Interview with Lev Grossman

1.The Silver Arrow was your first foray into writing children’s fiction. Its sequel, The Golden Swift, publishes soon. Could you tell us a bit about your experience writing for children? What have been the rewards and challenges of writing in this new format?

I was already very used to telling stories to kids, since I have three kids of my own and they fight pretty much all the time except when I’m telling them stories. I just had to learn to write them down.  The funny thing really was how similar it was to writing for adults: the stories and the vocabulary are a bit simpler, but the feelings underneath are just the same. 

2. I love stories that ground themselves in both the real world with a fantastical edge. What was your approach to world building for The Silver Arrow?

As a writer I’m always trying to have it both ways—I put magic in my books but I also want them to feel real. So I was very very careful to get the science right in The Silver Arrow and The Golden Swift. Kids love magic but they have a hunger for reality too. For example I think kids are actually quite aware that something really disastrous is happening to nature right now, and they want to know the truth about it. 

3. The Silver Arrow features a brilliant cast of characters, including humans and talking animals. Do you have a favourite character to write? Can you share any tips for how writers can create authentic characters that will engage child readers?

There’s an extremely venomous snake in The Silver Arrow called an eastern green mamba, and I enjoyed writing him a lot. These snakes are paradoxical creatures, because even though they're just about the fastest snakes on earth, and they're an intimidating shade of green, and their bite will make you die in agony, they’re very shy and avoid people. I tried to get inside what it would really feel like to have that kind of power and then to avoid using it the way they do. I think the mamba is both proud of how deadly he is and also a little bit ashamed.

4. Writing a series can be tricky! How do you balance tying up the individual plot of the first book, while also ensuring that there is a running thread into the second book?

It’s doubly hard in the case of the Silver Arrow books because so much of the plot and the conflict is driven by climate change, which as far as I know is not a problem we’re going to resolve anytime soon. How do you end a book when the villain is an unstoppable millennial environmental catastrophe? So it becomes about Kate’s emotional story. She’s growing up. She's learning about the world and her place in it, and what she can change and what she can't. 

5. Do you think that your background as a journalist helps your own writing process?

Oh, it definitely does. For the new book, The Golden Swift, I had to read all sorts of academic papers about trophic cascades and things like that, and journalism teaches you how to find that stuff and get the gist even though you're not a properly educated scientist. And when you really dig into the science of things, you tend to find that the results of any given human intervention are never 100% positive, there are always complications that are more interesting than anything I could ever make up.

Also being a journalist forced me to learn to write clearly and give up a lot of literary affectations, for which we can all be grateful.

6. What’s next for you?

This and that! You always try to keep a few projects going on at once, in case you get stuck on one and have to change horses. Last year I wrote a movie called The Map of Tiny Perfect Things, about people trapped in a time loop, so now I’m writing the sequel to that. But the big thing is a book about King Arthur called The Bright Sword that I’ve been working on for about six years. I really must finish it. If I let it go on too much longer King Arthur’s going to come back in person and spoil the ending. 

Lev Grossman is probably best-known for the #1 New York Times bestselling Magicians trilogy—The Magicians, The Magician King, and The Magician’s Land—which has been published in thirty countries and adapted as a TV show that ran for five seasons on Syfy.

His debut children's book, The Silver Arrow, a novel for children, was published in September 2020. It was a bestseller and was on the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, People magazine, Apple and Amazon best-of-the-year lists. The sequel, The Golden Swift, will be published in July 2022.