Percy Jackson author Rick Riordan: ‘Just facing a school day can feel like a heroic quest’

It begins, as all good origin stories do, with an ordinary moment. Rick Riordan was working as a middle-school teacher in San Francisco when his son, who was having difficulties at school, was diagnosed with dyslexia and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD.

Tapping into his teacher tool set, Riordan started spending nights in his son’s room telling him stories from Greek mythology. When Riordan exhausted his repertoire, he created, with his son’s encouragement, his own hero, a modern mythological character experiencing similar difficulties to his son. He called his hero Percy Jackson.

Six books, two spin-off series and more than 180 million copies later, Riordan’s bedtime story has grown into one of the most popular fantasy franchises in children’s literature. Now, after two critically unpopular film adaptations, the story has been turned into a TV series that arrives on the Disney+ streaming service this week.

The idea of a teenage demigod resonates so strongly with young people, Riordan says, because readers “in those middle-grade years are straddled between two worlds”.

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As a teenager “you are neither a child nor an adult, and everything is changing: mentally, physically, psychologically. Just facing a school day can feel like a heroic quest. So the idea of [a teenager] discovering they really do straddle two worlds – the divine and mortal – makes sense on a visceral level.”

The quests faced in the original myths may have been more dramatic in thrust than real, modern life, but “whether it is 2,000 years ago or the 1990s” – when Riordan wrote the first Percy Jackson book – “or today, the things you deal with when you are 12 stay fairly consistent: your needs, those universal questions, are the same. Who are we? How do we relate to our parents? How much of my background is destiny?”

They were probably fine if you never read the books, but if you know and love them, and were waiting patiently to see them on screen, the films did a poor job

—  Rick Riordan's view of film adaptations of his novels

For Percy Jackson, son of Poseidon, it is difficult to avoid his mythological heritage. Enrolled in Camp Demigod after the appearance of a minotaur and the disappearance of his mother, he finds himself at the centre of a war between the Olympian gods. Over the six books – a seventh will be published in 2024 – Percy gets a satyr sidekick, befriends the half-blood offspring of Athena and Hermes, secures the famous golden fleece, and turns down the gods’ gift of immortality. The episodic nature of the TV serial, Riordan says, enables an adaptation that encompasses these discrete events while staying true to the original impulse of Percy’s journey.

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Riordan notes he was “famously and very vocally unhappy” with the pair of feature films in the early 2010s. “They were probably fine if you never read the books, but if you know and love them, and were waiting patiently to see them on screen, the films did a poor job. They changed many things, taking away from the heart of the story, which is a coming-of-age story, as many of the Greek myths are.”

The author had no involvement with the films, but for the TV series he and his wife, Rebecca, became executive producers, ensuring they were involved in every step of the adaptation process. “We were involved in every hire, all casting and crew choices,” he says. “We sat in every writer’s room, read every draft of every script. It was our prime focus and full-time job.” Equally, making TV “is definitely a team sport: there is a whole crew, hundreds of really talented people, who bring all their experience to the show.”

The Riordans’ touchstone was Steven Spielberg’s classic film ET: The Extra-Terrestrial. Percy Jackson is “the story of a child who discovers a magical world that adults aren’t privy to”, Rebecca Riordan says, “and one of things the director did in terms of the point of view of the main characters is that they brought down the camera so we are watching at the level of the children: we are not spectators. We are not ‘the adult’. We are on a journey with them.” While the point of view is specific, her husband adds, the story is universal: “All adults remember that time in their life so well.”

I have learned a great deal about writing from the point of view of screenwriters. It was not a world I was familiar with at all

—  Rick Riordan

The TV series has been four years in the making, and what Riordan did not expect was the extent to which working on the adaptation would vividly invigorate the Percy Jackson stories for him – so much so that he has returned to Percy’s story for the first time in 14 years, writing two new stories; the first, The Chalice of the Gods, was published this year; the other follows next spring.

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“It was really not something I had planned,” he says about the new novels. Although he “had written other adventures in other worlds” in which Percy Jackson makes occasional appearances, he thought he had left Percy’s own adventures behind. The inspiration to write a new Percy Jackson story “was directly related to the TV show”. As the series was being developed, Riordan was “rediscovering the voices of the characters through the dedicated trio of young actors” – Walter Scobell, Leah Sava Jeffries and Aryan Simhadri – “who are so important to the show”. When Riordan began writing, their versions of the characters “started to show up in the [new] books and to permeate it in a very interesting way”.

Riordan’s experience with the TV adaptation was influential over the way he approached the writing process too. “I have learned a great deal about writing from the point of view of screenwriters,” he says. “It was not a world I was familiar with at all, so I had to figure out the lingo, the customs, how things work. It was very enlightening, and I came back to being a novelist with a different set of tools.”

Percy Jackson & the Olympians is available on Disney+ from Wednesday, December 20th; Percy Jackson: The Chalice of the Gods is published by Puffin