Texas Monthly Talks
Rick Riordan
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Oh, absolutely. I always think of my sons first. If it’s a book they’ll like, it’s probably a project I’ll go forward with. I would never think about sending a manuscript to my editor before I read it to my sons. Because if it doesn’t work for kids, I’m wasting my time. It’s one thing for a book to fly with adults, but the kid test is a much tougher litmus test.
By my calculation, about half of the twelve books you’ve written have been for adults and half have been for kids. What’s the difference when it comes to writing for those audiences?
People have said for many years that writing for kids is easier. I haven’t found that to be true at all. If anything, writing for young readers is more demanding because they don’t have as much patience as adults. Adults will stay with you if you have paragraph after paragraph of extraneous descriptions. Kids won’t do that. They’ll let you know right away if your story is losing them. So you have to be a better storyteller. Your narrative has to be more compact and more gripping. You have to make sure the characters are empathetic, that kids can relate to them. And you have to include all of the things that storytelling should include: You have to have action, you have to have humor, and you have to have emotional situations. And you have no time to waste. You have to get it all in there economically.
How heavy is the burden to create an alternate universe that your readers may never have a chance to experience, a universe that relies entirely on their imagination?
It’s very important to give the reader the opportunity to become part of the story. When I was a kid, that was always the mark of whether I got into a book. Could I imagine myself being James in James and the Giant Peach? Could I imagine myself being a character in the Lord of the Rings?
Even though those are fantastical situations?
Oh, absolutely. Sometimes the more fantastical it is, the better, because it’s sort of a vacation from real life. It’s nice to get out of the grind of being an elementary or middle school student. Maybe your pen can turn into a sword. Maybe your teacher really could turn into a monster.
For a lot of kids, the idea that their teacher could be a monster is not that fantastical.
Not so much of a stretch.
What was your childhood like? Describe yourself as a kid when you were roughly the age of the kids in your audience.
I was born in San Antonio and lived here most of my life. Growing up, I attended the Alamo Heights public schools. I was a reluctant reader—I didn’t like books until I was probably in the fifth or sixth grade. The books that were recommended to me just didn’t connect with me. That changed when I discovered mythology, around sixth grade or so, and I had a series of very good English teachers. From mythology I got into fantasy. The first series of books I really remember loving was the Lord of the Rings.
At what point did you begin to think to yourself, “This is something I might do as a career”?
From about the time I was twelve or thirteen, I knew that I wanted to be both a teacher and a writer. And I was very fortunate that I got to do both. The most powerful experience for me, in terms of writing, was when my eighth-grade English teacher read a story that I wrote for class and encouraged me to try to get it published. I still have the rejection note from Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine.
Did you come to UT still thinking about teaching and writing?
Yeah. For a while there I was a musician. That was how I worked my way through UT: playing in cover bands. That’s where my energy went for a while. We played folk rock, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan—that kind of thing. It was the mid-eighties. We had long Tony Orlando hair. Very embarrassing. But I kept coming back to writing short stories. I didn’t get serious about it until I was out of college and my wife and I moved to San Francisco. I was teaching at a private school and got homesick for Texas, and that’s where the idea for my first detective novel, Big Red Tequila, came from. It was a love letter to San Antonio. I couldn’t be home, so I wrote a book about it.
Eventually, though, you did come back home. It was while you were teaching at Saint Mary’s Hall that you wrote the first book in the Percy Jackson series.
During that time, I was continuing to teach both social studies and English, and my students would always ask me why I didn’t write for kids. They knew that I wrote books for adults. They thought it was really interesting when I told them that they couldn’t read them because they weren’t appropriate. Of course, as middle schoolers, that meant they had to go out and buy them right away.
Not Henry and June inappropriate?
No, the equivalent of an R-rated action film. All my adult books are. Anyway, they would ask me why I wouldn’t write something that was gauged toward middle schoolers, and I never really had a good answer for them. At the time, my older son, Haley, was in the second grade, and he was having a lot of trouble with reading and writing. We found out that he has ADHD and is dyslexic, which explained a lot. The only thing he enjoyed in school that year was Greek mythology—
And that was the genesis of The Lightning Thief. You thought, “I need to do something that speaks to him directly.”
It really was, in the beginning, a story for my son.
For the uninitiated, say a few words about the plot of this series, which is now at four books, with a fifth coming.
In fact we just announced the title of the fifth book: The Last Olympian. It will be out next May 5. Overall, the Percy Jackson series is about a young modern-day kid in New York who discovers that his father is actually Poseidon, the god of the sea.
Daddy issues!
Yeah, no kidding. He goes off to a summer camp for demigods, where they train to defend themselves against monster attacks, and Percy goes on a series of quests to help the Olympian gods against their mortal enemies, the Titans.
If a series is going to be compared to Harry Potter, this is clearly the one. But regardless, there seems to be a common thread between the Percy Jackson books and The Maze of Bones. You’ve got kids in modern times who discover some extraordinary thing in their family’s history and go off on a quest to wrestle with it.
The quest is a pretty powerful and a pretty standard element in a lot of young-adult fiction.
The Lightning Thief and the other books in that series were successful enough that you no longer have to earn a living as a teacher. You can write full-time.
It’s an amazing chance that very few writers ever get, so I think of myself as being very blessed. On the other hand, I miss the classroom quite a bit, and I did feel that teaching was my calling. Nobody ever believes me when I say I didn’t want to quit my day job, but it’s true. The upside of that is that I still feel very much like a teacher, because I’m doing school visits all the time. I’m always talking to kids. The big difference, as my wife likes to say, is that instead of having thirty kids in my classroom, I have millions of kids in my classroom. And I don’t have to grade their papers.
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