The Sneaky Way to Construct a Novel

All abrim with dewy naiveté, I started by setting up two bins. (Metaphorical bins. They were really Word documents.)

One bin had to do with mood. I threw into it everything that felt the way I wanted The Magician King to feel. It didn’t matter if it all fit together, I just threw it in. I’d connect the dots later. The second bin had to do with the book’s actual plot. There were certain sorts of things that I wanted to have happen in the new book, certain scenes I knew I wanted to write…. Once the bins were full, I had a pretty good idea of the kinds of feelings I wanted the book to create in its readers (Bin #1). The trick was to use the stuff in Bin #2 to build a machine that would make people feel the feeling in Bin #1. The machine would be the novel.

Of course a novel isn’t a machine. A novel is a story. All this business with bins was a funny, backward way of figuring out how to tell the story I wanted to tell.

—Lev Grossman explains how he wrote The Magician King, the very good sequel to The Magicians. This is an incredible idea about how to write a book. (Also I love this book. You should get it! It's surprisingly dark! Definitely not for children!)