Riding with dinosaurs: an interview with Jeff Norton

Fans of Jeff Norton’s thrilling Dino Knights chapter books owe a big thank you to his son, Torin, for sparking the idea that led to the series, and its enthralling mix of knights and dinosaurs. It was during one middle of the night ‘playdate’ when Torin was a toddler that he took a plastic knight and popped it on the back of one of his dinosaur toys. ‘As soon as he did it, I thought, “That’s brilliant!”,’ says Jeff, ‘and that night before I went back to bed, I drew a picture of it. I’ve always loved ‘what if’ stories and I was immediately wondering what this world would be like, a world where maybe the meteor that wiped out the dinosaurs just ever so slightly missed Earth.’  The world he created sees dinosaurs living alongside humans, with some domesticated to be ridden like horses. The books star Henry Fairchild, promoted from dinosaur stable boy to Dino Knight in the first book of the series, and part of a troop of brave young people always ready to defend their homeland, Brecklan. In each of the now three books – Dino Knights Extinction is just out –  they face different foes, winning out as much through teamwork as fighting skills, knights and their dino steeds all established as well-rounded characters.

Henry is a particularly appealing lead, with a courteousness the best of the Round Table would recognise, and a talent for winning over opponents through reasoning. ‘There’s a lot of protagonists in literature and in film and television, particularly young male protagonists, where it’s all about fighting and winning somebody over through physicality,’ says Jeff. ‘I wanted to have somebody who, deep down, is really focused on trying to do the right thing and to live by a code of honour, which is why the knight setting worked so well. It was important to me that Henry always tries to do what he thinks is right and honourable and that really plays out in the third book, Dino Knights Extinction, because they come up against some people you could say are just purely evil.’ This is The Guild, a warlike lot whose leaders are quite happy to press gang their own people and determined to wipe out the dinosaurs of the Dry Lands in their efforts to conquer the territory.

‘I think the other lesson I’ve been trying to weave into the stories is that you can’t win everybody over; you will meet people in your life who are simply malevolent, while there are other people who are just going through their own thing or have their own motivations, and them maybe you can get on side. Understanding the difference and navigating that is really important, particularly for young boys.’

As a boy, he was a reluctant reader and vividly recalls the satisfaction of making it to the end of a book, highlighting the Choose Your Own Adventure series as his way into reading. In a neat twist of fate, that very series was a starting point in his highly successful career as a film and TV producer. Despite always being interested in storytelling and creative writing, Jeff wasn’t encouraged into the field. ‘My father was the first person in our family to go to university and so the emphasis was very much on finding a stable profession.’ His father would have loved for him to be a lawyer, but he chose advertising – ‘the most creative job I could find in a corporate environment’ – but after seven or so years, undertook a complete career pivot and moved into film and television, starting at the very bottom, ‘pushing the mailcart’. ‘I quickly found opportunities within what is called creative development, which is like the editorial side of the business.’ He realised though how insecure the job was: ‘I saw a lot of people getting fired, people I admired and people whose jobs I was interested in were basically very easily dismissed. My big lesson was to try and get a position that I couldn’t get fired from, and the only way to do that was to own it.’ Setting up on his own, he optioned the rights to the Choose Your Own Adventure books and saw them turned them into an interactive DVD movie. Many more successful book to screen adaptations have followed, including the hugely popular Geek Girl series and he was speaking to me from the set of his latest project, Finding Her Edge, a romantic sports novel set in the world of elite figure skating by Jennifer Iacopelli.

Jeff has also had real success as a book packager. Amongst series developed for publishers are Princess Ponies devised for Bloomsbury and written with Julie Sykes. These too helped in the creation of Dino Knights as epic, swashbuckling stuff but written as accessible chapter books and with boys like he used to be in mind. ‘I think boys always have to feel like they’re winning at something and so I wanted the books to feel like a big book, even though they’re chapter books and about 10,000 words. I wanted a format that would make a younger reader feel successful in the same way I felt when I read the Choose Your Own Adventure books, proud at having read a whole book even though I was reading it in small chunks.’

With reading for pleasure an increasingly pressing issue, I ask what he think is causing the drop off in young people’s reading? ‘I think there’s two reasons. The first thing that we cannot ignore is the addictive dopamine of the phone. I remember when I first moved to London in 2006. Commuting on the tube, pretty much everybody had a book. I was back for a couple of weeks at Christmas and on the tube and I barely saw one book. Almost everybody was playing a game or doing something on their phone. And the addictive nature and the way that it triggers the dopamine response in the brain cannot be underestimated. I tell my own kids, there are thousands of the very best, most highly paid people in the world working every day around the clock to make this thing, the phone in your hand, the most addictive it can be.’

‘The second thing I believe very strongly is that we put too much emphasis on the reading and not enough on the pleasure. There are lots of books that are promoted by our industry, that win awards, that aren’t that fun to read, that actually feel like homework. And if you’re competing with the screen, and you’re serving up books that aren’t that fun or aren’t that emotionally satisfying, but are “good for you”, I think we’re doing ourselves a disservice as an industry.’

‘With Dino Knights it was my goal to create a chapter book series that is just rip-roaring fun, with something happening every couple of pages. There are cliffhangers, turns in the story, you want to know what’s going to happen next. To me, that’s the pleasure part of reading for pleasure and it’s something I can control. As a parent, I can try and control access to the screen, and there are debates going on in the UK about limiting social media and screen access. I don’t have direct control over that, but I do have direct control over how exciting Chapter 4 can be.’

Are there things the publishing industry can learn from the world of film and TV? ‘It never ceases to amaze me that I get an e-mail from Netflix pretty much every day with recommendations. The fact that a platform has a direct communication with me is huge. And I would love to see what the publishing industry could try to do to replicate that direct relationship with the consumer in a meaningful way.’

‘On the creative side of things, I think one of the things that’s interesting to me is the way these stories are told, particularly on the streaming platforms, and the show I’m making right now is a good example of this. We’ve gone back to Dickens, in effect telling a serialised story. It’s broken up into ‘chapters’ with twists and cliffhangers, certainly at the end of every episode, but also within the acts, and even within smaller beats in the acts, where you’re keeping the viewer engaged with the story and with the characters in a way that is propulsive. I think that’s where the binge viewing phenomena comes from, the way the storytelling is structured to keep you watching and wanting to play the next episode. It’s interesting to me that this actually came from the world of publishing, from the magazine serialised narrative of Charles Dickens and others.

‘I would love to see the publishing world find its way back to that by making sure that the author and the editor are always thinking about the drop off rate. In television today you’re always focused on keeping viewer engaged and I don’t see that level of discipline necessarily in the editorial process in the publishing world. I don’t mean that every book has to be a thriller, but it goes back to what I was saying earlier: sometimes there’s too much emphasis on the prose and not necessarily enough on story and if by Chapter 7 readers have dropped out of your book, then the language doesn’t matter, no matter how beautiful. I think our guiding light has to be engaging the young reader to enjoy the experience of reading the book, so they finish the book and then want another one.’

There’s very little chance of readers of the Dino Knights books dropping out before the finish.

Andrea Reece is Managing Editor of Books for Keeps.

Dino Knights Panterra in Peril, Dino Knights Invasion and Dino Knights Extinction are published by Scallywag Press, £7.99 paperback.