So what’s next?
I’m going to do some more Charlie and Lola picture books that I wrote years ago but never got round to illustrating. Doing them now will work very well with having a young child in the house coming in to chat to me from time to time while I am doing them. That wasn’t possible with writing about the Ruby books, where I really had to concentrate. I also want to do some more Clarice Bean books, because I feel I know much more now about how best to pace myself in fiction. Clarice is younger than Ruby, and her stories are much shorter. I had to find out how to write long in the Ruby Redfort books. Now I will have to work out how to write short again, and I am looking forward to it.
And with that, our interview, often punctuated with hoots of
laughter, came to an end. Evidence of the huge enjoyment Lauren Child derives from writing and illustrating her many books is always there on the page, even in moments of high excitement. It is hard to come away from them not smiling; the same could also be said about departing from Lauren herself after this interview.
The Ruby Redfort books, including Blink and You Die (978-0-0073- 3428-5, £12.99 hbk) are published by HarperCollins Children’s Books.
Nicholas Tucker is honorary senior lecturer in Cultural and Community Studies at Sussex University.
Three boys on an island of adventure . . .
You also do two things that don’t normally happen in children’s adventure stories; you keep parents in and you make your main character go to school. How did you manage to stop either parents or school from ruining any decent adventures by always insisting that their own daily demands come first? Well, rather than remove Ruby’s parents I simply removed their brains, so they never have any idea of what’s really going on. They are lovely and good fun, but mostly provide comic backdrop. As for school, when I watch James Bond I always feel I know so little about his other day to day world. This means that at least for me he soon becomes little more than a two-dimensional bore. We never see him simply at home or having any sort of enduring relationships. So with Ruby I wanted to write about someone who experiences extraordinary events but also has a normal life going at the same time.
You talk about Ruby as if she is a real person. Is this how you think about her? Yes, I suppose I do think of her as a real person with real relationships.
But although she is nearly fourteen she still has no growing interest in boys. I was in fact going to put that in but it felt as if it might take the story off into a different direction. As it is, all six books take place in one year of Ruby’s life and there is already so much plot to juggle with.
You have said you want your readers to form their own visual impressions of what your characters look like, but then you add your own illustrations of them at the end of the book. Why? I tried on the whole not to give too many verbal descriptions of my characters’ appearances. This meant I never had to be specific about where exactly they all came from at birth and the problems that might sometimes arise for them as a result. But I thought it might be interesting for readers to finally see how I actually pictured them once we got to the end of the series.
978-0-9956368-0-4 Based on the much-loved TV series
£8.99 pbk
www.grasshopper.co.uk Books for Keeps No.221 November 2016 13
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