Mother and daughter: how we wrote bestseller Lionboy
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Version 0 of 1. Louisa (Isabel’s mother) In 1997 I had a chatty four-year-old and a half-baked idea for a novel about love, death, alcohol and Rachmaninoff. Every night I would be knackered and when the child wanted a story, I would say, what about? A boy, she’d say. What kind of boy? A naughty one. What’s his name? Charlie. What does he do? Run away. “Once upon a time,” I intoned, half sleep, “there was a very naughty boy called Charlie, and one day, he RAN AWAY… then what?” “Lions,” she’d say. Or “A French whale”. Or “Venice.” For her eighth birthday, I asked what she would like. “Write down the Charlie stories,” she said. Of course we had forgotten them, so we started again, with more shall we say narrative arc, and an actual plot. I thought she meant “write them down so we don’t forget them”; but when I’d written them, with her leaning over my shoulder, correcting my spelling, dictating developments, yelling, and so forth, and I said “Now what?”, she said: “Send it to Derek”. Derek was my agent, and she was old enough to know that when you finish writing something you send it to Derek. And Derek, who was expecting the love/death/alcohol/Rachmaninoff novel, rose gallantly to the small boy who can talk to cats, runs away with the floating circus and gangs up with captive lions to save the world novel, complete with French whale, and Venice. We called it Lionboy, and wrote sequels, and further novels, and Derek and his colleagues sold it in 36 languages, at least partly because someone called us the New JK Rowling, and several people exaggerated how much we were paid. An Australian paper said Isabel dictated it to me; an English one said I invented her contribution as a publicity stunt. We found ourselves in Japan and Argentina, Holland and Bangkok. Isabel learned the Catalan for “What is this obsession with Harry Potter?” Now my co-author is finishing up at university, and I am back where I belong writing for adults, about the history of maxillofacial reconstructive surgery, and love and death and alcohol and Rachmaninoff and post-traumatic stress disorder. I will say, writing five novels in the comparative privacy of children’s fiction certainly honed my abilities. And Isabel is still, and always, my first reader. Isabel (Louisa’s daughter) Just when I thought I, and Lionboy’s readers, had grown up and moved on, a new incarnation of our beautiful old adventure is growing under new inventors. The theatre company Complicite has created a stage show: Marcelo dos Santos wrote the script, Clive Mendus and James Yeatman directed the revival, Annabel Arden’s magnificent talent created the original show last year. These living, magical people are acting out what we’d only ever seen in our minds’ eye. When I was little, Charlie Ashanti was my alter-ego and we’d go adventuring as one: now, I’m going to meet Charlie at the Tricycle Theatre, and we’ll get to know each other. It’s pretty strange. It was special, too, to have made the stories we’d concocted at my bedside into something for children across the world. Sometimes when we went abroad, kids recognised us and came up clutching well-thumbed copies. Aged 10, I couldn’t quite get my head around the role reversal, given how I followed Philip Pullman and Jaqueline Wilson around our publishers’ parties. It was the loveliest thought, that these kids were sharing the mad world inside our heads. People often ask how the actual writing process worked: as I remember, we’d discuss the story in the park or on the way to school, and then mum would write it. Then I’d read what she’d done and say, “that won’t be funny for kids” or “what does that mean?” or “please don’t kill Primo!” - as well as “oh wow” and “that’s brilliant!” I hadn’t read mum’s adult books – they were a bit beyond me – but as Lionboy came into being, I got to see her professional side. The buzz around Lionboy generated some truly surreal moments. When we signed the initial contract, they sent a guy dressed as a lion to our house with a hamper of Lion bars, which made us laugh! And I always look back fondly on our visit to Japan, which included “intelligent” toilets like in that episode of The Simpsons, and strawberries-and-cream sandwiches, which were a kind attempt to make us feel at home – what two things do Brits eat, after all? I hope the lasting legacy of Lionboy will be a love of nature and an instinct to care for Earth. That kind of concern was intrinsic to the plot, and now seems all the more important. The books, set in a potential near-future, involve big pharma, animal welfare and climate issues, which grow more pressing by the day. I hope the kids that loved Lionboy will be motivated to help save our lovely planet, and that they’ll love the adventure too. The Lionboy books are available from the Guardian bookshop. Louisa’s most recent novels for adults are My Dear I Wanted to Tell You and The Heroes’ Welcome. Lionboy the play is at Tricycle Theatre Wed 17 Dec 2014 - Sat 10 Jan 2015. |