Rick Riordan reveals a long held passion for Greek mythology and shares some of his approaches to writing with Nikki Gamble.

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Rick Riordan is a teacher and a writer, and has won many awards for his mystery novels for adults. He says that the idea for Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief first came to him while he was teaching Greek mythology at middle school in San Francisco. But rumour has it that Camp Half Blood actually exists, and Rick spends his summers there recording the adventures of young demigods. Some believe that, to avoid a mass panic among the mortal population, he was forced to swear on the River Styx to present Percy Jackson's story as fiction. Rick lives in Texas (apart from his summers on Half Blood Hill) with his wife and two sons.

 Can you tell us something about your early encounters with Greek Mythology?

My first encounter was in middle school, what would be Year 9 here. I had a very good English teacher and she taught an extensive unit on Greek Mythology and Norse Mythology. It was really the first time that I had been exposed to any of those stories, but I had just read The Lord of the Rings and she hooked me in through what I was interested in by explaining how The Lord of the Rings is based on mythology. That was the point when the stories of the Gods and the monsters, and the heroes, who were half-God just captured my imagination.

It’s obviously quite a deep knowledge because you bring in the less well known characters. Have you continued to develop your interest as an adult?

Oh, absolutely. I think every teacher should be a learner, first and foremost; when you stop learning then, it’s over, so I still research all the time. There are some great websites now on Greek Mythology that are compendiums of amazing primary sources. There’s an especially good one called theoi.com. And if you type in any Greek God to the search facility, it will give you seven or eight different primary sources that mention the God, so you can compare notes. And I’m always finding monsters and minor Gods that I didn’t know about, as I try to delve deeper for more material for the series.

 In your experience of talking to children, do you think it matters that they may not have prior knowledge of those stories?

I think children know more about mythology than we give them credit for. They are exposed to mythology everywhere and they don’t necessarily even know it. My sons watch cartoons, which include Greek myths: Medusa, the three-headed dog, Cerberus, the Grim Reaper, who is actually Kronos the Titan, are all part of popular culture. Greek myths are ubiquitous; you will find them in cartoons, comic books, novels and movies. But having said that I try to write the book so that it doesn’t matter whether you know a lot of Greek mythology or not. I hope Percy can be enjoyed on a number of different levels and some will read it just as an adventure. However, a lot of kids that don’t know much mythology have told me that they have gone from the Percy series and checked out all the mythology books in the library.

Yes I agree we often underestimate what children know because they come to it in a different way. I’ve been surprised by what they pick up from computer games like The Age of Mythology.

 I know a lot of kids who play Age of Mythology. Sometimes they’ll get their facts mixed up, they’ll include the Atlantean mythology that was completely made up. But they sure know a lot, they know of the Titans, they know of the Gods.

 Mythology is not only about gods and monsters but heroes too. Do you think there’s any need for heroes in today’s world?

Oh, there’s always a need for heroes; that is not going to change. As long as we’re human, we’re going to need heroes. Heroes do what we wish we would do, and not necessarily what we end up doing. They’re what we aspire to. We read these stories because they make us feel good; they make us feel that there’s a side of humanity that really is capable of perseverance.

So they reflect the best of us, but perhaps they reflect the worst of us as well. For example Theseus’ treatment of Ariadne is pretty despicable

Absolutely, heroes are flawed, and that’s what makes them so interesting. They wouldn’t be believable if they were perfect. I think it’s similar to the need for humour in tragedy. With heroism you have to have something that balances things out, and the tragic flaw in the Greek hero is a prime example of that. Every hero has something that they don’t do well. Achilles has his tender heel and that’s what makes him intriguing.

And is that the same for the comic book superheroes?

 Some of them have emotional flaws. And sometimes comics explore the idea of darkness taking over and what happens if you use your powers for evil. This is true of the Star Wars novels and Spiderman and Batman. Talking about the similarities between the old gods and superheroes, one of my favourite answers from a kid at a school when I asked what Greek God they’d like to be related to was, “Batman”, which was a pretty good answer. She understood that they were both superhuman archetypes.

You’ve talked about your background interest in mythology. How did that lead you to the Percy Jackson series?

Well, it started as a bedtime story for my son. He was having a rough year in school and for various reasons he wasn’t enjoying reading and writing. The only thing that he really enjoyed was Greek Mythology, so I tried to keep him interested in school by telling him Greek myths. And eventually I ran out and he said, “Well, can’t you make up a new one for me?” And that’s where it came from. And since my son was struggling with ADHD and Dyslexia, I gave those attributes to Percy.

So it was an oral story first.. ..

Completely spontaneous. When I was done, my son was the one who suggested that I should write it down. I did, and the next thing I knew, it was being published. Like the older myths then, that was told before they were written down.

Obviously, a written story is going to be different to a told story...

Yes, before Homer wrote the Iliad it was told and told and told again. But I think the biggest change was that the story shifted from third person to first person. When I was telling the story I was saying “Well, Percy did this Percy did that”, but when I sat down to write it, Percy’s voice just came to me; it was very immediate. People sometimes ask, “Well, how can you get into the mind of a 12 year old boy like that?” I think my wife would probably say it’s because I never grew up.

Well, you were most definitely a 12 year old boy once upon a time..

That’s right and that kid is still in there. I just imagined him as a member of a class I might have taught. There were some other changes too. In writing you have to do a lot of elaborating and description, which isn’t necessary with an oral story. Also some of the scenes were changed, some were added and I developed the characters.

Okay, so why Perseus - Percy Jackson - rather than Hercules or Theseus?

Perseus is really the only hero who gets a happy ending. All the other heroes are maimed, tortured, killed, horrible things happens to them. Hercules has an awful death with an acid shirt burning his body. Perseus gets a good break, he’s the only one. The original Perseus was the Son of Zeus whereas my Percy is the son of Poseidon and it’s his Mom who calls him Percy because she’s hoping for a good outcome for him.

Children in the US will be familiar with the cultural context, for example Percy’s military schooling. How have British children responded?

 It’s interesting, British children pick up on different things. Their sense of humour is a little different, so they’ll laugh at different lines. And they ask different questions. I don’t want to over-generalise, but I tend to get more introspective questions, more thoughtful questions from the British readers. When I was in Warwick the other day a kid asked, “Well, okay, if the Greek Gods had been moving west does that mean that the Egyptian Gods had been moving east?” He’d clearly given it a lot of thought; it was not off the top of his head. British kids also seem to ask a lot more about the writing process; they’re very interested in how a book gets published and what you have to do to become a writer. I think that British kids in general have an easier time understanding American culture than the other way around. I suppose that’s because England is so inundated with American culture through Hollywood movies and television. American kids reading a novel set in England would have more difficulty because they don’t have that same frame of reference.

I’m interested in the diction that you’ve chosen for the characters. You include a mix of contemporary colloquial language and the archaic. Were you conscious of those choices or did that come more intuitively with Percy’s voice?

Well, it’s a little of both. The voices of the characters do come to me organically and they develop as I’m writing them. At the same time I am conscious always of needing to make every character sound different. Another writer once told me that you should be able to open up a page in any book in the middle, read one line of dialogue and instantly know which character said that line, simply from the words they use. A 12 year old boy from New York is not going to talk the same as a 3,000 year old Centaur. And that’s a big challenge, to make every character sound different.

I think dialogue is hard to write well. As you say, it can be quite bland and often an otherwise good book can fall down on its dialogue.

Yes, I’ve learnt a lot about dialogue. It’s one of the most important things about writing. I guess the biggest lesson that I’ve learned is the secret to realistic dialogue is condensing. So if you have a sentence and you cut half of it out, it’s going to sound more realistic. My advice is to just find the core of whatever sentence you’re trying to write then just that and not everything around it.

Now, three books into the series Percy’s world is becoming a more developed alternative reality. Are you aware of becoming more absorbed in that world?

 It has been interesting. The world has developed and the characters are ageing, and so, the way that the characters perceive their world has changed a lot. You’re right, there’s a depth to the world that wasn’t there before. I explore some of the relationships between the characters and their personal histories. You discover that Chiron, the trainer, is actually the son of Kronos, who is a big enemy of Titan. Well, that colours everything. You also learn that Annabeth has a very troubled history with her own father and there’s something of reconciliation. That’s what I enjoy about a series, the luxury of spending more time with the characters and watching them develop over a longer story arc then you would in a single novel.

 In a way that’s true of the original stories as well. Although they are often told as single tales, it’s only when you have the whole arc in place that you understand the complex motivations behind the characters’ actions.

 Right, exactly. Where did that story start? Where does it stop? Well, you know, it has its roots in many other stories and it has repercussions in many that come after it. Percy can’t keep growing up forever, so do you have an end point in mind? Oh, absolutely: there are going to be five books, and that will be the end of Percy. At that point he’ll be 16 years old, which is a crucial age because that’s when the big prophecy says he will have to make a major choice that will decide the fate of the world. After that I do feel pretty strongly that the series needs to end while it’s on a high note. I think probably everyone has read a series that has gone on too long and I don’t want that to happen with Percy.

Does that mean that everything is already planned or are there surprises that will emerge through the writing?

There is the general framework, which is already laid out. I’ve already pretty much written Book Four I know generally what’s going to happen in Book Five but there are always surprises. The details are what I live for; that’s where the fun is in writing. I have no idea what the characters are going to say to each other, or how if they are going to end up liking each other or being resentful. I let the characters dictate that as I go along. I play around with the dialogue and let it unfold in my head and that’s great fun.

 Have you discovered things about yourself as a writer by writing for children?

Well, I discovered that I really should have listened to my students years ago when they said that I should be writing for kids. It’s funny that now, in retrospect, my life up until this point seems like preparation for writing these books for children. I have my teaching background and I honed my skills writing novels and it has all came together with the Percy Jackson books. I really think I’ve found my audience. So that was the biggest revelation.

Rick Riordan’s Blogspot http://rickriordan.blogspot.com/

http://www.rickriordan.com/

Thank you Rick Riordan for talking to Write Away.