The Magicians (Book)

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Original	Rewrite	Comment
Quentin did a magic trick. Nobody noticed.	They didn’t notice his magic trick.	The original has two statements which you just have to take. The second draws you in: who didn’t notice? Whose trick? What trick?
They picked their way along the cold, uneven sidewalk together: James, Julia, and Quentin. James and Julia held hands. That’s how things were now. The sidewalk wasn’t quite wide enough, so Quentin trailed after them, like a sulky child. He would rather have been alone with Julia, or just alone period, but you couldn’t have everything. Or at least the available evidence pointed overwhelmingly to that conclusion.	They just kept holding hands and picked their way along the narrow sidewalk. He skulked along behind them. So, that’s how it was now, was it? Quentin would rather have been alone with Julia, or just alone, but by now he was used to not getting his own way.	Wasteful with words. The punchline about the “overwhelming evidence” is weak.
“Okay!” James said over his shoulder. “Q. Let’s talk strategy.” James seemed to have a sixth sense for when Quentin was starting to feel sorry for himself.	James caught the vibe. “Okay, Q: let’s go over it one more time.”	Quentin isn’t starting to feel sorry for himself. He’s well and truly miserable already.
Quentin’s interview was in seven minutes. James was right after him.	His interview was in seven minutes. James’ was next.
“Nice firm handshake. Lots of eye contact. Then when he’s feeling comfortable, you hit him with a chair and I’ll break his password and e-mail Princeton.”	“Firm handshake. Solid eye contact. Once he’s comfortable, you hit him with a chair. I come in, break his password and we e-mail Princeton. Simple.”	Not sure where this is going but okay.
“Just be yourself, Q,” Julia said.	Julia rolled her eyes. “Just be yourself, Q. You’ll be fine.”
Her dark hair was pulled back in a wavy bunch. Somehow it made it worse that she was always so nice to him.	She wore her dark hair pulled back in a bunch. That she was so nice to him just made it worse.
“How is that different from what I said?”		kill this. Not funny.
Quentin did the magic trick again. It was a very small trick, a basic one-handed sleight with a nickel. He did it in his coat pocket where nobody could see. He did it again; then he did it backward.	Quentin did the trick again: a basic one-handed sleight with a nickel. But he did it in his pocket, so nobody could see. He did a third time, then he did it backwards.	What is going on here? what good is a trick you do in your pocket that no one can see?
“I have one guess for his password,” James said. “Password.”
It was kind of incredible how long this had been going on, Quentin thought. They were only seventeen, but he felt like he’d known James and Julia forever. The school systems in Brooklyn sorted out the gifted ones and shoved them together, then separated the ridiculously brilliant ones from the merely gifted ones and shoved them together, and as a result they’d been bumping into each other in the same speaking contests and regional Latin exams and tiny, specially convened ultra-advanced math classes since elementary school. The nerdiest of the nerds. By now, their senior year, Quentin knew James and Julia better than he knew anybody else in the world, not excluding his parents, and they knew him. Evewbody knew what everybody else was going to say before they said it. Everybody who was going to sleep with anybody else had already done it. Julia—pale, freckled, dreamy Julia, who played the oboe and knew even more physics than he did—was never going to sleep with Quentin.
Quentin was thin and tall, though he habitually hunched his shoulders in a vain attempt to brace himself against whatever blow was coming from the heavens, and which would logically hit the tall people first. His shoulder-length hair was freezing in clumps. He should have stuck around to dry it after gym, especially with his interview today, but for some reason—maybe he was in a self-sabotaging mood—he hadn’t. The low gray sky threatened snow. It seemed to Quentin like the world was offering up special little tableaux of misery just for him: crows perched on power lines, stepped-in dog shit, windblown trash, the corpses of innumerable wet oak leaves being desecrated in innumerable ways by innumerable vehicles and pedestrians.
“God, I’m full,” James said. “I ate too much. do I always eat too much?”
“Because you’re a greedy pig?” Julia said brightly. “Because you’re tired of being able to see your feet? Because you’re trying to make your stomach touch your penis?”
James put his hands behind his head, his fingers in his wavy chestnut hair, his camel cashmere coat wide open to the November cold, and belched mightily. Cold never bothered him. Quentin felt cold all the time, like he was trapped in his own private individual winter.
James sang, to a tune somewhere between “Good King Wenceslas” and “Bingo”:
“In olden times there was a boy Young and strong and brave-o. He wore a sword and rode a horse And his name was Dave-o ...”
“God!” Julia shrieked. “Stop!”
James had written this song five years ago for a middle-school talent-show skit. He still liked to sing it; by now they all knew it by heart. Julia shoved him, still singing, into a garbage can, and when that didn’t work she snatched off his watch cap and started beating him over the head with it.
“My hair! My beautiful interview hair!”
King James, Quentin thought. Le roi s’amuse.
“I hate to break up the party,” he said, “but we’ve got like two minutes.”