The “fusion of hilarity and horror” that inspired children’s author Andy Griffiths

In this episode, we talk to Andy Griffiths. The children’s author has written 40 books, including The Day My Bum Went Psycho, and the wildly popular Treehouse series. Griffiths has been published in more than 35 countries, and sold an astonishing 13 million copies in Australia and New Zealand alone. He’s led an interesting life, too. He wanted to be a frontman in a punk band, but ended up as a schoolteacher. He’s serious about fitness – a former obsessive runner who now loves the gym, flexing wiry muscles that are covered in sticker tattoos. His latest book – You And Me And The Peanut Butter Beast – is out now. Hosting this conversation about the “fusion of hilarity and horror” that inspired Griffiths, and the “sacred moment” when he meets his young readers – is Good Weekend senior writer Konrad Marshall.

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Episode Transcript

S1 (00:11):
Hi, I'm Konrad Marshall and from the Sydney Morning Herald
and The Age. Welcome to Good Weekend Talks, a magazine
for your ears, featuring in-depth conversations with fascinating people from
sport and politics, science and culture, business and beyond. Every week,
you can download new episodes in which top journalists from
across our newsrooms talk to compelling people about the definitive

(00:32):
stories of the day. In this episode, we talk to
Andy Griffiths. The children's book author has written 40 books,
including The Day My Bum Went Psycho and, of course,
the wildly popular Treehouse series. Griffiths has been published in
more than 35 countries and sold an astonishing 13 million
copies in Australia and New Zealand alone. He's led an

(00:53):
interesting life, too. He wanted to be a front man
in a punk band, for instance, but ended up as
a schoolteacher. He's serious about fitness. Once, as an obsessive
runner and now in the gym, flexing wiry muscles that
are covered in sticker tattoos. His latest book, You and
Me and the Peanut Butter Beast, was released this week
and Griffiths has just started his press tour, which will

(01:15):
include an appearance on stage at the Sydney Opera House
on September 6th. But for now, he's hunkered down in
our sound studio for a chat with me. Welcome, Andy.

S2 (01:24):
Thank you very much. Great to be here.

S1 (01:27):
It's great to see you again.

S2 (01:28):
With a with a fellow obsessive runner.

S1 (01:30):
Indeed. I've got a question about that later. Um, let's
start at the beginning, shall we? So you grew up
in Vermont? Um, on Melbourne's leafy eastern edge. It's sort
of pretty suburban kind of place right now, but back
in the 70s might have been somewhat closer to the
the rural urban fringe.

S2 (01:49):
The wild frontier. Yeah. There was a lot of, um,
houses being built and, uh, and a lot of bush
that was just untouched. And the Dandenong Creek for us
to play, play in and explore.

S1 (02:04):
Yeah. I read a little, uh, profile of you written
on the Guardian the other day, and I was, I
was wondering, was it a as idyllic as it sounds
that a childhood out there.

S2 (02:13):
It pretty much was, um, it was, you know, you
left at 9 a.m. in the morning. We were me
and my friends and a little gang of of, uh,
dragster racers. Riders and, um. Yeah, we could catch carp
in the the pools of water next to the creek.
We could climb the trees once a year around November,

(02:38):
Guy Fawkes Day, the shops would fill up with dynamite,
and you could go get a bag of mixed dynamite and, um,
a period of great freedom and experimentation away from the
constant gaze of adults, which was was kind of cool,
I think.

S3 (02:56):
Do you reckon you were able to.

S1 (02:58):
Bring that into your own children's life? Or had society
changed so dramatically by the time that you had kids
that you found yourself helicoptering them as well or.

S2 (03:09):
No. We, um, we subscribed to the, um, philosophy of
good enough parenting. There was already the this idea that
you should do everything to make your child's childhood perfect.
You know, the perfect party and the right party food
and the right bags to put the lollies in. We

(03:29):
were always highly skeptical of that. And, uh, we ran
one of the kids in my. My youngest daughter, Sarah,
had a birthday party, and these were often orchestrated with
the trampoline bus or, you know, the circus come to,
to entertain all the kids. And we were like, no kids,
get out in the backyard, there's a trampoline, there's some balls. Just,

(03:53):
you know, leave us alone for an hour and a
half and then we'll have some cake. And the kids
loved that party because no one was telling him what
to do.

S1 (04:01):
So absolutely nothing wrong with a backyard and a bit
of fairy bread.

S2 (04:05):
Yeah, and it's not like we just let them. Wasn't
Lord of the flies out there? We we would step in.
And so we were good enough parents and we valued that.
The kids had lots of time to themselves. That wasn't
adult directed. Yeah. That's all that concerns me a little bit. Um,
about the trending of parenting since the 70s. And I

(04:29):
will put the caveat that Richard Glover, the ABC broadcaster
and great writer himself, wrote a book called The Land
Before Avocado about growing up in the 70s. And he said,
be careful about waxing lyrical, about all the freedom that
us kids had, because it wasn't coming from a philosophy

(04:51):
of the parents. It was coming through. Half the time,
neglect and not everyone made it through. So there is
a happy medium here. But as a corollary to all
the freedom we had to explore the neighborhood at nights,
I had a lot of books that I free ranged
my way through as well, so there were two sides

(05:12):
of the same coin for me. Um.

S1 (05:15):
What did your parents do?

S2 (05:16):
My dad was an industrial chemist, um, a very talented carpenter.
He could make tables, chairs, bookshelves. You know, I didn't
inherit any of that practical skill. But, you know, give
me a bunch of words on a page and a typewriter.
He even got my old typewriter working. Um, I know

(05:37):
how to structure a story in an abstract, symbolic way.
But he was practical, and my mother was a midwife,
so she was very practical. No nonsense. My dad was
kind of the the jokey uncle, the king of the
king of the kids. He did a magic show he
was quick with a joke. He's still. He's still alive.

(05:59):
Not quite as quick with a joke now, but, uh.
Or he doesn't do magic tricks. But I had that.
Same as I, uh, there was a lot of kids
in the neighborhood. Kids were drawn to me, um, for
some mysterious reason. And it was my role to entertain them,
to to make them do silly things or chant silly rhymes,

(06:23):
or I would tell them stories about impossible things that
I'd done. Wow.

S1 (06:28):
Pint size, uh, Pied Piper. Um, a few years ago,
when Covid was in full swing, my son Charlie was
exactly the right age for the Treehouse series and got
into it quite deeply. My wife likes to say that
those books. Your books, uh, got us through the pandemic.
But I've got to ask for all the fans out
there who might be curious of the author of the

(06:51):
Treehouse series. Did you play in a treehouse growing up?

S2 (06:54):
Um, I didn't have one. We only had an old
stump in our backyard. But my cousin David, who lived
in Rosanna, uh, they had this nice big old oak
tree in the backyard, and they had a single story
platform in that tree. So I knew what it was
to go up into the tree once again, away from

(07:18):
the world of the adults, um, and into we would
just make up whatever imaginative games to ten year olds would,
would make. Um, so once again, that that feeling of
involved in freedom and escape. And I realized that, um,

(07:38):
my professional life many years later involved sitting in the
second story of our townhouse in Williamstown with Terry, with Jill.
And we're like. And then. And then what if this happens?
And then what if that? And yeah, you draw that
down and I'll write this in and then. And I
was like, wow, this is just like being ten years old.

(07:59):
But we've got a we're it's a more elaborate game
that we're playing and we're writing it down, but it
feels like we're in a treehouse essentially playing. And um,
so that's where the idea of Treehouse came from.

S1 (08:14):
Fantastic. For our listeners, that's, um, Terry is Terry Denton,
the longtime illustrator, and Jill is, uh, your partner and
also first editor.

S2 (08:24):
Editor? Yeah, that's how I met her. Yeah.

S1 (08:27):
Fantastic. I've heard you describe books, um, during your childhood
as kind of being individual portals into other worlds. What
did your early reading diet kind of look like? Did
you fall for a particular series in the school library,
or was it stuff that your parents gave you?

S2 (08:47):
My grandmother had a copy of a German children's classic.

S1 (08:52):
Called Struwwelpeter.

S2 (08:53):
Struwwelpeter. Peter.

S1 (08:54):
Oh my God. There's a there's a character in that one. Um,
what was it? Little sucker thumb. That's it. His name's Conrad. Yeah.
And he. He sucks his thumb. And the the long
legged Scissor Man comes in and cuts his thumbs off.
And my name being Conrad and me being a nail biter.
Some some vindictive parent of a friend of mine showed

(09:16):
me that book and traumatized me. And my mum was
pissed that I was exposed to it because. Right. But. Sorry.
Go on. Oh, no.

S2 (09:24):
I'm not the only one who's been traumatized by it,
but I was radicalized by it. I found this so funny.
Like it was disturbing. Yes. But the story starts with
the mother going out and saying mine now, Conrad, while
I'm away, don't suck your thumb. The great tall tailor
always comes to little boys who suck their thumbs. Sorry

(09:44):
I'm traumatizing you.

S1 (09:46):
Happening all over again.

S2 (09:47):
Mama had scarcely turned her back. The thumb was in. Alack, alack.
The door flew open and he Fanini ran the great
long red legged Scissor Man. All children see the tailors
come and cut off both of sucker thumbs. Thumbs. Snip snap,
snip the scissors go! And Conrad cries out. 0000! Snip

(10:08):
snap snip. They go so fast that both these thumbs
are off at last. Mama comes home there. Conrad stands
and looks quite sad and shows his hands with which
are missing their thumbs. Ah, said mama, I knew he'd
come to naughty little sucker thumb. All right. There's a
lot of questions there. One that the mother is possibly

(10:29):
the most heartless person in that story. There you go.
If she knew he'd come, why didn't she protect him?
And what was obvious to me, even at the age
of five, was if this is a story to tell you,
how not to suck your thumb cut and cutting thumbs
off is pretty extreme. That's no solution to a problem.

(10:51):
So this is kind of comic in a monty Python.
You know, the knight who loses all his legs and arms.

S1 (10:58):
The child who plays with matches burns to death in it.

S2 (11:01):
Yeah. Well, her mother told her not to play with matches.
They all start the same. Don't do this thing. And
then the kid does it and ends up maimed or dead.
But I found it over the top. There was a
fusion of hilarity and horror, which I then found in
Grimm's Fairy Tales. Not so much hilarity in those, but

(11:24):
certainly the horror and. And I came to believe as
a as an adult, this is an essential ingredient of
any children's story is that that's what stories are. It's
when things go horribly wrong and the child who is
a vulnerable being, um, and often you're scared of things.

(11:46):
You don't really know what they are or, you know,
one of them might be parental abandonment. That's a primal fear.
But if we read a story like Hansel and Gretel,
who are abandoned by their parents, um, we see them
fighting their way through. And so by proxy, they are

(12:07):
working through our nameless fears. And maybe the world is
not quite so scary. As a result of having these
stories in our lives, of course it can go two ways. And, um.
But yeah, that's something I was looking for as I
became an English teacher. And kids were like, ah, books

(12:29):
are boring because they're so safe. And I was like,
we need to get a bit of rambunctious horror and
hilarity back into the reading.

S1 (12:40):
Fantastic. Now, being a teacher is probably skipping ahead, but
as I understand it, being a writer wasn't really your
first dream. You kind of wanted to be in a
punk band, and you were briefly as a as a
lead singer. So I have three questions about that. What
did you love about it? Why punk. And what was
the band called?

S2 (12:59):
Um, okay. So like, I always liked music, but round
about the age of 13, 14, uh, I encountered Alice Cooper.
Thanks to my best friend's older brother's record collection. Oh
my goodness. You know, the first time I heard Welcome
to My Nightmare and heard Vincent Price doing the Black

(13:20):
Widow thing. You know, my belief the Black Widow is
going to rise as mankind's most fitting successor. And this
fusion once again, high brow, the high delivery of that
with the sort of horror overtones, but the silliness of it,

(13:40):
like the spider's gonna take over. Um, I was just sold,
and I was like, that's what I want to do.
I want to write narratives like that. And there was
Alice Cooper. There was David Bowie. So it just seemed
like a sort of normal thing that you'd want to do.

(14:01):
So we had a fake band, and I used to
write the lyrics, just adapt any song of the day
and make punk versions of them. And then we eventually
put that band on as a joke for our year
12 final day prank, and I couldn't sing a note
and the band couldn't play a note. But we smashed
out all this noisy stuff and I discovered I was

(14:23):
quite good in front of a microphone. I could hold
the attention of the audience. People found it very amusing,
and I'd already been converted by the Sex Pistols. Like
they were just like, whoa! That energy, that exciting energy
that I heard was on a Four Corners report. This

(14:45):
terrible thing sweeping England. And I was like, yeah, that's
the sort of music I want. So yeah, I just
went into I did an honours degree in English literature
at Monash by day for five years, and I was
in punk bands at night. So I was writing, performing

(15:07):
and also reading through the history of English literature. Um, simultaneously,
the name of the band that we got a bit
of notoriety from was Gothic Farmyard.

S4 (15:17):
Awesome Gothic Farmyard.

S2 (15:19):
Back in the days of Crystal ballroom, the early to
mid 80s. Real experimental scene. You could get up and uh,
if you were committed, you know, you could have a,
an appreciative audience for any type of noise, experimental or otherwise. Yeah.

S1 (15:37):
And you ended up becoming a high school teacher out
in regional Victoria. How did you go from that to, um,
to to writing books?

S2 (15:46):
Uh, well, I realized my my real interest and talent
was the writing of the lyrics. It wasn't so much
the music musical side, so I sort of got out
of bands, started taking learn to write courses and organising
myself a little bit and realising I could improve what
I did if I practised, and then at the same

(16:09):
time I needed a job and I realised, well, I
could do a dip ed and um, because I like
kids and I could teach them English. And the first
thing I noticed was they were all, they didn't like writing,
they didn't like reading. So I started writing funny, provocative
stories for them, which they enjoyed and wanted to write

(16:30):
their own. So it all fused together for me. So
I was writing stories for the kids self, publishing them, um.

S1 (16:40):
Photocopied and stapled together.

S2 (16:42):
And just like we made our own cassettes in the
do it yourself indie scene, um, you didn't need a publisher.
You just you did it yourself and you put on
your own launches. So I did that. And yeah, the
the books were becoming very popular with my friends family.
I'd leave them in bookshops and, um, sell them through

(17:04):
the through that. And so eventually I decided I needed
some more guidance to get to the next level. Took
leave without pay and, um, came back to Melbourne and
did the traditional starving in the garret for a few
years while I hammered out my style, which happened to
be funny. Whatever I wrote, um, that I could sell

(17:28):
was always funny. Yes. So I was like, all right, well,
I'm not going to be the next, um, Raymond Carver,
I don't think, uh, I'm just I'm a clown. So.
And I accepted that very happily. Yeah.

S1 (17:42):
We mentioned running, um, briefly off the bat there. At
first blush, that would seem to be completely unrelated to
to writing, but you were an avid runner when you
lived in Ballarat. You joined up with one of the
Harrier groups doing tempo work and hill runs and long
runs and trail running. And you've spoken about this before,
about these transcendental kind of moments that you would have, um,

(18:06):
while running, I can't say I ever have those experiences.
My running is more of the huffing, heaving, labouring variety.
But how did you first sort of get into running
and what did you love about those? I mean, because
you were doing serious, uh, serious mileage per week.

S2 (18:23):
Yeah, yeah, I went from about 30 days a week
to about 150 K's, um, for quite a few months.
And I became very fast and good. But eventually shin
splints caught up with me from the overtraining. It was
too much, too soon, but I'd always run. I'd always
loved going for a run around the block. And like

(18:45):
I have probably a slow heartbeat. I'm good endurance athlete.
I've done a lot of bushwalking at school, so running
was always a very satisfying thing to me. And I
realised that, as with writing, uh, the more you apply
yourself to running, the better you can get. Once I
had my shin splints, I thought, well, why don't I

(19:08):
apply this training program to my writing? So, you know,
do a few, like a different thing each day? A
lot of free writing. Um.

S1 (19:20):
You'd sort of sit down and go, I'm going to
write for three minutes and see what comes out.

S2 (19:25):
Write non-stop for three minutes. You're not allowed to stop.
You're not allowed to let your conscious editor mind come
in and try to make it nice. You've got to
write whatever comes out. And you, you contact your subconscious.
Because the thing that makes writing hard for most people
is that we have an editor inside us trying to

(19:48):
protect us from embarrassing ourselves in front of the world.
So if you want to write something, you know, last
night I went out to a bar and got wasted
and then woke up in the gutter. Before you've even
written that, the editors go, do you really want people
to know that about you? How about you say, last
night I had an early night, a cup of cocoa,

(20:10):
and I went to bed. And boring. Because as readers,
we want we want dysfunction. We want truth. And, um. So, yeah,
Natalie Goldberg's timed writing practice was an absolute godsend when
I found this book. It's called Writing down the Bones,

(20:30):
if you'd like to try it. Okay. Um, yeah. And
it just for a few hours a day, I would
just do free writing, and I came into contact with
all sorts of memories that I'd forgotten about. Um, pleasant
and unpleasant. And so there was all this raw material
on the page that I could eventually channel into characters

(20:54):
and stories. But aside from anything, it was just sheer
practice of putting words into putting thoughts into words through
a pen that was that became second nature. Yeah.

S1 (21:17):
Now, I believe you don't do as much running anymore.
You prefer the the gym. You also sort of mentioned,
I think, that you do a bit of cold plunging
in the your, your backyard pool. It was four degrees
in Melbourne today at 7 a.m.. Did you jump in
the water today?

S2 (21:35):
And no, I didn't because I, I had a very
good reason. Because. Have a shower a hot shower out
in the backyard there, and the real pleasure of jumping
into a cold pool is the hot shower afterwards. Yes,
and that's currently out of action. It'll be fixed tomorrow morning. So. Wednesday? Yes. Um, no,

(21:58):
I didn't do it today. And the purists would probably
say no. You're supposed to warm up through the power
of your own body. But I say whatever works for you.
Whatever makes you feel alive, that's what's right for you.

S1 (22:13):
Okay. I got a long question now about editing. And
this question is so long, in fact, that it could
probably use an editor. Um, a long time ago, I
read this study about personality traits and different professions, and
basically it said the personality profile of the average writer
was it's really unflattering, were amongst the most egotistical and

(22:33):
defensive people on the planet. Like ranked third only behind
like doctors and lawyers. And some part of that, sadly
does ring true at times. Like I'm very bad at
letting people read early iterations of, um, whatever it is
that I'm writing, I'm just too, too precious. But not
so for you. However, I believe you, um, your your wife, Jill,

(22:56):
is in fact, an editor. And I'm just wondering what
it is like having an editor in the house for
sort of appraisals whenever you need them or, um, do
you tap her for, for guidance about, um, all your
stories as they're taking shape or.

S2 (23:12):
Absolutely. Yes. Yeah. If she was here, she'd be rolling
her eyes. Yeah. Yep, yep. Anytime. Um, I guess what's,
I don't know, different about me as a writer from
that personality profile is I've always wanted to write something

(23:33):
for an audience. Like, that's the point of doing it. Yeah. Um.
I'm not. I am writing for myself, of course, but. Oh,
what can I write that's going to make my mum
freak out? Yeah. What can I write that's going to
make my friend in school while we're doing maths guffaw
and get us into trouble. That's kind of the. That's

(23:58):
why you're right. So I'm looking for a reaction. And
what an editor is to me is someone who helps
you to get the biggest possible reaction by making sure
you're there's not any more words than there needs to be.
That what the the aim of what you're saying is

(24:19):
coming across clearly. So if I'm running something by Jill,
I want to see I'm watching her reaction and go,
what if what if we fell down a hole in
you and me and the peanut butter beast? What if
we fell down a hole? But at the bottom, you
didn't actually just hit the bottom. You bounced on a

(24:40):
mushroom and you fell down another hole.

S1 (24:42):
Whole I wasn't expecting the second whole, by the way,
like bouncing through the mushroom forest. I was like, he's
got to stop some. They're not going to go splat.
So I was like, that's a good solution. But then
bang down another hole.

S2 (24:54):
And then you must have freaked out when they fell
down a third hole. Um, yeah. So I'm sort of judging,
which she might say. Yeah, that's that's sounds cool. She
didn't like the mushroom forest for a long time. I
had to fight her on that.

S1 (25:09):
So. Okay, so there is, uh, there is give and take. Absolutely.

S2 (25:12):
She she is the type of reader, um, as a
child who read non-stop. So she's read many thousands of books,
more than I ever have. Right. I read much more
slowly than her. Um, and I plod along and I
absorb like I'm not going to say more deeply than her,

(25:35):
but I have noticed with another friend that, yeah, he
hasn't written. It's not so much the quantity, it's the
the depth that you lose yourself in a book can
inform the way you go about it. Um, so I
rely on Jill's inbuilt intuition as to whether the story

(25:55):
is progressing forward or whether I've got myself trapped in
a little absurd to many holes, you know.

S1 (26:04):
Or the online.

S2 (26:06):
In the treehouse. Sparky the barking dog is barks for
five whole pages of strip cartoon. I mean, in my
head that was going to be 30 pages. And Jill
was like, no, it's not funny. But yeah, no, no.

S1 (26:22):
Random question here. How many tattoos do you have?

S2 (26:25):
Um, I've lost count. Um, I don't know. Um, but.

S1 (26:31):
They all sort of consciously considered. Or are they, are
they spur of the moment ones in there as well?

S2 (26:35):
They're mostly consciously considered and mostly many feature book characters
of books that I really admire. There's Alice drowning in
a lake of tears. Um. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is
one of the the the north stars of my practice.
I just look at that book and think, wow, it's like,

(26:58):
how did he do that? Surrealism, fantasy, comedy. And and
it's something that everyone who encounters it at the right
age never forgets. So that's what I'm always trying to
get to. And I think you can make an argument,
sort of English humor comes from that Monty Python, um, absurdity.

(27:20):
The philosophical dialogues within that book, something for every age,
every time you go back. So Alice's important. Um, doctor
Seuss rhyming nonsense. One fish, two fish. So I had that.
That was a pretty early one. I was like, that's
your Mount Everest, buster, you know. Don't you get big

(27:42):
ideas about yourself until you write one fish. Two fish.
You know, forget about it. You keep working. So they
were sort of motivational and keying and commitment, like like this.
I'm going to do this so well or I'm going
to do it until I bust. You know, there's there's

(28:03):
no going back here. So and I guess that's a
coming back to running. That's that's what you're if you're
in a race, you're going to give it everything you've got.
Whether you win or lose, you gave it all. Yeah.

S1 (28:19):
Let's talk for a minute about your your new book,
You and Me and the Peanut Butter Beast, really puts
readers at the center of the story intentionally because one
of the characters is simply called you, uh, allowing kids
that are reading it to kind of identify with a
person on the page. Uh, what what prompted that idea? Like,
where did that idea come from?

S2 (28:38):
Well, what I was saying about always writing to get
a reaction. Um, I'm always very conscious that there's a
reader reading, um, or a listener is responding to my story,
and I invent new things to keep the reaction going.
So it was a natural sort of progression in a way,

(29:01):
to like, let's get the reader writing the story, because
I've always talked to them, even through all of Treehouse.
I'll sometimes go, oh, gee, Terry, we don't know what's
going to happen. Let's ask the readers, hey, readers, what
do you think should happen? And then we have a
page where they're all just yelling, uh, random things at us,
like millions of speech bubbles. And I go, gee, those

(29:24):
readers are a shouty lot, you know? So it's sort
of a fourth wall joke, but I'm bringing the reader in.
I want them to know that I know that they're there.
And when I'm in a signing, um, queue. Q well,
not for myself, but when I'm signing books for kids
and they've come to meet me, and it's a very

(29:48):
sacred moment for me because I they have come not
to meet me. They've come for me to meet them. Yeah,
they they already know my inner world. They know the stories.
They want me to know that they are part of
my world. And that gives you a very special connection. Um, that's.

(30:13):
You know, if I meet a writer or a musician
I love, I want them to know that I know
what they're doing, and I'm part of it and keep
doing it. And there's often nothing to say there. It's
just the recognition. So, you and me, the series is
bringing that into right into the middle and going right.

(30:33):
Do you remember that time where you fell down the
hole and we found the peanut butter beast. What, you
don't remember? Well, let me remind you. One day we
were walking through the forest and you said, hey, there's
a deep hole. And. And I said, I wonder how
deep it is. And you said, oh, I'm going to
jump in and find out. And I said, don't be
an idiot. But it was too late. You'd already jumped in.

(30:56):
So I jumped in after you to save you. And
so it's it's really just, uh, assuming a familiarity with
the reader, which makes them feel recognized. And I think
Roald Dahl said something to this effect. He said all
kids want to be recognized for the special person that

(31:19):
they are. And you'll see it in something like Matilda.
Her parents don't rate her. She's a silly little book reader,
a waste of time. But her teacher, Miss Honey, recognizes
her special qualities. And I think we all, uh, we
obviously are unique. We are all special in this way.

(31:41):
And to have someone recognize you or take the time
out to spend time with you and draw you out,
whatever that interest is, is a very special thing. And
I think when we fall in love with a writer
that we love, I think that's what they're doing. They're
they're we recognize that. They recognize where that type of

(32:03):
person and we're not alone. Yeah.

S1 (32:06):
So the listeners that can't see the pages, the two
characters are just essentially people, and they're both got, um,
cardboard boxes on their heads.

S2 (32:15):
Adventure helmets.

S1 (32:16):
Adventure helmets. Sorry. Um, but what I what I noticed
there was that, uh, you can see the eyes of you,
but you can't see the eyes of me. Meaning you. Um. Why?
Why is that?

S2 (32:28):
Well, the reason number one, they're wearing the helmets is
because if you're going to have a character call you,
every reader is different, so we needed to have a
way of not showing nationality, gender or age. So we
came up with this comic idea. But functional. They're wearing

(32:52):
adventure helmets. But then the problem became, well, how do
they show expression? Yeah, because illustrations rely on characters reacting.
And so Bill just used a bit of surrealistic magic there.

S1 (33:08):
This is Bill Hope, a young illustrator from the Blue
Mountains that you're working on this series with.

S2 (33:14):
Yeah. Um, uh, he he just started animating the mouths
in a way that doesn't make literal sense, but it
makes storybook sense. And yes, we see the eyes of you,
but May remains mysterious. Um, that was not a conscious Decision,

(33:36):
but I'm glad it was made that way because the
me changes whoever's reading the book, so it's not me.
Andy Griffiths in this case, it's if you're reading the
book to your son.

S1 (33:51):
You effectively.

S2 (33:52):
Become me.

S1 (33:53):
Yeah.

S2 (33:54):
And he becomes you. Or if he's reading it to you,
he becomes me. And so I'm just playing with the
whole idea of identity. And, um. Yeah, but it's cool
to have things not completely explained that keeps us coming back.
I think I.

S1 (34:10):
Just want to chat about illustration for a second. So
I once did a story for Good Weekend about branding. Um,
and in order to do it, I went to a
branding company and were like, design a brand for me.
What is brand Conrad like? What is my logo look like?
What is my um what is my mission statement say?
And they did the whole work. So it was it
was really great. But the most fun thing within it

(34:32):
was when they were coming up with all these outputs
for my brand, and one was a newspaper of a
handful of my stories rendered by one of their beautiful
kind of graphic artists. Instead of the photos that would
usually come with a good weekend story. And I just
I just loved it when somebody was drawing my stuff.
What was that like for you when you first sort of, um,

(34:55):
began work? I assume it was working with Terry. Um,
was the first illustrator you worked with? What was it
like when somebody put squiggles to your stories?

S2 (35:05):
In Terry's case, it was like, oh my goodness. He
has given me A3D representation of the abstract feeling that
I was trying for in that particular story.

S1 (35:20):
Right. So not just the representation of the thing that's happening,
but it was.

S2 (35:26):
That very early thing was a, um, an educational book
of short pieces, uh, for teachers to use to help
teach creative writing more creatively. Uh, and it was called
swinging on the clothesline, and it had a set of instructions. Hey, kids,
do you want to really annoy your parents and spend
and have have some exciting pastime swing on the backyard

(35:49):
clothesline like it drives parents insane? And if you want
to go faster, get your friend to, uh, run around
pulling a rope on the clothesline and see how many
people you can get on. And the more you break it,
the more your parents go in like crazy at you. And, um, yeah,
job done. But Terry drew that as a cover picture,

(36:10):
and the kids are swinging around on the clothesline. It's
he's he's illustrating it from above, and the kids are
swinging off and they're launching themselves into space. And there's
also crabs coming off it and a cow upside down
and all this surrealism, but it's got the energy and

(36:34):
the mischievousness. And what I loved was it was a backyard.
It was an ordinary clothesline, ordinary backyard. And these kids
are launching themselves into the freedom of the unknown. And
I went, he gets me, like, at a very fundamental level. Um,
and became very important subsequently because no one would publish

(36:59):
my early, um, masterpieces. They they couldn't understand the humor.
They didn't see what the point of it was, which,
of course, there was no point. That was the point. Um,
but he said, tell them I'll illustrate whatever you do.
So he was more established than I was.

S4 (37:18):
Okay.

S2 (37:18):
And that was a good deal for one brave publisher said, well,
you know, if we've got the great Terry Denton on board,
you know, we'll make our money back at the very least. Yeah.

S1 (37:29):
Amazing. Uh, final question, a writer question and a question.
I figure you've probably been asked before how do you
get over writer's block, or do you even get writer's block?
But how do you defeat the the tyranny of the
blank page?

S2 (37:42):
Um, it's just coming back each day, and I'm always
solving a problem.

S4 (37:50):
Okay.

S2 (37:51):
Um. My problem, my master problem is I have a
book to write each year. How can I keep the
kids interested this year? What have I not done? So
I'll go searching for the answer to that problem. In
this whole series, it was like, well, I haven't had
the reader as a character, so suddenly I've got a

(38:11):
lot of problems. Good problems to solve. And as I
begin solving them, new problems arise and you create new
little backstories to solve them. And pretty soon you've got
a lot of material that. So I'm not. Yeah. I
don't have a lot of writer's block, and I would

(38:35):
use the timed writing practice for writing. Sometimes I.

S4 (38:38):
Just go, yeah.

S2 (38:40):
I've got this problem. I don't know how to solve it.
I want this. And so I'll just flow onto the
page and there might be something it may not be
the the exact answer, but there may be a little
stepping stone idea or it lets me see what the
problem is. I've been I've gone down a dead end.

(39:01):
This is I shouldn't be trying to solve this at all.
There's no solution. So it encourages me to go somewhere else.
To the freedom and the excitement of a blank page.
You know, that's that. I love that, whereas Jill, uh,
hates the blank page. She's terrified by it. Like, how

(39:21):
would you know what to do? Whereas if I just
dredge up any old rubbish, she'll immediately start, um, arranging
it into Something we can all enjoy.

S4 (39:33):
Yeah.

S1 (39:33):
Amazing. The freedom and excitement of a blank page. I'll
never look at them the same way again. Andy Griffiths,
thank you so much for coming in and having a
chat on good weekend Talks.

S2 (39:43):
My pleasure. Thank you.

S1 (39:47):
That was children's book author Andy Griffiths on the latest
Good Weekend talks. If you enjoyed this episode, please remember
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(40:11):
This episode of Good Weekend Talks is produced by Conrad
Marshall and edited by Tim Mummery, with technical assistance from
Julia Katzel. Our executive producer is Tami Miltz. Tom McKendrick
is head of audio. And Melissa Stevens is the editor
of Good Weekend.