Screenwriter learns how to show and tell

As a screenwriter, Dibben was used to "showing and never telling". He had done his apprenticeship at the coalface of Hollywood, working for a decade on films as diverse as Puss In Boots and Phantom Of The Opera, in an industry entirely orientated towards "showing".

This book, The Storm Begins, the first he had ever attempted to write, was packed to its gunwales with action. But this was a revelation to him. After all, he says, "You can't do that in film unless you have a voiceover. And voiceover always seems a cop out."

Dibben is not the only writer to have made the transition successfully from the screen to children's books, but there is a huge buzz about his work. His History Keepers tales, the third instalment of which is published this month, have been hailed as the next Harry Potter. A "major movie" version of the series is in development with Working Title productions.

What screenwriters bring to children's books is a sophisticated and honed sense of the mechanics of story. Most learn it diligently as a craft, and are used to dissecting tales, taking them apart, deconstructing their supporting skeletons and reconstructing them. Just as the world of children's publishing recognises story as prime, so do the movies. It's not for nothing that one of the most famous screenwriting gurus, Robert McKee, titled his guide to the art Story.

For Dibben that craft was learned through watching endless movies, classics from directors like Frank Capra, Alfred Hitchcock and Billy Wilder. "You learn what to hold back and what to give and how much adventure is needed compared to humour, compared to mystery and to danger. And though it's not all about tears - getting emotion, laughing, crying - you know this is all about story. Also, a screenplay is only 100 pages. You've got to make every word matter."

History, for Dibben, is "the greatest story of them all, with the added bonus of it all being actually true". Hence his tales of Jake Djones, a teenager who, following the mysterious disappearance of his parents, discovers that they are agents in a time-travelling secret service that darts through the centuries trying to prevent villainous characters from changing the course of events. The books are set against the sweeping backdrop of all of history.

It is a storyscape, says Dibben, "inhabited by explorers, inventors and world changers, as well as villains that want to change things for the worst".

Many of Dibben's most flamboyantly intriguing agents and villains are based on characters from his own family. His grandfather was Horace "Hod" Dibben, the infamous nightclub owner and socialite, who, with his wife, Mariella Novotny, organised outrageous parties, including the one at the heart of the Profumo scandal. The couple were, says Dibben, the "very naughtiest people in London".

Indeed, he describes his grandfather almost as if he were some character from one of his books, marking history indelibly as he passed through. "He had this incredible life. He was best friends with Giuseppe Cipriani in Venice [owner of Harry's Bar] and allegedly invented the Bellini with him. He lived every decade at the forefront of whatever social movement was going on."

Dibben, who is 47, grew up in Kensington with his mother, a civil servant who worked on the Channel Tunnel. His father inhabited "this sort of ridiculous National Trust house in the country that was quite surreal". It was a world populated by "aristocratic social types" in which "everyone was pretty eccentric", and in his books he has used "all those mad characters". "My parents were friends with these really interesting, engaging, fun types who didn't stand on ceremony. Which neither of my parents did."

It was also in childhood that Dibben first started to develop a taste for the escapism history offers. Those "bohemian, arty parents" of his would take him to museums and galleries every weekend and, he recalls, "that brought everything alive to me". He is now patron of Kids In Museums, a charity which aims to lure children into museums and make the venues more family friendly.

However, the world of history and museums was not where he chose to create his early career: rather that was the movies. After studying stage design at Wimbledon School of Art, he went on to train as an actor at the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art, appeared in a few films, and then moved into screenwriting.

Dibben seems glad to have left the movie industry behind - to be doing no more than the occasional "polish" on a screenplay, or work on the movies of his own books. Though lucrative, the world of screenwriting can, he says, be deeply dissatisfying. Only 90% of scripts are actually made into films, he says.

"It's a really bizarre world because it's incredibly well paid. And that's what makes it hard to leave. But in Hollywood there are so many millionaires whose films have never been made. It's good to be paid that kind of money, but you get a bit bitter. It's really demoralising when you do stuff that you're really proud of, and for one reason or another it doesn't happen."

Dibben has brought to his fiction a love of the crossover story that appeals to adults and children. In the world of movies, the "family film", pitched at all generations, is a blockbusting genre. Over the last 15 to 20 years the market for these films has grown, as has their sophistication. Now, Dibben notes, you can go, as he did recently, and watch a screening of the kids' movie Frozen, and find yourself sitting amongst an almost entirely adult audience.

Because of this he has a leaning towards what one might almost term the family book. "The idea of my books," he says of The History Keepers, "was that they weren't just for kids. It was that everyone could read them." His next novel, about a 200-year-old dog who is searching for his master whom he lost on a European battlefield 150 years ago, is one his agent believes should be pitched at adults.

Of course book-reading, unlike movie-watching, is a solitary experience, so perhaps it's not surprising if books are more age-targeted, and crossover successes like the Harry Potter series are relatively rare. Nevertheless, as Dibben points out, in Britain markets are more compartmentalised than in some countries. In Germany The History Keepers was also marketed to adults. "Here there's still a slight stigma attached to adults reading this kind of book, as if JK Rowling had never existed."

History, Dibben believes, is all the rage these days: from the "non-stop" history shows on television to Terry Deary's Horrible Histories. "I think people have really woken up to the whole romance of it," he says. However, though Dibben is a meticulous researcher, there is no danger of him getting bogged down in dry details and allowing a surfeit of fact to slow down his giddy pacing. "I want the story to be fast moving, so I try to just seamlessly put in all these facts and information. I want it to seem it is nothing but a rip-roaring fight against the clock and danger and adventure. Because I think first and foremost you want to turn the pages."

Perhaps one of the most captivating devices in his History Keepers series is the swashbuckling means by which his characters travel through time. Rather than make their trip in a space-age device, they embark by galleon, setting sail on the sea and leaving land behind in one era, to arrive at some port in another.

Dibben came up with this notion while on a ferry crossing the Channel, when he noticed that there was no land in sight. Rather, there was, he recalls, "just horizon all round and I thought this looks the same now as it did 50 years ago, 100 years ago, 1,000 years ago. I thought 'wouldn't it be exciting if you carried on and arrived at the shores of a different place and time?'"


This idea speaks of Dibben's own appetite for adventure. He is a traveller at heart - he has journeyed to China, Venice, Rome, Stockholm, as research for his books - though he likes his comforts and always takes a pillow with him, and, if he can, his Jack Russell terrier, a constant companion and "long suffering personal assistant". This enthusiasm for the romance of shipping was born on a school trip he made at the age of 11.

"I'd never been abroad before, but my school did this trip - a cruise would be too fancy a way of putting it, because we were on an old army boat. We flew to Venice, went from there to Crete, to Istanbul, Pompeii, all these places. I remember thinking, 'isn't it incredible, all the incredible things you can see around the world?'" He still seems to be thinking that. But with an added twist: Isn't it incredible, all the incredible things you could, in the past, have seen?

The History Keepers: Nightship To China is published by Corgi, £7.99