Fantasy world beckons

JOHN STEPHENS, formerly a writer, director and producer on smash-hit TV shows The OC and Gilmore Girls says, “It really is a Golden Age of television right now.

But it’s only that way in specific cases. If you’re David Chase, say, who created The Sopranos, or Matt Weiner who made Mad Men, or Damon Lindelof, who made Lost, it’s a really exciting time.”

The 35-year-old Stephens spent 10 long years building a career in TV. So why has he jumped ship to write kids’ fantasy novels at a time when Salman Rushdie, for example, is going in the other direction, and abandoning fiction to write for TV?

“It’s easy to find a lot of 40-something embittered screen writers in Hollywood,” he says, “who spent their careers working really hard to become really good at something that was somebody else’s voice. It’s ventriloquism, it really is. You become a gun for hire. And when you’re a writer, you have to be really careful about nourishing whatever bit of creative flame you have.”

Apart from his personal desire to write books (“I’d always wanted to be a novelist, that was the first dream I can really remember having,” he says) Stephens’ decision was also fuelled by very pragmatic commercial reasons, not least of which is the collapse of network TV revenues in the US.

“Network TV in America has changed dramatically in the last five years or so, especially on the subscription channels, which do the really interesting programming,” he says. “And network audiences in America have just been shrinking and shrinking, to the point where you start asking, ‘Okay, where’s the bottom here? At what point does this business model no longer become feasible?’. I really don’t understand where people are making money on network TV anymore.

“The push in network TV these days is always to make another Lost, that large show that’s going to be a global hit. But when you’re trying to appeal to everybody in the world, you do tend to flatten out the creative edges. Lost was a great show — but as a mainstream audience shrinks and shrinks, it becomes more and more conservative. And you don’t want to do anything that’s going to cut off any more edges of your audience.

“For years now network TV has been supporting itself on DVD sales, they recoup a lot of money that way. But that’s disappeared now, because everyone can get video on demand, or download the episode from the web. DVD sales have collapsed in the last few years. You can jump past watching the show on TV, wait until it’s over, buy the box-set. But in two years or so, you’ll be able to just download the whole series in whatever week you want to do it. And who then will buy DVDs?”

A youthful-looking 35, with a young family to support, Stephens took a huge leap of faith when stepping away from his successful TV career to write children’s fiction. The result, The Emerald Atlas, is the first in a proposed trilogy that has already been compared to Harry Potter and Philip Pullman’s Northern Lights books.

It’s a tale about three orphaned siblings, Kate, Michael and Emma, who time-travel in a bid to find their missing parents, in the process battling a supernatural evil. It seems a long way from The OC, but Stephens argues that his TV and fiction writing have much in common.

“When you write for children, or Gilmore Girls or The OC,” he says, “you’re always fundamentally telling a coming-of-age story. Because kids’ lives at that point have a natural dramatic arc, they’re making choices that are going to determine who they’ll be for the rest of their lives … When you’re that age, the things that are happening to you are happening for the first time, the first kiss, the first time you fall in love, it’s the first time it’s happened to anybody (laughs). It’s very intense.”

Moreover, writing for TV honed his dramatic instincts, particularly the need for constant twists and turns.

“My favourite writer is Dickens,” he says, “and you know the way he would serialise his novels, there’d be a cliff-hanger at the end of every chapter, except you’d be waiting for a whole month for the next chapter to start … So that whole Scheherazade storytelling — don’t kill me and I’ll tell you what happens — that’s just part of my storytelling DNA.”

One charming aspect of a beautifully crafted novel is the occasional knowing nod to adult humour, which Stephens attributes to the playwright Martin McDonagh. “He’s really such a funny writer. There’s tension behind the scenes, but you’re never sure what’s going to happen, because his dialogue is so funny, so black.”

Stephens is also anxious to include adult readers in his novels, much in the same way as animated movies tend to do these days.

“You saw Wall-E, right? The beginning of that movie is fairly difficult and adult, and Wall-E’s watching an old movie, a musical from the ’50s, and I thought, ‘Wow, they’ve really set the bar pretty high there.’ But I think that it shows you don’t have to talk down to kids. If they don’t fully understand everything immediately, that’s fine. They should have to think about it, and reach for the meaning, ask their parents, ‘What does this mean?’”

The most endearing aspect of The Emerald Atlas, however, is that Stephens makes an actual book the ‘magical hardware’, as he puts it.

“When you’re growing up,” he says, “and you’re a passionate reader, books almost become that magical wardrobe for you, providing access to the magical lands. So, yeah, I guess I just made that metaphor more explicit by having the book legitimately be the time-travelling ‘hardware’. Because books, when I was growing up, were what made me want to become a writer. It was like, this is Frodo’s ring in real life. And as well as that, we live in a world now where it almost seems like books are in danger, not just from TV and movies, but ebooks too. And I think the physical book is still a really precious thing.”

* John Stephens’ The Emerald Atlas is published by Doubleday.