Author: Rick Riordan

 

Bibliography

• Richard Russell Riordan Jr. better known as Rick Riordan is The New York Times bestselling American author of the Percy Jackson and Olympians series. Born on June 5, 1964, Rick Riordan grew up in Texas.
• Graduated from University of Texas in Austin majoring in English and history.

• Chose teaching for a career. For 15 years Rick taught English, history and Greek mythology at various middle schools
• In 2002, he was presented the St. Mary’s Hall’s first Master Teacher Award for his exceptional teaching services.
• Childhood Influences: The first book which heavily impacted riordan was the Lord of the Rings. He began to gain an interest for  Greek and Norse mythology since middle school. He read mostly fantasy and science fiction in high school, then got interested in mysteries in college.
• The first book in the Percy Jackson series was The Lightning Thief and it was released in June 2005 and his work was noticed not to long after that.

 

Writing Style

• Genre of writing is mostly fantasy/mythological, or adventurous.
• Incorporates a lot of historical information
• Characters are usually written in 1st person view or 3rd person limited.
• Underlying themes in his work is creating complex characters.
• Majorly Focuses on character development and creating one’s identity.
• Typically his writing is light-hearted and humorous

 

Published Books

As an author, he is known for writing his popular book series called “Percy Jackson & the Olympians”.

But along with that he has written many best selling book series like:

• Percy Jackson Chronicles
• The Heroes Of Olympus
• The Kane Chronicles
• Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard
• The Trials of Apollo
• Tres Navarre

 

Writing Advice

Rick Riordan emphasizes on three points:

1. Read a lot.
2. Practice. You have to write every day.
3. Never give up

 

Rick Riordan states: If you write well, you have already set yourself apart from 99% of what agents and editors see every day.

“Below are some notes on what I call “sentence level competence” — the ability to craft prose at the most basic level. These tips reflect the most common problems I’ve observed in unpublished manuscripts.”

Sentence-Level Competence:

“sentence focus — the subjects of all clauses should be appropriate to the content of the sentence. Favor the concrete over the abstract, the antecedent over the pronoun.”

Example: It was a sunny day. (the subject “it” is boring and vague.) Better: The sky was brilliant blue. (Here the subject is sky, which is what the sentence was supposed to be about.)

 

Quotation:

“Chaos is impatient. It’s random. And above all it’s selfish. It tears down everything just for the sake of change, feeding on itself in constant hunger. But chaos can also be appealing. It tempts you to believe that nothing matters except what you want.”

 

My Emulation:

Stress is like a whirlwind that rises up out of my body and blinds my eyes. Deafens my ears. Makes the world empty of substance. There is a threshold of threat that when exceeded, obliterates the world.It really does. There is a white-out of reality, a panicked paintbrush applied to everything that exists. It feels like chaos and broken mirrors and pieces of glass everywhere. It looks like flat cardboard. All is flat. Nothing is full, nothing is solid, whole, substantial. It’s a pretend world. The real world is gone.Except today. It appeared.  “Follow me, “ it whispered and it lured me in. I can take you to a place that is sensible, coherent. A place you know, are familiar with. Do you remember? Do you remember waking up and the world made sense?And your foot could reach out of bed and actually touch the ground? The ground, the real ground. What about your stomach? No butterflies. No lurching. No fright of all that is, all that is around you. No whited out eyes, no incomprehensibility of all that is, and was, and ever will be. “Do you remember when the air smelled as if you knew it like a friend? And the air came from places you understood. For real.There was a time like that. But that time is gone and you will be too. It’s not too late to make the right choice.