Start with a fearless 12-year-old protagonist. Add a plot featuring ancient relics and non-stop adventure, and top that off with a passion for storytelling and for inspiring kids to read. The result is a best-selling children’s book series with a timeless quality that both kids and parents alike can enjoy and share.

“Will Wilder: The Lost Staff of Wonders” by best-selling author Raymond Arroyo is out today from Random House Children’s Books. It follows last year’s immensely successful, “Will Wilder: The Relic of Perilous Falls,” and this time features the storied Staff of Moses, which was responsible for summoning the plagues of ancient Egypt.

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“What I’ve discovered from talking to so many librarians and teachers about the first book is that kids in this age group — kids ages 8 to 14 — love a series. They love a bigger story than just a one-off,” said Arroyo, who is also a journalist, producer, and managing editor of EWTN, as well as LifeZette’s editor-at-large. “I knew with Will Wilder that I had to have a character who was complex enough and broad enough to sustain a number of books. So I spent a long time creating the whole thing so that it could live over a span of multiple books and not just one story.”

“This series is really about the generations. It’s about history, and our family history, and how that affects us all.”

Arroyo spent seven years crafting his ideas before his first book came out, and says that his three children — Alexander, 17, Lorenzo, 12, and Mariella, 11 — all played a big role in inspiring him over that time period.

“Will Wilder is a collage of people I’ve known in my life,” said Arroyo. “He’s a little bit of me, and some adventures in this story come from my own childhood and experience. And he’s daring. He’s a good-hearted kid who makes major mistakes because he’s sometimes looking for the shortcut. That usually leads to disastrous results for Will — but at the end of the day he learns from it and sees the greater good, even if it cost him something to repair it and to achieve it.”

Arroyo said he spent so much time with his character that at times, during the writing process, “I had to get out of the way and let my character do what he wanted to do. I was merely listening to him. I was following him around.”

Related: Your Kids (and You) Will Love ‘Will Wilder’

He also said, “Kids want to read the series because of the unexpected twists and turns that are character-driven.”

In a lively conversation as his book was released, Arroyo shared thoughts about kids, history and storytelling — and the generations.

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Question: Talk to us about the thrill of seeing children read your books and really care about the stories you tell.
Answer:  I learned a lot about writing for kids by watching my two sons, and just being around them and their friends. Boys tend to be reluctant readers. But what is something that boys do all the time? They’re addicted to video games. And I spent a lot of time with my boys on video games. They get hooked because of the story that the gameplay is a part of — they’re trying to work through the game to get to the next cliffhanger or resolve the cliffhanger.

It’s the larger story for them, a larger narrative they care about. And I thought to myself: I’ve got to create a series of cliffhangers and keep raising the stakes so that reading is not a burden, but something they want to do. That’s the lesson here.

Q: You had a teacher in your life who played a big role in your own love of reading.
A: Yes, I had a teacher in fifth grade who would read murder mysteries to the class. And he would read up to the point where the body would drop and the mystery was set, and then he’d close the book and say, “If you want to know what happens next, the book is here.” Well, we would all kill each other to get our hands on the book. And that’s what it’s about.

It’s really not a big mystery. Kids want to know what happens next. They want to figure it out and find out how it ends. And I’ve always been fascinated by antiquities and relics, and the supernatural, and the battle between good and evil. So I kind of threw all of that in the pot, and that became Will Wilder. You put that 12-year-old kid together with his friends and his family, and it all becomes irresistible.

Q: Did you find that writing the second book was easier or harder than the first?
A: There was so much labor in the first book because I was laying the foundation for a number of books, so that was a heavy lift. The second book did go more quickly and with more ease, but by then I was so close to the characters, too. I was able to dig deeper into them, and with the family relationships, too. I outline all of my books so I know where I’m going with them, but in this book I ended up tossing out the outline about halfway through — by then I knew how I wanted it to end, and as an author you sort of trust the process.

“I’ve always been fascinated by antiquities and relics, and the supernatural, and the battle between good and evil.”

Q: You had the Staff of Moses to work with, too, which is so interesting.
A: It was a thrill ride. In this book, the Staff of Moses goes missing, Will gets unfairly blamed for its loss, and before long, while he’s trying to figure out who has the staff, the plagues of the Old Testament start falling on the town of Perilous Falls. And he knows there is a great evil present, but he can’t see it. So it’s kind of a double mystery. I’ve read mysteries since I was a kid, with red herrings and great craft, so I worked hard to respect the architecture of this mystery while letting the characters have their way. That was tough.

In terms of the staff, I did a lot of research on it, and several years ago, there was a British writer who made the argument that he had discovered the Staff of Moses, and that it was in the Birmingham, England, museum. I was just fascinated by the idea of this, that the staff might have survived. Now, I don’t happen to believe that is the Staff of Moses — there’s a second museum in Istanbul that also makes claims about the Staff of Moses. Both of them are probably, I think, fallacious. But that doesn’t matter. The point is, there was a historical staff at some point, and I thought, Wouldn’t it be neat if you could actually touch it and see it? And if it went missing, would it still have the properties that it had in the Old Testament? And that rattled around in my head and then finally showed up in this new Will Wilder book,  “The Lost Staff of Wonders.”

It shows you how important these stories are, the Old Testament stories, to literature, to our culture. And that becomes the archetype for King Arthur and the Excalibur — when he pulls the sword from the stone. That was borrowed from Moses. And you see it again and again and again in literature — and it becomes the first magic wand, if you will. And then all of the old wizards, the mentors, with the staff — all of it came from Moses. Kids reading this will come away with a better understanding, historically, of the staff — and of course, Moses had a brother, Aaron, who also had a staff. So I play with all of this imaginatively. And I spent a lot of time doing research on all of this, and on the historical settings.

Q: You wrote this not just for children, clearly, but for adults as well. 
A:
The best children’s books, I believe, have a timeless quality — an eye for adulthood, an eye for the deeper things that children will deal with in time. And this series is about that. It’s really about the generations. It’s about history, and our family history, and how it affects us all. And it touches on many of the things that adults and parents feel over the course of their lives — regret, and loss, and trying to protect kids from things that you’d like to protect them from but really can’t. But parents try, they really try. And I think this is why, after the first book, I not only heard from very young children about Will Wilder — I heard from parents, and grandparents, from people of all ages.