Rick Riordan on What Keeps Percy Jackson Interesting After All This Time

Rick Riordan’s first Percy Jackson novel, The Lightning Thief, was published in 2005. The series it spawned has been translated into forty-two languages and has sold more than thirty million copies in the United States alone. (So far.) But though Riordan has become a household name thanks to this character, the twelve-year-old modern-day son of the ancient Greek god Poseidon, his career contains multitudes. A former middle school teacher who specialized in English and history, he published several mysteries for adults before writing Percy Jackson, which began as a series of bedtime stories for his son. 

There are currently 18 books in Riordan’s sprawling fictional universe, spread across three different series. Wrath of the Triple Goddess, the second installment in his trilogy of senior year adventures featuring Percy and his friends, as our favorite demigod works to complete three trials that will earn him recommendation letters for college. After the events of the original Percy Jackson series, these stories feel delightfully low-stakes, a genuinely fun and fizzy adventure that is as much about the friendship at the series’ core and the challenges of growing up as the tasks the heroes are meant to perform. 

We got the chance to sit down with Riordan himself to chat about Wrath of the Triple Goddess, how the Disney+ series has changed his approach to writing, when we might see Magnus Chase or the Kane Chronicles brought to life onscreen, and lots more. 

Paste Magazine: Rick, what I wanted to start with is— you are terrifyingly busy. How do you find time to focus on writing a book while you’re doing so many other things?

Rick Riordan: It’s a fair question. If I ever figure it out, I’ll let you know. [laughs] 

Actually, I find that the writing of the books is really helpful and therapeutic when I’m doing all the other stuff, like all the TV series. Because it’s just a different kind of busy and it requires a different skill set. It’s also something I can control on my own. I can control what goes into the book. When you move over to the TV side, that’s such a team sport. There are so many more people involved, and it’s just a very different feeling. So it’s kind of nice to go back and forth. 

I also find that one informs the other and helps keep me inspired. I’ll be working on a book and I’ll think, “Oh, hey, this would be fun to talk about in a television show.” Or vice versa. So it’s not quite as bad as you might think. The other thing is, I really love what I do and I love telling stories and it’s a dream job, so I’m not going to complain.

Paste: I put out a call for questions on Twitter when I found out I was going to be doing this interview and I was genuinely overwhelmed by how many people—from across the age and interest spectrum just love the series and its characters. What do you think it is about the stories of Percy and his friends that speak so deeply to people?

Riordan: Honestly, it blows my mind. I never expected this kind of longevity or reach for Percy. Remember, it was just a bedtime story for my son when he was nine, and it was just a very personal story that I was telling him to try to make him feel better about where he was at that point in his life. 

And it’s stayed alive because that core of trying to make sense of who you are and struggling and finding out that you have strengths that you didn’t maybe know about or appreciate, that just resonated and people could relate to that. It also doesn’t hurt to have the Greek mythology angle. Those stories are around after however many thousands of years, we’re still telling them, still drawing inspiration from them. Because they’re just very human stories. And humans really haven’t changed all that much. So that’s a kind of built-in advantage that I can’t take credit for, but it helps.

Paste: What keeps you, as a writer, coming back to the character of Percy specifically? What is it that makes you want to keep writing about him?

Riordan: Percy is like a member of my family at this point. He’s based on my son, but he’s also based on my personality. His voice is very close to my own, his relationship to Annabeth is very much based on my relationship with my wife. We were high school sweethearts, met at 16, and so he’s interwoven into my life,  it would be hard not to have him be part of it. 

What keeps it interesting to me, I think, is that I keep looking for different angles in, things that excite me, challenges that are a little bit different. Within the new series, it had been years since I tried to write from Percy’s point of view, and I honestly didn’t know if I still could do it. Could I recapture that voice from 12 years ago and tell a story from the point of view of a 17-year-old Percy rather than a slightly younger kid? That was the challenge, the dream. It helped that we were doing the television series at the same time because we were reinventing Percy there from the ground up again, and that’s kind of the same thing I was doing with the new series. So one thing informed the other and made it inspirational to be telling these stories again.

Paste: The show is based on Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief, so it’s the beginning of Percy’s story, while these latest books are set at a very different time in his life. I say that like 17 is the end of your life or something, of course it’s not, but it’s a very different experience. But how has it been sort of seeing him from both sides now, to steal a line from Joni Mitchell?

Riordan: Honestly, it’s great. And, as I said, they sort of cross-pollinate. Now that the show is underway and I’ve gotten to know the cast and they’re so good at embodying the characters when I’m writing the books, I hear their voices and I imagine them when I’m creating Percy and Annabeth, and Grover. And it brings a new life, a new freshness to the characters. 

It also helps me when I’m writing the books to go back to the TV show and see the things that I wrote 15 years ago in a new light and think, “Oh, this might be a kind of an interesting spin to freshen up the story’. I didn’t think about this back in 2006, but now that I’ve lived with this story for so long, maybe we can highlight these things a little bit more.’

Paste: I genuinely love that this new trilogy is a little lower stakes for Percy in the sense that… well, college is a big deal for teenagers, obviously. So for him, the stakes are very high, but the overall stakes of the story—we’re not fighting to save the world here, we’re just trying to get into college. And to go from a war with the gods to pet sitting is quite a swerve. Tell me a little bit about that change in perspective. 

Riordan: It is strangely challenging to write a lower-stakes book like that—I’m so used to the big set pieces and the huge save the world battles. But that also felt like a fun challenge. Could I write a book that was not about saving the world but had the same characters? Could I write a book that was more like a slice-of-life story, something inside the life of the average demigod—f there is such a thing as an average demigod—in high school? 

And I just had to be really upfront right at the beginning with the readers and say, “This is a different kind of book. You need to understand, when you go into this, this is not Percy trying to save the world. The kid’s just trying to get into college. But what you will find is it’s almost just difficult.” And anybody who’s ever tried to apply for college can totally get that.

Paste: Halloween is my favorite time of year always. It’s a great holiday. You don’t have to do anything with your family and there’s candy, you don’t have to buy people stuff, you get to wear costumes. What made you want to lean into that spooky season vibe?

Riordan: Same, I love October. I love the Fall, and I love Halloween, always have, it’s just fantastic. It also just made sense. I wanted to do Hecate, the goddess of magic and goddess of witchcraft, it had to be set during the fall of a school year. What are you going to do? It’s got to be October, right? You got to lean into Halloween, it was the only thing that made sense, that that’s when Hecate would be doing her world tour. 

It was just fun. This is a part of life that everybody who’s had that typical American calendar ingrained in their lives is familiar with, but we’ve never seen Percy and friends at that time of year. So what is that like, when you have a party and you’re not sure who’s in costume and who’s actually a monster, that could be really interesting. 

Paste: With as long as this series and its spin-offs and things have been happening, sometimes simultaneously, sometimes not, you have basically been adding lore to this world for decades now. How in the world do you keep everything straight? Do you have a flow chart? Please, please say yes.

Riordan: In the old days, I did actually have flow charts! I don’t do that anymore, but when I was starting, yes, I did use a flow chart program because I am a very visual thinker, and it did help. Now, it’s just so ingrained in me that I hope that, between me and my editor and the copy editors, we can keep me on track. That someone will say, “Oh, no, actually, Rick, you can’t say that because back in book four, you said this thing instead.”

Paste: Because this story is slotted into a very specific place in the series’ chronology, to that had to have been extra stressful. 

Riordan: It was a challenge, but, as you can tell, probably from me talking, I enjoy a challenge. This is what gets me up in the morning. It’s like, “Oh, cool. What do I get to tackle today?” It’s fun. And the other nice thing is, again, I’m basing it on Greek mythology. I try not to deviate substantially from what it says in the primary sources. So I can always go back to that if I forget what are these monsters about or what that goddess did? I can just go back to the source.

Paste: Can you tell us anything about where the series goes from here? I’m assuming this is a trilogy. I don’t know that anybody has officially said that. But I’m just guessing.

Riordan: Well, yeah, that’s fair. I did originally pitch it as three recommendation letters, so it would be really mean of me to not at least give him a shot at getting that third letter. So yes, the third one is outlined. It will, at some point, come out. I have not started writing it yet. 

The other stuff, as you mentioned, has been keeping me pretty busy, but it will be out at some point and we’ll see the third installment.

Paste: Can you tease anything for me about this third book that doesn’t exist yet?

Riordan: Well, it’ll be a quest, obviously, from another God to get a recommendation letter. Right now I can’t tease much more than that other than you’re going to see some other characters come back from the past that we haven’t seen in quite a while, and it might be quite a shake-up for Percy.

Paste: Because you do have so many other irons in the fire, so to speak, are you planning more in the Magnus Chase world or the Kane Chronicles? Where are we with that?

Riordan  I would love to revisit both of those series. Nothing on the front burner right now, simply because the TV stuff is still up and running that it’s taking a lot of my bandwidth, which is great. It’s a wonderful thing. We are trying to get the Kane Chronicles up and running on the TV side. Very early days Not much to report.

Paste: That’s something else I was going to ask you—whether you would want to adapt either of those series for TV. Because we are in the time of cinematic universes after all. 

Riordan: Really honestly, I would consider it a huge win if we just got five seasons of Percy Jackson. These days in television….it’s hard. We’re off to a great start, so I’m optimistic. But anyway, a cinematic universe…that’s a ways down the line I would think. We are having conversations about Kane, and I’m optimistic that we might be able to get that up and running. There might be other projects that are coming in the pipeline that are just in the nascent, maybe let’s think about it stage right now. 

Magnus Chase, I would love to see. I’m intentionally holding that back for now, just because that’s one too many balls in the air for me to juggle. And  I don’t want to do that to Magnus. If we do that as a TV show, I want it to be when I have a little bit of space to do it right. So, we’ll just have to see.

Paste: Most of your career has been spent writing about mythology in some form or other. We’ve done Greek mythology, Norse mythology, and even some Egyptian mythology. Is there a sub-genre or vertical that you would like to play in and maybe haven’t gotten the chance to do so yet?

Riordan: Well, I’m sure there is. What that would be, I’m not quite sure. During the pandemic, I got to write Daughter of the Deep, which was my first science fiction, which was an homage to Jules Verne and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. That was a lot of fun, totally different, and no mythology involved, but it scratched an itch for me that I didn’t even know that I had.  I started my career as an adult writer of private eye novels, so I actually wrote seven of those before I ever jumped into Percy Jackson. So I’ve done that. So I’ve already dipped my feet into different things. 

I do think that middle-grade fantasy is my sweet spot. I think I have enough of a track record now that I can say, “Okay, yeah, this is probably what I do the best.” But I’d love to try different things. It’s just a question of what gets on the front burner in terms of something that is really burning to be written.

Paste: It sounds like weirdly running a TV show is hard work or something. [laughs] Speaking of the show, how has fandom reaction been to it all—and I mean book fandom, really, because a lot of the time you get adaptations where book readers are really resistant. But I feel like this show gets a lot of the soul of the books right. How has the reaction for you, as the author, been from your readers toward the show?

Riordan: Overwhelmingly positive. Overwhelmingly positive. Of course, you’re never going to please everybody, and I totally get that. I am a fanatic of books too, and I am that person who always says, “Well, the book was better.”

Paste: Same. But for me, it’s usually more of a “the spirit versus the letter of the law” kind of thing. You know what I mean?

Riordan: That’s kind of a spectrum and everybody’s on a different place on that. How literal does the translation need to be to make you happy? Everybody has a different answer and some things are more important to some fans than other fans. I have come to respect that and appreciate that the longer I work in the TV space. 

My wife and I have been executive producing now for four years, and I’ve gained a lot of respect for the people who work in that field. It’s not my field. I will never call myself a Hollywood person. It’s not my natural environment, but I do respect all the work that goes on there, and I understand it more now. So I see firsthand how difficult it is to adapt something and the zillion ways that things can go wrong. And I also understand now how impossible it is to do a word-for-word translation. You can’t do it. There’s no way. They are two different creative languages, and sometimes when you’re translating from one language to another, to have the same meaning, you have to say it a different way because literal sense of the words just doesn’t work. So I understand that. I appreciate it. And sure, some fans will say, “Well, how come this isn’t in there?” And I say, “Yeah, I know. We didn’t have that. That detail didn’t make it in. There just literally wasn’t room for it. And I know, I like that detail too.” But again, that’s what the books are for. They give you a different scope.

Paste:  You dedicated the first book in this new trilogy to the leads of the Percy Jackson TV series, and I have to admit, I’m obsessed with them. They seem so, I don’t mean worldly in a grown-up sense, but really capable of handling everything that has come along with being in the show. And it’s clear how much you just adore all three of them. How has working with them shaped or impacted their voices in the show for you?

Riordan: I love them all. They are like part of my family now. And we were very clear, all of the producers, the executives, everybody was on the same page with the fact that it’s great if we make a good show, but our first priority, if we’re using young actors, is we have to protect them. We have to nurture them, and we have to make an environment where they can be okay. 

Because being an actor is a lot, and we all have heard horror stories about what happens when young actors are not supported, are not protected from the world. So it’s one of those, “it takes a village” kind of things where everybody’s first job is to take care of our family, our actors. They have great families of their own that are very supportive and also provide structure and support and stability, and we try to augment that as best we can. But the kids are, as you say, they’re worldly in the sense that they’re very grounded, they’re very real, and they have a good perspective on all of the craziness that goes on around television. And I think they’re able to compartmentalize that and just be kids, which is what we want for them.

But yes, their voices have affected the way I write the books. I hear them now in my head as I’m writing new novels with these characters, and I think they have brought a new freshness and vitality to the stories that I wrote before they were born.

Paste: I always end my interviews by asking people the same question: What are you reading right now? I don’t think my list of things to read needs to get any longer, but I love to know what the people whose work I admire are reading in their spare time. 

Riordan: I usually have multiple books going at the same time. I’m reading a great fantasy novel right now by Mai Corland, which is called Five Broken Blades.

Paste: Yes, that book is so good! I cannot wait for the sequel.

Riordan: I’m about halfway through, so don’t tell me how it ends because I really love it. You Dreamed of Empires is another one I’m as a Spanish translation, it’s about the meeting between Cortes and Montezuma, and it’s really lovely. It’s done very, very well. And then, I’m usually also reading something in Italian because I study Italian and I like to keep my skills up. So I just started a thriller by Donato Carrisi called, in English, the House of Voices, which is very creepy. 

Percy Jackson and the Olympians: Wrath of the Triple Goddess is available now wherever books are sold. 

Lacy Baugher Milas is the Books Editor at Paste Magazine, but loves nerding out about all sorts of pop culture. You can find her on Twitter @LacyMB