Interview with Lauren Child

by Judith Ridge

Sydney, October 2003

I first came across Clarice Bean in a bookshop I was working in at the time, and I hadn’t heard of you, hadn’t heard any pre-publicity, and so I came to Clarice Bean completely fresh, and I can remember standing in the bookshop, just laughing out loud and being utterly charmed and delighted by this really fresh approach to a picture book. I’ve been reading your history with art school and design work and so on with interest. I was interested that at art school they didn’t teach you the fundamentals of book design, like gutters and that kind of thing, because what strikes me about — you know how people say about writing and so on you need to know the rules to break the rules? There’s something really fresh about your books — you seem to really understand how a book works, because you’ve taken it apart and put it back together again… Starting the story before the imprint page, playing with design and so on. I’m interested in how you came to that approach.

Part of it maybe is not knowing all the rules.

Not being bound?

Yeas. I wasn’t taught any of that stuff, which I do think you should be taught. Generally it would be helpful.

Well, it is teachable, as you’ve said.

Yes. But perhaps not knowing it means you fumble your way through it and you get something different. I think maybe also I wrote, I’d tried writing before and publishers were always saying “write a little bit more like this or a little bit more like that”…

More conventionally? More plot based?

It was ages ago when I was trying to write the story, and they have a very… I can see why it happens, they don’t really want to take a big risk on somebody new, and nobody wants to publish something that won’t sell, so it makes sense that they want you to write a little bit like somebody else before, but I found it very difficult, because I was always trying to write something that would fit in with what they wanted. In the end I wrote Clarice Bean, which was a long time after I had written things in my early twenties, and nothing got through and I’d given up on the idea. And then really because I wanted to maybe come up with a character that could be used in animation or product design…

So you had that idea quite early on.

Yeas, I’d given up on the idea of being an illustrator or a writer. It was really a means to an end, to get into something else, so perhaps that made me approach the whole writing thing in a different way, I wasn’t all that interested in that side of it. I just started writing about a character, rather than trying to make a very plot-based story book.

And was there some resistance from publishers to that?

Well, I just kind of wrote and wrote, and then I knew very much how I wanted the book to look, so I set it all up, I did some sample spreads, and I went and worked with a graphic designer friend of mine, and we made all the type move in the way I wanted it too, and came up with the different fonts for each character.

I wanted to ask you about the fonts…

So that was right at the beginning, I decided all those things. So then I put the two things together, so I’ve got the picture and I’ve done overlays of the text, so you could see how it would integrate with the pictures.

There’s a couple of questions I wanted to ask you about that. First of all I was going to make the comment that the convention about children’s books is that they’re really strong on plot, that children’s books are the last bastion of plot. You’ve proved that that doesn’t always have to be the case, although as for instance the Clarice Bean books have gone on the plot has become more fore-grounded, and then you’ve gone to the novel, which is something we’ll get back to. So that interests me. But also, in terms of the overall conception of the book — when I first read your books, it took me quite a while to realise — I’m not a visual person — but it took me a really long time to notice the detail of your books. I didn’t realise at first that they were collage, I didn’t sort of consciously notice, even though I know that Marcie’s got all the photos of boys in her room and so on, but it took me a while to actually see the different layers that you’ve built up there with text and drawings and photographs and then the fonts. There’s a real coherence to the books. It reminds me of, when I was at uni I was in a drama group, and there was a fellow I’d been to high school with who turned up at a performance and he’d become a makeup artist, a theatrical artist, and he said to me, “If people say to me after a performance, the makeup was great, I know I’ve failed, because they shouldn’t notice it.” I feel that way a little bit about your books, like I didn’t notice at first all the different— because they work together so well. So I’m just wondering how you conceive of all of those disparate elements. Do they sort of naturally fall together, or do you work with one element at a time, like text and then…

Yes, I think they just come, I think it’s a — while I’m writing, I’ll get a visual thing in my head of how the illustration should look like. Marcie’s room was one of those ones where I had very strong feelings that I wanted it to look a bit like a teenage magazine. So you’ve got that feeling that, yeah, you’re in her room and you kind of know what her room looks like, but some of it you know isn’t really there. It’s quite abstract in a way because it’s laid out like a magazine, and I left that picture right to the end that I had such a sure feeling of how I wanted it to be I kind of felt like I couldn’t do it. And it was one of those ones where I dreaded it because I thought, oh it’s just not going to come out, and it was one of those that just did come out exactly, it wasn’t this awful thing trying to get down on paper what I wanted. That’s the funny thing about illustration. Sometimes it really happens exactly how you want it to, sometimes it doesn’t, you can’t get it across and I would change things, and you keep changing them…

So do you start with a pretty fixed picture in your head of how it should look?

No, it’s usually quite a blurry vision! And you think, yeah, I sort of know how I want that to look. You have something in your mind’s eye, and you kind of think, it’s going to work, and then sometimes just getting it down on paper is just impossible. Or sometimes you do exactly what you thought was going to work, and it doesn’t, it just doesn’t quite look the same, and you’ll redo it and redo it. The last spread of That Pesky Rat, it was exactly that, where I had this kind of vision of how I wanted the old man and the rat to be sitting in front of the fire in a sort of quite gothic way, I suppose, having a little cup of tea together. And it suddenly didn’t make any sense to do that, because I looked back at all the other images, and the writing, and it suddenly all became about looking into windows, that this is about a character who’s spent his whole life yearning to have a home, and he’s always looking in, and he finally wants to look out, so I changed it, because I felt he had to be sitting in a window of his own with this man, his new owner. And that’s where you were going to get the cosy feeling from, that he’s finally made it. So things like that happen all the time. I would say sometimes I’ve got a very clear idea of what I want, but you don’t always get that in the end. I mean, illustration is such an odd thing, and I usually dread starting because there’s so much disappointment involved, because you’re trying to get something that you can’t always get. And at other times its such a surprise and it just happens.

I think sometimes, too, people underestimate — if you’ve got a more cartoony style, for want of a better word, it looks so spontaneous and fresh and quick and easy, but that’s not the case at all, is it?

No, it’s not. I think people —

If you’re doing it well it looks fresh and spontaneous and easy!

Yeah, you definitely want it to look like that. But I think people find it very hard to understand visual things in a way, because— I was debating with my…

Your minder?

My minder, who is the head of Orchard, and we were just talking about that whole thing, and I was saying how I definitely feel illustration is not considered as important as writing.

I think you’re right.

I definitely think that. She doesn’t feel that, because Orchard is the only publishing house that I’ve worked for that treats the designer as the editor. I think they’re really good at getting that right.

I wanted to ask you about the design of the books. The Clarice Bean books — Anna Louise Billson is credited as the designer on the imprint page, but the other books don’t have anybody credited. I was wondering about your relationship with the designer. I’m sure it varies from book to book and publisher to publisher… You did refer to that earlier, when you were starting out with the first book, you worked with a graphic designer friend. Do you consider the designer an editor in a way, like an editor who edits your text?

I think it’s a very similar job. What I would do with my roughs, and certainly with that first Clarice Bean, because— it wasn’t exactly my first book, but it was the first book I wrote… things like… if you saw the original for something like that… (indicates a spread) it would be pretty similar. This (Clarice twirling in the garden) is different because (the designer) had to reorder that because I had that (the text) moving around much more. I think that she felt we shouldn’t do that. But things like this one, this looks almost just the same. Basically with this one (Clarice twirling), things got toned down more, because I’d done things like when she’s says about twirling, and I’d done this so it was twirling, but it wasn’t logical enough, and things like this, I wanted to have the argument in between them…

Oh yes! Divide them.

It would make more sense, but because of the gutter it was just getting tricky, and that’s why we didn’t do it in the end. Here I’d had all the words falling out of his pockets…

It’s got a similar effect.

It’s just that sort of thing of — I think, it was one of the first books that I worked on, things like that had stayed and things like the writing being scrunched up, but it was sort of a lesson for me in toning down.

OK! But on the other hand you’ve said you’re going to be doing some new books with Penguin and you want to try new things there.

Yeah, in different ways. I guess when I’m doing a rough of something like this then I will usually do that on the computer, so I can see what it looks like, because now I’ve got to know my designers so well —

And they you…

Yeah, I can send them a much rougher thing, but with a book like this, I was working with a different designer on this, it was great, but I’ll generally do it as a visual note to myself rather than to her, so I did spend quite a long time…

And do you do that on the computer…

Something like that I did do, because I needed to know if it was going to work, whereas when I was first doing these books, I needed to know that she understood what I meant, and then once you’ve dome a couple of books you have a kind of shorthand between you, so it’s not a problem.

How many of the fonts have you created specifically for the books?

No, we’ve just used— I’d love to do our own fonts, but we haven’t.

The one that made me wonder was in “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Book”, I think it’s when Herb’s in Little Bear’s bed, he’s in a bed anyway, it’s a quilted bed, and the letters have stitches…

Oh! That’s true! I think that my designer, David, did that.

OK!

I think he did. He adapted one…

That one made me think, I wonder if they invented that one.

I think he did in fact.

So it’s a very close relationship, working with the designer, then?

Yeah, it’s always really close. With that book particularly, we both spent hours doing that, where I didn’t just pencil in how I wanted it, I literally did put it in. It would have been the correct font, but that one, particularly that spread, because there’s so much text… I can’t actually do the illustration until I know that the text is going to fit in, because — I don’t have a copy of it (Big Bad Book) — That was a really hard book, because I wanted you to feel like you were right in there, so it’s meant to look like, obviously it’s meant to look like you’re in the page, and so you can’t have it all abstract like this, because he’s actually going into the room, and everything, and it’s a very traditional fairy tale book. So therefore everywhere is wood panelling or carpets or quilts or whatever, so I did have to go through everything making sure I’d left enough space for all the text, which is why a lot of that I did do just by laboriously glueing it all in and then sending it to him, and then he would have to rework everything.

There’s a bit of a tradition of the fractured fairy tale. Did you feel daunted about trying to do something fresh with that? Because I think you have…

I didn’t really. I had this idea in my head — it was really all to do with this little boy who’d read my book “I Want a Pet”. He was really small, and his mother had relayed this thing that he’d said after they’d finished reading the book, he said “Will you take the book out of my room” and she said “Why?” “Because there’s a lion in the book.” And that had given me the idea of the story before. It’s a really simple idea but I hadn’t thought about it. And so I came up with that and wrote that. I was going to write it just as any old story, I was going to make something up, and I just thought, Oh, if you make something up, about an ogre or whatever, then the kid hasn’t got any — you’re having to explain the story, which hasn’t got a reference about the story that you’ve got with an ogre in it, and that it’s much easier to come up with something like little red riding hood, because they already know about the wolf and what the wolf does, and you don’t have to explain. And so that’s why I used the fairy tale. It wasn’t really intentional.

I think that’s a really common experience. As a teenager, I went through a period of reading horror and ghost stories, and I buried the books, so I wouldn’t wake up in the night and see the cover and give myself a fright, so even older kids have that experience. That’s interesting, because that’s two kids now that have sparked off a book; there was the little girl in Denmark who inspired Lola, who’s fabulous… What interests me about Charlie and Lola is that the books are about Lola, but Charlie tells the story. I wondered how you came to that decision, to have Charlie be the narrator.

I don’t know how it happened. I wanted to do something where it was just children’s voices. I had this really strong feeling about siblings and how they relate to each other, because I think as a child you do spend an awful lot of time with people your own age. I had two sisters and a lot of our time was spent squabbling or paying or whatever, and so I thought it would be nice to do a book where actually that’s all you see. You don’t see the parents. They’re referred to but you don’t see them.

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