13 Years of Storeys
Today, The 169-Storey Treehouse is published! After 13 incredible years as a record-breaking, #1 bestselling kids’ favourite series, we’ve reached the very top of the Treehouse. Below, author Andy Griffiths reflects on the building of this legacy with the series’ illustrator Terry Denton.
When young readers ask me how I met illustrator Terry Denton, I always have to check whether they want the true story or the made-up one.
I warn them that the true story is a lot less interesting than the made-up version, involving as it does over-protective parents, emergency inflatable underpants, fire, defenestration, sea-rescue, pirates, sharks, storms, shipwreck and the creation of a 13-storey treehouse complete with bowling alley, marshmallow machine and vegetable vaporiser.
The true story is that in 1991 an educational publisher hired Terry to illustrate a book I’d written because she figured we shared a similar sense of offbeat humour. She was right, of course—and Terry and I have been happily creating books together ever since—but the facts don’t always make for the most exciting story, or the one that the kids want to hear.
In the beginning Terry and I would work separately, but one year when he was behind deadline on Just Stupid!, he invited me down to his studio (i.e. mouse-infested backyard shed) to help him. I sat there coming up with silly ideas which Terry would instantly transform into funny cartoons that would have us both in stitches at our combined comic genius. For example: Hickory Dickory Dock / The mice ran up the clock / They pulled off its hands / Put a spanner in the works / And set fire to it. Okay, I guess you had to be there. But believe me, it was serious fun. Like the sort of fun I used to have with my friends messing around in class when we should have been doing our work.
It wasn’t long before we were meeting regularly and figuring out how to write books together with the pictures being as essential to the storytelling process as the words (which were correspondingly decreasing in number as the amount of illustrations increased).
After half a dozen experimental books we created The 13-Storey Treehouse—a pseudo-autobiographical story about us living in an ever-expanding treehouse trying to write a book but being too distracted to do so by all the wonderful and terrifying things happening around us. We knew it was a sort of odd and unusual book, which we both really loved, but neither of us could have dreamt that 13 years later we would be making the final book in what has become a 13-book series.
Our namesake characters are based pretty loosely on our real-life selves. Is Terry really as dreamy and prone to distraction in real life as his fictional counterpart? Maybe not, but he’s not that far off. He’s just as likely to be drawing a close-up study of his finger—or a puddle of prehistoric pond scum—as working on whatever picture he’s supposed to be doing.
And am I as bossy, deadline conscious and fond of cracking the whip as my character in the book? Once again, it’s not too far off the mark, but it’s not the whole truth. In real life I’m easily distracted by Terry’s clowning and whole sessions can pass by in helpless laughter with very little apparent ‘progress’ on the book.
Ironically, however, these diversions have, time and again, provided rich and memorable material for the stories. I’ll be doing my best to create a structured plot while Terry will be throwing metaphorical spanners into the works, all of which has to be somehow incorporated logically—or illogically—into the story and it’s in this tension between opposite approaches that the true creative energy lies.
To sit beside Terry while he is drawing is amusing and mysterious in equal parts. While I generally can—if pressed—explain how I arrived at a certain plot point or idea, Terry’s creative process is much more opaque. He seems to literally ‘think’ through the drawing process itself and if asked to explain why he has added a particularly brilliant or funny detail to a picture is likely to say little more than, ‘Dunno—I just felt like it.’
At the heart of our collaboration, however, is play—the pure pleasure of playing with words, pictures and ideas and arranging them in surprising and amusing ways. And I think it’s this quality of play in the books that kids in more than 40 countries have picked up on and taken to heart. They use the books as prompts for their own stories, drawings, costumes, models and, in some cases, actual treehouses.
Children don’t work out every detail of an imaginative game before playing it. They just start playing and make it up as they go along. And, one way or another, that’s at the heart of what Terry and I have been doing since we met all those years ago.
We’re incredibly fortunate and grateful that so many kids—and even parents—have been willing to play along with us.
But even the best games have to come to an end at some point—if only so a new game can begin—and after thirteen epically mind-bending, eyeball-exploding, treehouse-themed adventures, we figure our namesakes have earned a little rest and recreation. It’s time for us to fire up the marshmallow machine, take a dip in the chocolate waterfall and pop some popcorn with the lid off*.
*In the words of Dr Seuss, ‘If you’ve never done these things you should—these things are fun, and fun is good’.
The 169-Storey Treehouse is out now and available where all books are sold.
