself: I once met Miyazaki, because he had come to America to do press to promote Ponyo. And he came to Comic-Con in San Diego, and I was also in Comic-Con in San Diego, and so I arranged an interview of him. And in the middle of interviewing him, I burst into tears, which I have never done. It was one of… I wish I could say it was my least professional moment as a journalist… it probably was not. I got the impression this happens to Miyazaki a lot, because he wasn't that phased or surprised by it. But I feel passionately connected to that movie, and especially that scene. And I think it it echoed itself in The Magician King. Though, it’s never really explained, so I feel like we actually got to get in to a little bit where that train was going, and what it was doing.


CSA: So we've got a question from Sam: There's a lot of animals in your work — we’ve talked about plenty of them today. Who is your favorite animal that you've written, Lev? And I'm told I can answer too, so I'll let you answer first. I might do that. 
 
LG: Do I… (he chuckles) Do I know the answer? It's a really good question. It's probably that bear, humble drum. Although, you know, there's a very, very brief appearance of a talking hedgehog early on in The Magicians; You absolutely blink (he snaps) and you missed it. He doesn't have any lines, actually. Just, it's mentioned that there is a hedgehog who can talk. I always liked… His name was Pickle Plum, and I always liked him, and then, one day in the mail arrived a beautiful oil painting that somebody had done of Sir Pickle Plum. He was done in an old master’s style, where he was looking very, very dignified, and there was a landscape behind him. I wish it was in my room, but it's a very sought after commodity in my house and it's currently in Hally's room. I’ve got to say, it made me very fond of Sir Pickle Plum, but I feel like maybe I should bring him back in Silver Arrow.


CSA: I really liked the... I mean, I really like a lot of the talking animals, cuz as you said, they're so fun. But I really liked the sloth in the books. Is The Magician King for The Magician’s Land when we have the sloth (on the m—?).
 
LG: Yes, she's in The Magician King. I felt like I did a good job with her. I don't feel like I like her personally as much as I like some of the other animals. She is… well, she's just very slothy. I don't know that I would hang out with her before I would hang out with Sir Prickleplum, for example.


CSA: Sent to test Quentin’s patience. (They chuckle) We have one from Theo, that I think is similar, but about real animals, if I'm reading it correctly. What's your favorite animal? 


LG: It's funny. I had a conversation with another writer about talking animals — Jeff Vandermere, who coincidentally also wrote his first book for young people this year. It's called A Peculiar Peril. It's incredibly good, and everybody should seek it out. But Jeff is an actual… He enjoys hiking. He's an outdoor person, and he regularly comes in contact with animals; Which is very funny because I am an indoor person, and I do not on any regular basis come into contact with animals. I like to think about animals a lot, and I recently acquired a cat, so now I have a cat. But, I don't come into contact with animals that much. If I had a favorite animal... I can do Top 3 animals. Top 3 animals: bears, whales, and bees. I think those are my three favorite animals and there is actually a bear in The Silver Arrow, and I'm very strongly leaning toward having a hive of bees in the sequel to the Silver Arrow. I'm still trying to work out whether the bees should each individually have a voice, or whether they are a quote/unquote "hive mind” and are a collective voice. I don't know if you have any feelings about this, Clara.


CSA: No, I think you should play wi— I think, I mean you could do the, like, Locutus of Borg. Like, you could have the one that has a separate personality, or the queen could have the separate personality, but those are things you can play with.


LG: I know, yes, but like, a nice borg.


CSA: A nice borg! Exactly. A nice, friendly, pollinating borg. All right. Well I think I'm going to do just one more, so this one is from Katya: If you were to recommend a piece of children's literature for two adults, what would it be?


LG: Hmmm, That's such a good question! What would it be? There's so many really wonderful ones. When you have kids, you spend a lot of time rereading works of children's fiction, and you are often reminded of the fact that they are as powerful as adult literature. There are a number of works of fiction, especially by… All Creatures Great and Small… Harriet! James Harriet. There are several short stories of James Harriet that I simply cannot read out loud because I start to cry in the middle of them. The book that I recommend most often is Watership Down, which I truly love. It’s one of those amazing one-off works of fiction. It's not like anything else. It really gets at the rabbitness of rabbits. It's about rabbits, and it gets at the rabbitness of rabbitsThey are very much themselves, and they have rabbit-y emotions. I can't say enough good things about it.


CSA: Well on that note, thank you so much for being here at this Kepler’s virtual event! Yeah I think I think that's just about it. So Angela —


Angela: Thank you so much! What a wonderful conversation. We're all going to wish that we could talk to animals now. Thank you so much for joining us! Remember you can pick up a copy of The Silver Arrow at Keplers.com, or at the bookstore. Tonight's fabulous event was produced by Keplers Literary Foundation. If you're in the position to contribute, keep us producing events like this, please consider a donation. There’s a donate button at Keplers.org, and if you'd like to get in touch with us directly, our contact button is there too. To stay in touch with the Kepler's community, check out our upcoming events, under the heading refresh the page. Next up, we're hosting Rick Riorden, November 13th. Please join us again. Stay well, be happy. Have a great evening.