Julia Donaldson is one of the UK’s best-loved children’s authors. Her award-winning collaborations with Axel Scheffler include the modern classic The Gruffalo and its irresistible sequel The Gruffalo's Child. Julia also writes children’s plays and songs, and runs regular storytelling workshops.

Here she talks to Write Away about her rollicking, rhyming story, Tyrannosaurus Drip.

Download the full version of this interview in PDF format

How did Tyrannosaurus Drip come about? Was it the dinosaur or a particular phrase or the refrain, or something else?

I’d had the idea for Tyrannosaurus Drip for a long, long time. I’d wanted to write another story with a baddie. Ever since The Gruffalo I hadn’t had a proper baddie. So I had this idea of the T Rex, and I had the idea of an egg swap, but I just couldn’t work out the plot. I really, really worked on this plot. I had a bit of a headache sorting it out. That’s always the difficult bit. An idea might be vaguely in my head for a year or so, but then I just have to decide what the plot is going to be and then I do brainstorming - writing it vaguely in verse, but just writing out the story with any little ideas, nice phrases, lines. Then I usually pick out this phrase or this rhythm or this chant. With Tyrannosaurus Drip it had the chant and I wanted to keep it, having it not exactly as a refrain, but everyone has to chant things in it, and that dictated the rhythm. The actual writing might be two weeks of real, hard work. I’d written an older book called The Dinosaur’s Diary, which is a short novel. That was about a small dinosaur, so I did quite a bit of research for that. And when I was a child I lived in London and I remember once going to a lecture about dinosaurs in the Natural History Museum. I remember the lecturer saying that most dinosaurs were the size of a pen and that’s always fascinated me. I wanted to get that into writing and disseminate that. So I did do quite a lot of research before I came up with the Duckbill dinosaurs.

The song about Tyrannosaurus Drip on your website has such different words from the book that it’s almost like you’ve told the story twice. Do you approach a written text differently from the way you would a song?

 It really depends completely on the book. With The Gruffalo it was obvious that you could just make a song out of the mouse’s description of the Gruffalo. With Tyrannosaurus Drip, it’s such a long text, there’s so much chanting, that I needed another approach. Actually that was inspired by the song “Bright Eyes”. It’s in Watership Down. It’s sung by Simon and Garfunkel. It’s like a song sung to a little suffering rabbit. And I thought I’d write a song sung by a sympathetic singer to this little suffering dinosaur. I wanted it to be a little bit over-the-top sentimental. I have a different approach each time, really.

Tyrannosaurus Drip seems for a slightly older readership than some of your other books.

It’s a bit more sophisticated. The illustrations are more stylised. Even Tiddler is maybe a little bit more sophisticated than the most simple. I think perhaps Monkey Puzzle is the simplest. Some of them come out older and some younger. I might intend to do something simple, but when I write it, it comes out differently.

Did you have to change anything in Tyrannosaurus Drip because it didn’t work?

For the American edition I had to rewrite the first couplet “where the land was thick with veg” because they didn’t know what veg was. I was quite pleased with what I came up with, the alternative to that: “Once upon a time (something) beside a swamp lived a heard of duckbill dinosaurs who liked to stand and chomp”, or something like that. I had the swamp-chomp rhyme instead of edge-veg. With Tyrannosaurus Drip I had a long chat to my editor about how the egg could get across the river. Maybe she thought of the idea of the little dinosaur swimming. So I had a little bit of help with that.

Does your relationship change with an illustrator as it develops?

Not really. It was quite hard finding the right illustrator for Tyrannosaurus Drip. I chose David Roberts. The publisher sent me a lot of books by different illustrators and I went for David because I like his colours and atmosphere. I’ve written a new book about pirates, which David Roberts is going to illustrate. We were doing a signing and he did say to me, “Do you see the pirates being traditional pirates or very weird and different?” and I said I wanted them quite traditional, so I’m waiting to see if he bows to that or if he just thinks, what the hell, I’ll do what I like. But that’s the first time an illustrator’s asked me how I see something.

They’re the experts in their field and they know how something’s going to work. I don’t think it would work if I told an illustrator they’d got to illustrate in a way that didn’t come naturally and I can learn to live with that, really. Nine times out of ten I forget what I’d envisaged. It’s like when you go on holiday you’ve got a picture of what it’s going to be like, and when you get there it’s different, and very soon you’ve forgotten what you thought it was going to be like.

 The book you’re working on now with David Roberts is in prose. Why not verse?

I wouldn’t do a book in verse just for the sake of it. I wouldn’t do a book in doggerel rhyme or tell a story in rhyme without any reason. The book has got a troll in it and the troll is a bit stupid and the wrong animals cross his bridge and he says “Who’s that trip trapping over my bridge?” and they say “I’m not trip trapping, I’m slithering and I’m a snail.” I so wanted to keep that in, and that didn’t fit into a rhyming framework so that’s in prose and that’s quite long. The troll one’s probably going to be for readers that are a bit older.

I find it much harder to write in prose because you have to discover what your style is, and there’s not the limitation. I find it easier – it’s paradoxical, really – it’s hard to write in rhyme and make it scan, I’m not saying it’s easy. But to me it’s a medium that I know, I feel I’m the mistress of, and with prose I feel there’s so many good writers out there and people who are terribly observant. I don’t think I’m the most observant person. So I’m probably better with the language. I’m writing a novel for teenagers, and that’s very different again. I am enjoying that. It’s about a girl who runs away to Glasgow and a would-be detective paperboy who’s a bit younger than her. He’s modelled on my younger son, who used to be a Goth – a Goth paperboy.

Your books are often about the triumph of the underdog, or the power of stories. Do you set out to write a book with a particular theme in mind or does it emerge as the story develops?

Maybe it’s subconscious or maybe they’re just traditional themes: The Ugly Duckling, Cinderella – Tyrannosaurus Drip has the horrible stepsisters. Lots of people say that I seem to have sometimes quite wholesome themes of teamwork or cooperation, so I’m not sure where that comes from. I never start from that. I don’t start with a message. I’m not trying to preach to children at all. Even if it is a message, I’d start with a message that was like a fable or something. I wouldn’t say “I really think children should learn about global warming and not to pollute the environment. I’m going to write a story to teach…” I would never write from a didactic point of view. But if a story is worth its salt there’s going to be a message. Otherwise it would just be a series of mad coincidences.

Thank you Julia Donaldson for talking to Write Away.

2008-01-05