Write Place, Write Time

Lev Grossman

When we bought our house about two years ago the real estate agent pointed out the ivy-covered brick wall at the back of the garden and said, “Isn’t it magical? It’ll look different every different month of the year. It’s an ever-changing tableau of the seasons!”

Much later, after painful meetings with architects and structural engineers, we used to recite other quotations from the real estate agent in ironic tones. Such as: “You could have a dinner party here tomorrow night!” But the thing about the back wall turned out to be completely true. It really is a nice wall. A Chekhov wall.

This makes it sound like I don’t love our house, which is where I do most of my writing. I do love it. It’s an old brownstone in Clinton Hill in Brooklyn. It has most of its original details intact – it spent much of its life as a flophouse, and nobody cared about it enough to rip out all its beautiful moldings and replace them with boring modern fixtures. And now, thanks largely to the collapse of the housing market in 2009, it’s ours. And I love this room, which is the one where I write.

I picked this room because it has built-in bookshelves, and because it’s connected to the master bedroom by a little pass-through corridor. I imagined that if I woke up in the middle of the night with a brilliant idea I could race through the corridor and type it out in my study. In fact most of the traffic through the corridor goes the other way: me dragging my weary ass to bed at night having run out of stuff to say.

The other most prominent feature of the room is an enormous old work table, which I bought at a flea market. It was salvaged from an abandoned factory near Allentown, PA, and has a nice air of late-industrial twilight about it. It has a metal top which I always worry is going to have bad static or magnetic interactions with the various laptops that get placed on it, but so far there haven’t been any disasters. And anyway we had to take it apart to get it through the door, so unless it turns out to be covered with radium paint or something, it’s staying. No one wants to go through that again.

So far I’ve had good luck writing in this room. I wrote most of The Magician King here in about two years flat, which is pretty much a land-speed record for me. When I get restless I move to one of the two armchairs in front of the windows. A time-lapse video of the room would show me ping-ponging from chair to chair to desk in a triangular pattern.

But mostly I write at the big table so I can see that ivy-covered brick wall. In fact it made it intoThe Magician King — there’s a scene in Julia’s bedroom, where she’s looking out the back window, and rain starts rippling the ivy on the wall at the back of her parents’ garden. That’s how she knows fall has arrived. That’s how I know when fall arrives, too.

Lev Grossman is the author of The Magicians, which was a New York Times bestseller and one of the New Yorker’s best books of the year in 2009, and the sequel, The Magician King. Grossman is also the book critic for Time magazine.