I wanted to live in Rick Riordan’s mythical worlds of demigods, magicians, clue hunters, and Valhalla Vikings. His work has inspired, impacted, and educated thousands, and his creativity seems endless.
Rick Riordan is the author of the renowned Percy Jackson and the Olympians, The Heroes of Olympus, the Kane Chronicles, Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard, The 39 Clues, The Trials of Apollo, Tres Navarre, Daughter of the Deep, and The Sun and the Star series. He has over 190 million copies in print globally, with rights sold in over 37 countries. Riordan is also extensively invested in bringing his works to the silver screen. He and his wife are executive producers of TV/film adaptations of Percy Jackson, the Kane Chronicles, and the Daughter of the Deep. Rick Riordan began as an English and history teacher and taught in the San Francisco Bay and Texas for 15 years. He has chosen now to step away from teaching and focus on writing. However, he always stayed an educator.
From one artist to another, Faith Ringgold’s journey, written in her memoir, We Flew Over the Bridge, reveals striking similarities between the two authors and creatives in their inspiration and creative processes. Faith Ringgold is an artist and writer. She has written children’s books and a memoir and has created an extensive body of work, including various mediums, but much of her work is produced from quilts. A successful artist who grew up in Harlem during the Harlem Renaissance, Faith was surrounded by art and artists. However, she makes it very clear that she was an educator in addition to her artistry. In her memoir, she writes, “We are a family of teachers,” and that her daughters, too, had a “natural facility for communicating knowledge and ideas.” Faith continues to draw attention to this aim: a communication of ideas. It seems to be her why, her inspiration. And yet it extends further, communication for education. As a writer, Faith is a crafter of stories, explaining worlds, designing characters, and illustrating hardship, pain, and love. Rick, too, clearly demonstrates why it is set on education - he was a teacher for 15 years. He reports in an interview that he left the classroom to focus on writing full-time. He says, “Hopefully, I can get more kids interested in reading mythology than I ever did as a teacher.” Rick and Faith display a clear inspiration within their creative process. Both have created works for adults and children, but it seems that channeling their creativity into a medium specifically for children allows them to create art for a greater purpose. Their creativity is a way to serve and to educate. Rick’s journey may have begun in a classroom. Still, both he and Faith have expanded the canon definition of learning and stretched it to the world beyond, their teachings percolating into the daily lives of their students - all who pick up their writings and see their works.
Rick and Faith also talk about having a bedrock of skill sets that uniquely allowed them to create their art and engage in the creative process. Rick’s skills were centered around his experiences. He was an English and mythology teacher, a camp counselor, and a father. All these lived experiences, these passions, and this knowledge combined to yield a creative result. Rick grew up in a creative family; his parents were both artists, and he was given the time and space to be creative. He describes being a “reluctant reader” until he began reading mythology and fantasy, thus deciding then and there to become a writer at thirteen, even submitting a work to a publishing company. He then abandoned writing in college and “channeled [his] creative energy” into being the lead singer of a folk rock band. However, after becoming a teacher, he continued to read mystery books, which led to his first published work. The work was inspired by his homesickness for San Antonio, Texas, where he set Big Red Tequila. He describes the book as just writing itself in a moment of inspiration. The Percy Jackson series was much the same way, inspired in three nights by his son.
Haley Riordian loved mythology and one night asked Rick to tell him a bedtime story he had not heard before because his father had exhausted the telling of the myths he knew. Rick then became a collector. Collecting past experiences to combine into his work. While teaching mythology in middle school, he had done an activity where his students were asked to write about what it would be like to be a demigod, a child of one of the gods. He then borrowed from his camp counselor days as the music director at a summer camp and developed the idea for camp half-blood. Rick also borrowed from his experience as a father with a son who was struggling with dyslexia and ADHD and decided then and there to create a character with whom his son could relate. Rick’s unique personality inspired the creation, but it was his empathy and love for his son that ultimately solidified the mythical demigod Percy Jackson, into being.
Faith grew in and around Harlem. Her childhood and early adult life were spent amongst Big C creatives who shook loose the foundations of what up until then was known as art and rebuilt out of the rubble new forms. Creatives like Walter White, W.E.B. Du Bois, Aaron Douglas, and Roy Wilkins resided within her neighborhood. Her first husband, Earl Wallace, a classically trained musician, was friends with and aided musicians like Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins, Charlie Parker, and Jackie MacLean with transpositions and arrangements of their works. Faith’s mother was a Harlem Renaissance fashion designer, and she was encouraged to be creative as a child. Working on drawing, paintings, and sewing, as well as attending art classes in college, she developed artist skills early in life, but more so, her personality, an aspect involved in the creative process, drove her to be challenged and propelled by the work of those around her, causing her to improve her own. Faith describes an art class she attended in college where she was asked to decorate/design a playing card. Her classmates were using new mediums and techniques which she had not learned. She describes loving the competition and working to keep up with the times. Faith describes, too, that she enjoyed creating things in relation to others, working off her classmates, and striving to do better. This is a unique facet of her personality. She was brought up in a creative space that allowed for artistry to bloom - she took from that the desire to create art, good art, and do it in competition with some of the most prominent up-and-coming artists in Harlem. Both creatives grew up in an environment that cultivated their artistic personalities. They were inspired by the people around them and their audience - whether that be children, college art professors, or people with dyslexia/ADHD - to create meaningful art. Their unique personalities - one competitive, one empathetic - and artistic personality traits allowed them to develop art.
Their creative processes also involved the Geneplore model of trying and learning, stepping back and revising. Faith talks early on in her memoir about hard work. This quote was taken from a commencement speech she gave, “The harder you work, the more talented you will become because your talent can only be defined by you.” Rick’s writing process fits exactly within her words and the process she lays out. He first conducts research and then outlines his story, which takes about a month. He writes for five months on a rough draft and then spends revising the rest of the year. This is the Geneplore model in which one generates art, steps back, and incubates, giving their mind time to process and unconsciously form new creative ideas and then explore, revising what they’ve created. But it also fits Faith’s creative model. He first worked hard to the point where he improved, just as Faith did too in her art classes. But Rick defines within his process a stopping point where, during the revision process, he makes his work the best it can become, and then it gets published. Both creatives faced rejection - Faith from a professor who told her that she was no artist and Rick from the publishing companies; both artists ultimately worked hard enough to create a product they deemed worthy and that the public could consume.
Both creatives created pieces inspired by their surroundings and fashion for education. Their work is inspiring in and of itself and will continue to teach those in the ages to come.
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The connection you have revealed between teaching and artistic expression is incredibly interesting. In The Creative Spark, Fuentes explains how apprentice-style learning allowed early hominids to create useful tools and pass on their knowledge. Over time, this process could create diverging, novel techniques that were informed by observed tradition, but resulted from a moment of creativity. This is much how Riordan and Ringgold source their ideas to create new products.
ReplyDeleteI appreciate how you connect these creatives and discuss how they make creativity accessible. I have been a fan of Rick Riordan since middle school and I have always enjoyed how he made the Greek myths feel modern and relevant. In fact, I made my mom listen to the 15 hour audiobook of "Percy Jackson's Greek Heroes" and she still talks about it. My focus book is "The Creative Spark," and Fuentes describes how art has been seen throughout time as frivolous because it is often associated with wealth and the ability to afford the time to enjoy art. However, Rick Riordan shows how important art can be as a method of education and keeping history alive. Art can be a way to reach people who may otherwise not have the opportunity or interest in learning about culture and history. I also appreciate how you researched what life factors led these authors to write. Writing is an essential yet often overlooked artform that has shaped humanity into what we know it as today, and we should continue to praise the artists who write.
ReplyDeleteThe way you intertwined both creatives artistic products with their love/inspiration from children was fascinating to me. I too have been a fan of Rick Riordan since I was little and thoroughly enjoyed watching the "Percy Jackson and the Olympians" show on Disney+. Percy took on a whole new meaning with the knowledge that he is based off of Riordan's own child. Nick Cave also draws inspiration from his children in many of his songs. Cave says that his experiences with his son's death embedded themselves in his newer music as well as inspiring his lyrics. This demonstrates how influential children and those close to us can be on our creative outputs, especially in the cases of Ringgold, Riordan and Cave.
ReplyDeleteI really liked how you went into the detail of their creative processes. It was interesting to see how such an amazing series like Percy Jackson came to be. I also really appreciated seeing the different domains and experiences that contributed to both Riordan's and Ringgold's creative works. The notion that creative works come from a creator acting as a collector is very interesting. In my focus book, The Creative Act: A Way of Being, Rick Rubin talks about how sometimes creativity comes from filtering information that we perceive in a way unique to us and then presenting it in a new way. I feel that with Riordan's creative process that you described, this notion of presenting things he already knew about, but in a completely new way, is fitting.
ReplyDeleteYour analysis of his creative process, along with Faith Ringgold, was fascinating. My favorite part was the moment he was inspired. I always wondered where he got the inspiration to write these books. I love that the story's conception came from a moment with his son but was also a product of all his experiences. This reminds me of what Rick Rubin discusses in his book. Rubin discusses the concept of awareness. He argues that we do not have complete control of what happens in our lives, but we do have control of our ability to be aware. While Riordan did not have control of the story his son wanted to hear; however, he did have the ability to recognize the creative spark.
ReplyDeleteI've long left reading Riordan's works, but I do vividly remember being an avid reader of his-- always getting the first print copies of the Heroes of Olympus series. I still have a very worn version of The House of Hades on my desk.
ReplyDeleteOne think about Riordan's works is how impactful they were in having a diverse cast-- in PJO, the campers were explicitly dyslexic and had ADHD, in Heroes of Olympus, Nico di Angelo was the first overtly gay character I ever encountered (I was in the sixth grade in a converstive Catholic middle school, People Being Gay was revolutionary to my middle school self) and in the Magnus Chase series, I know one of the characters is explicitly genderfluid. Percy Jackson is often considered to be one of the best pieces of young adult fiction, and I think that is due to representation and exposure Riordan allowed in all of his works. Compare this to Rowling's only Asian character being named Cho Chang of all thing, and- it's just nice to have an author that isn't bigoted and using their platform poorly.