Interview: Andy Griffiths Tells Press Gang About His New Book, His Biggest Achievements & His Weird Sense Of Humor

Andy Griffiths is one of the most popular children’s authors in Australia. His best-selling Story Tree House series has won multiple awards, broken records and has been published in more than 35 countries.

The first book in his new series, Adventures Unlimited, a collaboration with illustrator Bill Hope, was published in August.

Press Gang reporters had the chance to interview Here are some of the highlights.

How many books have you written?

I think close to 40 books would be the answer to that. So I started in 1997 and published. I’ve always published one book a year, and sometimes there’s a second book. And in a couple of crazy years we did three books, but that’s a lot of work.

When did you start writing books?

I’ve been writing books since I was probably seven years old. I was making little booklets and drawing cartoons from my friends and writing stories that made my teachers laugh.

And when I became an English teacher, I started writing stories for my students and to make them laugh and to get them excited about the possibilities of books

What is your greatest achievement as an author?

There’s a few answers to this. Number one, just getting the first book published, Just Tricking was published in 1997, and that represented 10 years of work of practising, of trying different things, of doing workshops and learning how to write and then testing it out on people.

One of the books in the Just series was called Just Macbeth, where I took a Shakespearean play Macbeth, which is quite a dark story of a soldier who murders the king so he can become the king. But I really worked it so that it could be understood by everyone and suitable for families. So I added a few laughs and simplified it all, and that became a stage play, which it still plays today, and I’m really proud of that one.

What is your favourite series and why?

That’s a very difficult question because I’ve loved every book that I’ve written – if I didn’t love it, I wouldn’t publish it. I would just keep working until it’s good.

But I guess the Treehouse series was the series that really captured what I was trying to do, which is two very silly characters having ridiculous adventures and writing a book about it at the same time. It’s sort of fantasy, adventure and comedy all mixed in together.

I’m really excited about Adventures Unlimited too, it’s a bite more like more like a fairy tale, a really stupid fairy tale, but I think it’s got a lot of potential and I’m enjoying working with Bill a lot.

Where did the idea for Adventures Unlimited come from? 

One of the most consistent questions  readers ask is, ‘can you put me into your next book?’ And I was thinking, well, that’d be nice, but if I can’t have a book with thousands of characters. So how could I show the reader in a way that you could all join in?

And when I met Bill  Hope [the illustrator of Adventures Unlimited], I said,’ I want to write Me and You, but all readers look different and they’re different ages and they’re different nationalities and they’re different genders’.

And he said, ‘why don’t we put them in a head to toe adventure suit and put a cardboard box on their head just like kids dressing up and playing, and that way that character can be anyone.’

So that was the initial inspiration to get the reader into the book. And then off we went, just playing messing around and the more Bill drew, the more ideas I would have. And the book kind of emerges from that playful process of swapping stories, swapping pictures, and building it. 

Do you have any tips for kids that want to be authors?

Number one, read as much as you can. The more books you read, the more you fill up your head with ideas and how stories work, and you can borrow those ideas just like I grew up reading Enid Blyton books, the Magic Faraway Tree, and I loved that feeling that I got of possibility and anything could happen and the danger of being in the tree. And that gave me a big clue how to do the Tree House series. I said to Terry, I want to write, write about a tree house with a bowling alley and a tank full of sharks, a tree house where anything can happen.

So reading is number one and writing, unsurprisingly is number two. So the more you write, the better you will get. And that might be writing a report of something for your school newspaper. It might be starting a joke magazine like I did when I was in Year 7. I would collect kids jokes and then type them all up, print them and sell them for 3 cents a copy to all the other kids in school. Or it might be keeping a journal, write for five minutes every day – you’ll get a whole bunch of ideas and you’ll get the practice of putting your thoughts into words. 

What type of books do you like reading? 

I read a lot of different things. I love funny books. But I also read a lot of nonfiction accounts of adventurers of different types, deep sea divers or mountain climbers. I love reading biographies of other creative people like writers and musicians. That teaches me a lot about the process of being creative and the things that you can do to make it really good. 

How has your life changed since you’ve become an author?

It’s been really nice to find a very large audience of people who share my sense of humor. So maybe the answer to your question is, I don’t feel so weird anymore, because often people would say, ‘you’ve got really strange ideas and weird humor’.

When I started putting that weird humor into books, I discovered everybody has their own particular brand of weirdness, and everyone loves to laugh. So yeah, I feel very connected in a way that perhaps I didn’t before.