Lev Grossman
Novelist, author of The Magicians trilogy and The Bright Sword, who writes about writing, books and Arthurian legend in his newsletter Last Stop Corbenic.
Lev Grossman did not write this page.
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Their wordsWriting a novel belongs to that category of thing—like surviving the Hunger Games, and eating an entire garlic pizza by yourself—that appears to be impossible but actually isn’t.
↗The Halfway Point: A Pep Talklevgrossman.substack.com 1st of 4 in this piece
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Our reading
Being a novelist is a matter of keeping at it day after day, not of genius breakthroughs.
Their wordsBeing a novelist is a matter of keeping at it, day after day, just putting words after other words.
↗The Halfway Point: A Pep Talklevgrossman.substack.com 2nd of 4 in this piece
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Their wordsThe number one reason why people who want to write novels don’t is not that it’s impossible, and it’s not that they’re not geniuses, it’s that they lose their nerve and quit.
↗The Halfway Point: A Pep Talklevgrossman.substack.com 3rd of 4 in this piece
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Their wordsA lousy draft proves nothing. Rough drafts are rough—everybody’s are.
↗The Halfway Point: A Pep Talklevgrossman.substack.com 4th of 4 in this piece
- 3 months earlier
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Their wordsAnd now a major caveat: Leiber’s handling of race and in particular gender is, to say the least, unenlightened.
↗That Other American Tolkienlevgrossman.substack.com 1st of 2 in this piece
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Their wordsLeiber is barely in print now—I believe he’s only published by a reprint press—and I think that’s a shame, but there are a few of his stories (like “The Sadness of the Executioner”) that truly deserve to disappear forever.
↗That Other American Tolkienlevgrossman.substack.com 2nd of 2 in this piece
- 4 weeks earlier
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Their wordsAs Philip Pullman regularly points out, aspects of Lewis’s work have dated very badly—particularly around his portrayal of girls and women—but I do think that it not only changed me but had a genuine transformative effect that rippled the length and breadth of popular culture.
↗The Wardrobe Opened 75 Years Agolevgrossman.substack.com 1st of 2 in this piece
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Their wordsLewis may have been the first person to successfully imagine what it would actually be like to have magic happen right in front of you.
↗The Wardrobe Opened 75 Years Agolevgrossman.substack.com 2nd of 2 in this piece