Len Rosen on writing fiction/making magic: Aha!

HALLIE EPHRON: I am a huge fan of magic (the how-to of it; stories of great magicians and debunkers like and Harry Houdini and James Randi), and also of Len Rosen's crime fiction ever since I read his first, All Cry Chaos. So I was thrilled to have Len's new novel, The Kortelisy Escape, to read over the holiday.

I whipped through it, a fantastic twisty, heartwarming grandfather-grandaughter tale that mixes magic and mystery. Throw in a set of Russian nesting dolls... perfect for the season.

Kirkus gave it a starred review: "A master storyteller weaves a tale of love, pain, and sleight of hand.... [A] clever and richly enjoyable novel."

I'm thrilled to host Len today, talking about magic and writing.

LEN ROSEN: In his 1991 essay “The Magic Show,” Tim O’Brien (Going After Cacciato, The Things They Carried) finds in his life-long fascination with magic as metaphor for writing fiction.

Successful fiction¸ he claims, like successful stage magic depends on performers using the tools of their trade to create stunning effects. Onstage, a bottle of wine might appear from thin air; on the page, a character’s plight might evoke pity. Both effects are remarkable in that they’re illusions. Both are impossible, yet the impossible is made real.

Like stage magicians, writers conjure illusions so perfectly that we find ourselves rooting for or against people who don’t exist save for strings of letters on a page. Where does Jane Eyre live, exactly? In a book? In our minds? In conversations with friends? She’s alive, but then again not. Writers are magicians. When we are in full command of our tricks—point of view, framing, plotting, and so much more—we, too, make the unreal real. We move audiences to belief.

I’ve been thinking a lot about magic and writing. My just-released novel, The Kortelisy Escape, concerns the lives of a fourteen-year-old-girl who apprentices herself to her aged grandfather, an amateur magician who’s scheduled to perform magic shows across New England. Grace Larson is an orphan; Nate Larson is an ex-con running from trouble—characters who have good reason to distrust each other. But with time there comes a thaw and, with more time, trust.

Kortelisy is a mystery and a coming-of-age story told through a series of increasingly dangerous tricks.

Magic may be a metaphor, but I employed it literally to drive my plot, and this created challenges. How was I going to use words to reproduce for readers the ultimate surprise and delight of magic shows: the “AHA!” moments at the conclusion of great tricks? That “AHA!” is profoundly non-verbal. Audiences may gasp when a full-size bowling ball drops from a thin sheaf of papers. Their jaws may drop. Their eyes may go wide and they’ll definitely laugh and applaud. What they don’t do in their moments of wonder is talk. Yet words are all a novelist has. How was I going to use words to evoke a wordless experience?

I spent five years answering this question, describing magic tricks from the outside—from the audience’s point of view; from the inside—the magician’s point of view; from the deeper inside—the interior monologue all in search of the elusive “AHA!” Could I reproduce on the page what magicians achieve every night, onstage?

As it happened, Kortelisy’s biggest wonder-inducing moments came not through a depiction of stage magic but through human interaction: through affections unfolding between a wounded old man and a doubly wounded child. I used plot, metaphor, misdirection and every other tool in my writer’s kit to deliver “AHA!” moments to readers.

You can’t fake love and you can’t fake the grand “AHA!”, Nate tells Grace as she struggles to learn and perform her own magic. Nor can readers fake engagement with a story. Either the writer pulls off the effect—empathy for characters who exist only on the page—or not. Either jaws drop or they don’t.

When O’Brien suggests that the deepest mystery fiction explores is character, I understand him to mean this: We can’t have one another’s dreams, can’t know one another’s thoughts and emotions.  At the smell of rolls baking in an oven, I can’t recall, as you do, the Thanksgiving dinner five years ago when your daughter announced she was pregnant. The brutal fact of existence is that we’re radically separated from one other even as we spend our lives seeking connection. Fiction helps us bridge the unbridgeable. The biggest mystery of Kortelisy is not how a grandfather and granddaughter use stage magic to outwit people who wish them harm. It’s how, despite every reason to reject each other, a nearly ruined old man and nearly ruined child instead save each other.

I needed to write a novel about a magician to appreciate fully O’Brien’s account of magic as metaphor. Without the deeper mysteries of real human emotions being plumbed, the writer’s tricks—all the techniques of fiction—can take us only so far. To deliver an “AHA!” experience on the page every bit as compelling (and non–verbal) as those magicians deliver onstage, we writers must use our skills to achieve the greatest trick of all: convincing readers to care for people who exist nowhere but in our heads.

If we can get them to care, we’ve got our “AHA!”

HALLIE: By the end of The Kortelisy Escape, I was rooting so hard for Grace and Nate, but by then trusting that Len would manage the magic needed to save them.

What's your relationship to magic? Do you watch the show and happily suspend belief? (READ LEN'S BOOK!) Or do you need to know how the sleight-of-hand is achieved? (READ LEN'S BOOK!