The Magicians (Book)

Caption text

Original	Rewrite	Comment
Quentin did a magic trick. Nobody noticed.	They didn’t notice his magic trick. They just kept holding hands. She wore her dark hair pulled back in a bunch.	The original has two statements which you just have to take. The second draws you in: who didn’t notice? Whose trick? What trick? Introduce her beauty before we know who she is.
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.	He skulked along behind as they picked their way along the narrow sidewalk. So, that’s how it was now, was it? Quentin would rather have been alone with Julia, or just alone, but 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 read his mood. “Okay, Q: let’s go over it one more time. Firm handshake. Solid eye contact. Once he’s comfortable, hit him with a chair. I come in, break his password and we e-mail Princeton. Simple.”	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.		Wrong place for this information.
“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.”		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.	That Julia was so nice to him just made it worse. Quentin knew he didn’t have a chance.
“How is that different from what I said?”	The interview was in seven minutes. James was straight after him.	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.”	“Five bucks says his password is 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.	-	Clumsy backstory. We don’t need to know this now — we probably don’t need to know it ever. It slows down the narrative. What matters is Quentin fancies Julia but knows he has no chance. We’ve got that. We also need to know — maybe? — they’re brainy nerds. This is not the time.
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.		This is just terrible writing. it reads like the crows stepped in dogshit. It isn’t grammatically correct. Corpses of leaves desecrated by pedestrians? Is there any need for the ugly word “innumerable” even once, let alone three times?
“God, I’m full,” James said. “I ate too much. do I always eat too much?”		Now I am lost. What? Why are we suddenly talking about a previous meal?
“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?”		What? Who says things like this? Whose stomach touches their 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.		What on earth is going on?
James sang, to a tune somewhere between “Good King Wenceslas” and “Bingo”:		Why?
“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!”		What?
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.		No stop now.
“My hair! My beautiful interview hair!”		What?
King James, Quentin thought. Le roi s’amuse.		At least someone’s amused by this. What happened to the magic trick? Or the interview. Why? Where?
“I hate to break up the party,” he said, “but we’ve got like two minutes.”