The Trouble With Dragons: Interview with Debi Gliori

Can you describe your latest project, The Trouble with Dragons?

It's a picture book about climate change.

Well, that's the simple answer. The truth is that for me, it's the culmination of a lifelong hope that we humans might wake up to the beauty of our home planet and effect the kind of radical change needed to ensure that the Earth stays beautiful long after we're gone. Climate change is a 'hot' topic, rousing passionate arguments and many column inches in our newspapers, but there appears to be a real lack of will to take the necessary steps to prevent uncontrollable runaway climate change happening. Scratch an adult consumer too deeply, and he or she will cling to their inalienable right to practise outmoded forms of behaviour: flying, excessive food miles, driving a gas guzzling car, buying unsustainable products, services and comestibles, and furthermore, to justify this will argue that black is white, the science is suspect, the Chinese are opening one more yadda yadda yadda, and as a final bleat of eco-suicidal gobbledygook, will state blithely that it will probably not happen in our lifetimes. Whatever 'it' might be.

The Trouble With Dragons

©Debi Gliori and Bloomsbury Books

Not so, our children. I believe our children see the problem of climate change very clearly. After all, it's their future we're spending in such a profligate fashion. We are running up an ecological debt that they, the poor wee things, will have to repay. However, I believe in the massive untapped reserves of the pester power of small children. If we can rally our children round the recycle, re-use and reduce ethos, then we might have a hope of turning a potentially lethal global threat into something we can live with and hopefully overcome. Maybe, just maybe, our children will force us to behave correctly with regard to our custodianship of the Earth.

Ooops. That was about climate change and not about The Trouble With Dragons. I'd been trying to write a picture book about the desperate state of our planet for ages; I couldn't find a way to tell the story for small children without scaring them witless with the truth, or lying through my teeth and saying if we all use low-energy light bulbs and recycle our plastic bags everything will be fine and we'll all live in la-la land forever. I think our children deserve the truth, but delivered in a form they can deal with. Then one morning it all fell into place with one word - dragons. Dragons are the perfect vector for hefty carbon consumption - they blow huge flames out their nostrils, they fly and they're hot and red. But best of all, they're extinct which is exactly what we'll be if we carry on in our Feckless Ways. The book points this out, at the very end. Can I quote myself?

The rest was relatively easy. Sarah Odedina at Bloomsbury is the only editor I would trust with a book like this - she alone had the courage to publish No Matter What in its original form with the 'death question' intact. So, obviously, TDWD was hers. Thankfully, she thought so too. Val Brathwaite at Bloomsbury was Mr Bear's first ever art editor waaaay back in the mists of time, so in terms of a team to publish this book, this is the dream team. I think we all work together beautifully. I think the book is in the best possible hands and I feel enormously hopeful for its future. As to the planet - maybe when our children march on Downing Street we'll listen. Wouldn't that be a wonderful thing?

When you begin work on a new book, do you get advice from a publisher as to what’s popular – e.g., for picture books, what kind of animal characters are selling well – or does it all come from you?

Over the years there has been a bit of tweaking with regard to the marketplace - Mr Bear used to be Mr Badger, but my publisher (back in 1994) pointed out that they don't have badgers in the USA and therefore, Mr Badger Babysits wouldn't sell in the States. Back then, a book's success or failure did so some extent depend on the US market.

(I still love badgers, by the way. I haven't completely buried that idea, and like most ideas, it has gone back down deep and may well surface at some future date. Maybe with climate change there will be badgers in the US. Joke.)

These days, I mostly come up with ideas myself. I'm working on a book for RHCB called Witch Baby and Me, and there has been an unholy amount of to-ing and fro-ing between my editor and the S&M department with regard to some of the content of that title. Sales are out there at the pointy end of the whole publishing process, and have a worrying tendency to come back in-house as if descending from the mountain with the future writ large on stone tablets - pink glitter is the new black, everyone's doing books on dinosaurs why haven't we got one, fairies are dead ( oh, puhleeeeese) let's do trolls, what we need is more foil, more special finishes, more froth... When Witch Baby and Me was in its nascent stages, this kind of thing was deeply disturbing, in fact was destabilizing to a hideous extent, but once the story started to firm up a bit, I felt more able to come back to my editor and argue my own case for not having glitter, pinkness, trolls and dinosaurs.

Your books have a very distinctive look and feel, often with tactile covers. How much of a say do you have in that?

I imagine you're referring to the Pure Dead and Deep novels for older children, rather than my picture books. These novels came out in hardback with velvet covers back in those heady days when new fiction came out in hardback. O tempora, o mores...

Yeah. So, that was then, this is now. They were wonderful covers, and were entirely the idea of a designer called Tracey Hurst. There was a vague idea to make the Deep series have black rubber covers ( no, really) and that was my idea. Make of that what you will...

In the end, Random House wisely decided that velvet would be a better idea than rubber. The colour of the velvet was dictated by what was practical (light colours of velvet get hideously grubby in libraries) but also by what had gone before. By the time we reached the last book in the series (Deep Fear) we'd pretty well run out of options colourwise with the exception of a dark blue velvet which is the one we used.

And that was not an elegant sentence, but hey.

Do you trial your picture books with kids before you publish?

Are you kidding? I barely have time to write and illustrate them without taking them on the road. Although, I did do a six week residency in Shetland in the autumn of 2007, and showed some artwork from The Trouble With Dragons to two classes of p7's on the island. Normally I would never do this, mainly because watercolour artwork is too fragile to haul in and out of classrooms, portfolios or submit to the scrutiny of small children who especially love to 'look' at things with their fingers. I do show pencil roughs though, to explain that books don't just appear on the shelves as if by magic. I love to demonstrate the process behind the making of a book; the invisible underpinning between the covers of all picture books.

Unusually, for an illustrator of picture books, you moved into writing fiction for older children with the Pure Dead series. Would you regard yourself as more of a writer than an illustrator?

No. I began as an illustrator, trained as one, and after a long period of writing, I find myself slipping back into illustrating as if I'm slipping back into a pair of perfectly fitting shoes after an age teetering about on high heels. I love doing both, but illustrating is the easier form.

Can you describe your typical working day?

Brace yourselves, my dears.

I wake at 5.25 a.m. and head out into the night to the gym. By 7.40 a.m. after much breathless exertion, I feel just about ready to face the day. The logic behind this kind of aberrant behaviour is that nothing the new day throws at me can possibly be any harder than what I've just voluntarily put myself through. So don't hate me, right? I know that Condoleeza Rice does this kind of insane routine as well, but just don't go drawing any conclusions, okay?

Back home for shower and breakfast then cross garden to light-filled shedquarters (aka studio) with seven Velux windows to maximise the photon-quotient. In these northern latitudes, and with failing eyesight, I need all the light I can get. There's also three eye-wateringly expensive low-energy daylight helix bulbs directly over my drawing board, also in aid of being able to paint when the sun starts to go down at 2.30 as it does this close to midwinter. At the moment, I'm painting watercolour artwork for The Trouble With Dragons, so I crank up my Mac, select some music, coil myself on my draughtsman's chair into the human pretzel shape which will ensure that I'm a mass of creaky arthritic aches when I older, and Go For It. At eleven o'clock, the dial on my internal coffee-o-meter clangs across to empty, so I head into the house to remedy this in the company of Michael, my partner. Back out to shed till one o'clock. More painting. Lunch from one till two (God, how boring am I?) and then work with the fading light till my youngest daughter hammers on the shed door at 3.40 to alert me that Her Presence has returned from being educated and is in need of calories. Coffee break with daughter(s) and partner, then back into the shed for the last hour and a half which, oddly is always the most creative part of the day. I remember writing No Matter What in the darkness of a winter afternoon. I also remember that when I was writing the Pure Deads, I frequently spent the entire day writing and scoring out and chewing the end of my pencil and generally not advancing the story one whit until the magic hour of 3.40 had passed, whereupon the words came easily and before I realised, it was 5.00 and time to stop.

I cook to relax at the end of a day. I love cooking. I stop at 5.00 because I want to see something of my family. When I was away in Shetland doing my residency thing, I stopped at 5.00p.m. to reacquaint myself with a small measure of the contents of Mr Gordon's nice green bottles (ice and lime, please) and then I carried on working till 7.00 p.m. But now I'm back home, the children need fed, but even more than that, they need their mother to be a parent and not an artist. And yes, a modicum of Mr Gordon helps iron out any residual wrinkles after a day's work.

What advice would you give budding illustrators these days?

I wouldn't dare. I don't know what the industry wants these days. These days, I feel like a budding illustrator myself. Forgive me, but the best advice I can give is 'to your own self be true' and stay out of bookshops unless you have a burning desire to see what sells and slavishly follow suit. Feed your head, read everything you can get your hands on, turn off the television and get enough sleep.