Gregory Maguire on Thirty Years of Wicked and Returning to the World of Oz

Without author Gregory Maguire there would be no Wicked—no hit Broadway musical or big-budget film adaptation. There might not even be Maleficent or any of the other retellings of fairy tales from alternate points of view we’ve gotten in recent years. Maguire wasn’t the first writer to attempt to rehabilitate a classic antagonist but since the release of his book Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West in 1995, the villain origin story has become a trend that’s never really gone out of style. 

Maguire has written many books for adults inspired by classic children’s stories, including Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister (based on Cinderella), Mirror, Mirror (based on Snow White), and After Alice (based on Alice in Wonderland), but he keeps coming back to Oz and the one that started it all. After Wicked came out he went on to write three more sequel books in the series now known as The Wicked Years. Then, about 10 years after the final book in that series—Out of Oz—was published, he returned to continue the story of Elphaba’s granddaughter in the Another Day trilogy, beginning with The Brides of Maracoor in 2021. And now there’s one more on the way. Maguire’s next book Elphie is a prequel to Wicked and fills in the gaps of Elphaba’s life story prior to her arrival at Shiz University.

We got the chance to speak with Maguire about his new book, the stage adaptation of Wicked, and the highly anticipated film version. Although they depart significantly from the source material, he talked about his admiration for composer Stephen Schwartz and writer Winnie Holzman (who is also credited as a screenwriter on the film) and the ways their work has inspired him in turn.

Paste Magazine: What is it about the story of The Wizard of Oz that keeps you and other creators and audiences coming back to it again and again?

Gregory Maguire: Oz has always, I think, implied America, by the way that Baum designed it. But because Oz was originally made both broad and indistinct that has left people who came later, like MGM, like The Wiz, like me, like Stephen and Winnie [Holzman], that has left us lots and lots of acreage in which we can find a patch that had not been developed, make it our own and claim to be just as American as any other iteration of Oz.

In the same way, every American says, you know, I’m an American too. It’s been so endlessly renewable because its original depths and metrics were purposefully vague and purposely varied.

Paste: Have your feelings about Oz and your relationship to these characters changed as you’ve written these books?

Maguire: Yes, they have. And by this I mean, that if I continue to develop as a human being, which I hope I have done, then my concept of what makes human nature at my age now, which is 70, is different from who I was when I was 39 and writing “the end” on the handwritten draft of Wicked.

I’ve continued to see the complexities and the contradictions in human character as I view life unfolding in myself and in my children and in the nation in which we live. And every time I feel like I stumble upon another layer of complexity it makes me recall even the characters that I invented and think, “I didn’t quite get all of that, did I?”

Paste: Did you have that added layer of complexity on your mind as you were writing Elphie?

Maguire: Elphie takes as its origin point two or three very short segments, and by that I mean not more than a page, a page and a half each, that I had in the original novel. Some things that happened to her between the ages of 2 and 16. I understood why that had to come out. It was partly because the book was too long. But I always felt that, in a way, it left Elphaba being a little bit more of a cipher when she got to college than I had originally intended.

That’s a strategy of storytelling. Put a mystery figure in the middle and little by little as you see other people look at her you will, yourself, come to a conclusion about who she might be or who she must be. But I still think that we benefit from knowing some things that happen to somebody in childhood, even if it doesn’t change our conclusion about how it changed them, things happen. 

Paste: Do you feel like you understand Elphaba better now, having finally written that part of the story?

Maguire: It’s now 30 years since Wicked was published. Or will be very shortly. And I am not done thinking about the character of Elphaba. She is still a mystery to me. She is as much a mystery to me as you are, and as my husband and my children are. We are mysteries to one another. And that is why we don’t just say hello once and then walk into the wilderness. We stay with each other so that we can continue to learn about each other and find ways to care. I care about Elphaba still.

So it was fun to go back and resurrect a few memories I had about what had happened. In this book, I go into a lot more about who her mother was and who her father was and why, in my telling of the story, which is different from the play, they got together. They were an improbable couple in my novel. The mother was high-born and the father in my novel was an itinerant minister. So, still, there was something that drew them together and I was able to look at that and bring that in as well.

Paste: There are authors who do extensive backstory when they’re writing a novel, but don’t end up using all of it. Was that part of your process of writing the Wicked books? Or were you starting from scratch here?

Maguire: In a sense I was starting from scratch. However, there are a couple of loose threads in the novel.

In part one of Wicked, there’s a character who never appears on Broadway and won’t appear in the movie either. There’s a character who wanders into the hardscrabble outback where the young family is living and sort of captivates Elphaba’s mother. The father is off preaching and Elphaba’s mother, we know, has a tendency to be captivatable. So he wanders in, he’s a Quadling from a different part of the world. He’s exotic. And he sort of stays in the house for a while. 

Is this the father of Nessarose?

Maguire: Yes, exactly. Turtle Heart. I talk about him being murdered in the printed novel Wicked and I give one or two sentences that suggest why that might have happened, but it doesn’t say exactly why it happened or how it happened or what were the lead ups and what was the fallout of that, which was an important part. I had to take all that out. It was important to me, but it wasn’t important to readers who wanted to get Elphaba and Glinda together and find out what they were like.

Paste: Do you take responsibility for popularizing the idea of the villain origin story? It kind of all started with your book.

Maguire: I think that the fact that Wicked was so successful means that there’s been a lot more of that that’s been done by other artists. But I think with all immense respect and gratitude to Winnie and Stephen for what happened in the play and how they decided to mount the story and tell it, I think that in fact the play, by a thin margin, manages to avoid turning Elphaba into a civilian saint.

It’s not a work of hagiography. But the shorthand way of talking about Wicked, both the book and the play, is, “Oh, it’s the redemption story of a person we thought was bad.” Well, in fact, in my book, if you read it, Elphaba is no saint. She has complicated moral impulses and she sometimes makes a bad choice.

Paste: We’ve seen a lot of different interpretations of the characters now, and we’re about to get a couple more in the movie. Do these interpretations correspond with the image in your head? Has that image changed over time?

Maguire: All of them correspond a little bit with the image in my head. I can see the DNA straight through. It’s like, you can see someone’s bones in an X-ray. I can see the DNA of who I made straight through.

Of course, the plot changes, and the plot reveals character, so if the plot is different then the characters seem different. But I can certainly see. And I admire the changes, and I admire the constancy of the important things that remain.

Wicked opens in movie theaters nationwide on Nov. 22. Elphie will be published on March 25, 2025, and is available for pre-order now.