You’ve just been announced as Australia’s Children’s Laureate – congratulations! What’s the first book that had a transformative effect on you?
It was a German children’s classic called Struwwelpeter (Straw Peter), written in 1845. My grandmother had the book. It’s a collection of cautionary tales, and in colourful pictures and rhyming language it showed the various awful consequences of disobeying your parents, playing with matches or sucking your thumb – you would end up maimed or disfigured or dead. It was kind of terrifying, but it was so over the top it was quite funny to me, as a four-year-old. And I was transfixed, because I’d never know what was going to happen when I turned that page – what horror would be awaiting me.
So that kind of set the tone for my own writing from a very early age – I was quite comfortable with horror and humour, and how the two can sort of work together. You can go to dark places in children’s literature, and humour is a wonderful sort of anaesthetising agent that lets you get there safely without freaking the child out completely.
What book do you always return to, and why?
The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger hit me very powerfully around the age of 16, which I think is a really good age to read it. He articulates the uncertainty, the funniness, the awkwardness of that age in such a lively voice. It’s first person direct, and he [narrator Holden Caulfield] takes you into his confidence, but you can’t quite trust what he is telling you, and you have to do a little bit of work as a reader to read between the lines. And that book felt fully alive – Holden is as real to me as anyone I know in actual life. So that set the tone for me as well, in that all my books are told in first person by an unreliable narrator. The kids know that I’ll be saying something that is not to be taken literally or even as truth – but that’s part of the fun for them, to figure that out.
If you could change the size of any animal to keep as a pet, what would it be?
An elephant – just imagine a tiny little elephant running around in the palm of your hand. We have a level in the Tree House [series] that’s full of tiny horses. And I guess that’s my second pick, because I could imagine them all having a race around the palm of my hand.
You’ve written more than 40 books. What is your number one tip for writer’s block?
Just start writing – anything. Start writing “I’ve got writer’s block” and try to describe that. If you write for a few minutes, something else will appear. But it’s not going to appear until you dive in there. Even with the most unpromising description of where you are and how you’re feeling – something will connect.
Number one piece of advice for young writers?
Remember there’s a reader on the other side and that you are entertaining and engaging with them. And I’d borrow Kurt Vonnegut’s advice: pity the reader. There’s a lot going on, try to make it as easy and as involving as possible. And that’s why every book I write gets a year’s worth of editing, so that the reader can just come in and have a great time.
What is the question you get asked most by readers?
“Can you put me in the next book?” That’s been the most consistent question over 30 years of writing. And so that’s led us into the new series, the You and Me series, which includes the reader as the other main character, along with me, and I’m reminding them of this incredible adventure that we’ve had, and their role in it.
What’s the best thing a fan has ever sent you?
I get sent a lot of lollies, which is really nice – chewing gum and candy. But what comes to mind is a little award that a passionate reader, Corey Doyle, sent me way back – it was a little sculpture of me in a pram being pushed down a hill, and it was an award for the silliest writer ever. And I prized that, because he was a big fan. He had all the books memorised – you could pick any book and just start reading a paragraph, and he would continue the story. Many kids will claim to be my biggest fan, but Corey is the biggest fan. Sadly, he’s grown up now. I lose my audience on a regular basis.
What are you secretly really good at?
I’m secretly really good at collecting odd objects that would disturb most people. If I walk into an op shop or a garage sale, my mind will be scanning that place and will find this strange object that is both disturbing and funny. And that’s why I sit in a room full of those objects.
I often buy overly cutesy things for [my wife and editor] Jill, just to annoy her – like a guinea pig, or a little kitten coming out of a pail of paint. You know, it’s horrible, but it’s so funny that someone thought that was good. And those things can sometimes work their way into the fiction, too.
What was your first tattoo, and why?
[Points to his inner left wrist] I think it was this one, the [fish from Dr Seuss’s 1960 book] One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish. That book was a real light on the hill for me: Dr Seuss starts talking about all the different types of fish there are, and about 10 pages in, he appears to tire of that idea, and then just goes off on a random tour of strange animals and landscapes, all for no apparent reason other than that it’s entertaining. There’s no great lesson. There’s no redeeming value, apart from the musicality of the words and the celebration of nonsense. And I went, ‘That’s all I need to do.’ There is a place for pure pleasure.
I got the tattoo around the age of 30. I’d taken two years of leave without pay from my teaching job and rented a room so I could just write 12 hours a day, while taking a fiction course and an editing course at nights – just to find my writing voice. And I still couldn’t make a living by the end of two years, but I just went, I’m going to get that tattoo to remind me [of that time].
Many of my tattoos are characters from literature that inspires me – Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the Magic Pudding – stuff that shows me where the pinnacle is. So I can never slack off, because you’ve got these great books to aspire to.
What song do you want played at your funeral?
I’ve got an actual funeral playlist of about 60 songs, so they can just randomly shuffle through those, but one of the songs that means the most to me is a song called Wash It All Off by JG Thirlwell – an amazing Australian musician who works under the moniker Foetus. That song just blew my mind about the possibilities of what a song even was. There’s this insanely joyous, unhinged feeling coming out of it. I try to channel that energy into whatever I’m writing, because that’s what life seems like to me. It’s a joyously unhinged, absurd wonderland of possibility.
If you had a sandwich named after you, what would be in it?
Probably a banana smoothie. It’d be a soggy sandwich, but banana smoothie is my go to snack at about 3pm when I’ve still got work to do; it gets me through the rest of the afternoon. So that would be ideal – I could eat my drink.
LET’S GO: Stories to write, stories to draw, adventures to have, and fun galore by Andy Griffiths and Bill Hope is out through Pan Macmillan on 24 February, to coincide with the start of Griffiths’ Laureate term
