Sailing home to a Future Eden: an interview with Colin Thompson

The arrival of author/illustrator Colin Thompson in Australia has become legendary amongst teacher-librarians. Colin was invited to Australia by students at James Cook High School in Sydney. The students raised his airfare from England and Colin liked Australia so much he decided to stay! Many short stories, picture books and a Web site later, Colin Thompson is one of Australia's most prolific literary figures, with no less than five new books due to be published in 1999. Ian McLean recently conducted this interview with Colin for Scan.

Scan: You seem to have found equal success as a writer and an illustrator. From which discipline do you approach a new book?

Colin Thompson: Whenever I'm writing, I see it in pictures in my head. Even when someone else will be doing the illustrations, I still see the pictures.

Scan: I believe you began your professional writing career after many years making ceramics?

CT: I had a pottery business in England for about twenty years and had twelve people working for me. I've worked at the BBC, making documentaries, and have been involved in screen printing. As my kids got older and left home, I thought I'd like to get into drawing again. I was always drawing; I have memories of doing really fine detailed drawings, even as a little child. I came to writing quite late (1990), but I now consider myself to be a writer/illustrator, rather than an illustrator.

I didn't know anything about publishing at all. I thought you went to a publisher and they said, "Here's a story. Do the pictures for this." All the publishers wanted to see stuff in colour. "We don't work in black and white," which is what I'd done. I had one picture, which I think was of a staircase with little houses going up the stairs. A publisher wanted to know if I could write a story to go with it. We were on totally different wavelengths. I wrote the story, but she didn't like it at all. I didn't know about picture books, and the picture book format with 32 pages. But I quite enjoyed writing it, so I decided to have another go at it. I wrote a little story which was Ethel the chicken. It took me a day and a half to write it. Ten days later, I had a publisher. People often write and ask me for advice about how to get their work published. I almost feel guilty. For me, it was unbelievably easy to get started.

My first few books are out of print now but, with Ethel the chicken, I was asked to write a lot more stories to go with that, so Ethel was reprinted as one of the short stories in Sid the mosquito and other wild stories.

Scan: Would it be true to say that Ethel has come back to haunt you?

CT: In my third book of short stories for Hodder, she died. Everybody said, "You can't kill Ethel!", so in a fourth story I brought her back as a ghost. Then, when some people tried to reincarnate the Devil, they made a mistake and Ethel the chicken came back. In my new online science fiction book, Future Eden, which is more for teenagers and adults, Ethel the chicken is almost the main hero.

Scan: Does this mean you are moving toward an older audience?

CT: With Future Eden, I'm aiming at the same sort of market that read Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy. I was in America last year for the Los Angeles Times' Festival of Books - they used the cover of one of my books for the emblem of the festival - and I was really surprised to find out just how many adults buy my picture books for themselves. They buy How to live forever and The paradise garden and don't let the kids anywhere near them. I've never thought that I wrote for a certain age; I think I write for a certain type of person. And I'm always expected to put lots of detail on the covers of my books.

Scan: According to your Web site, tiny drawings of Max the dog are hidden throughout most of your picture books?

CT: Kids love that. He's in almost every picture. Whenever I visit schools, which isn't very often because I just don't have the time, they always want to know about Max. I ask the students why he isn't on every page and they come up with all these great, convoluted reasons. Only one child has ever guessed the real reason: because I forgot to put him in! The pictures are so complex, I can't do them in one go. Obviously, in a really detailed picture, I come back to it many times. By the time I've finished, I can't remember if I put him in or not.

Scan: What can you tell us about Sailing home?

CT: That was the first book I'd ever done where I wrote the story and someone else did the illustrations. I was asked by Hodder Headline in Australia to write Sailing home for the illustrator, Matt Ottley. He had the original idea, about a block of flats that sailed around the world, but Matt had only written What Faust saw before that; a short, simple story with only a few lines in it. I straight away realised that Matt's idea should be a house, because you only need a few characters in it, rather than a block of flats which would have had too many people to identify with. I enjoyed writing it; it's a nice book.

Scan: Future Eden makes unique use of the Internet, publishing 300 words per day, every day, on your Web site. How much did you have written before you began uploading it?

CT: I already had about nine months' worth of the story written. I'm hoping to do it for about seven years; about four or five books. To only write and publish 300 words each day, you wouldn't get the continuity. If you tried to do that, I wouldn't say it would be impossible... but it wouldn't be any good. When it comes out in book form in December, it will have two extra characters. If I'd read Future Eden on the Internet and enjoyed it, I'd want to buy it as a book anyway. But it was suggested that some people might not buy it because they'd already seen it on my site.

I came up with the idea to add a couple of extra characters for the printed novel; they live inside the heads of the two main characters, which is the only way to do it without changing the story. It's more surrealism, I think, than science fiction. It's a lot of work: every morning, apart from Sundays, I have to check my email and upload the next instalment. I have them divided it up into the daily pieces in directories on the computer. If I dry up for a while, or run out of ideas, it won't grind to a halt. I already know the last line of Future Eden: "And at last they were ready to begin the quest." So you can see that it will go on for quite a while.

Scan: How has the Internet changed the way in which you receive feedback from fans?

CT: Email gives children an immediate response, and that is important. Letters can sometimes sit around at the publishers for months. What happens with email is that you tend to get a shorter message, and you can send shorter, less formal, responses. You might even send three or four, back and forth; it's more interactive. I get very few letters (on paper) now, usually only when the children want to show me a drawing they've done. I put my Internet details in all of the books, and I get email from all over the world, including places where my books aren't even published! Sometimes I get emails in Portuguese and French. I don't know a word of Portuguese. I return it, and it comes back translated.

Scan: This is going to be a busy year for you!

CT: I have four other books due out before Future Eden. The last alchemist is released in April. I have a book of funny animal poems coming out called The dog's just been sick in the Honda and other poems, illustrated by Peter Viska, who did All right, Vegemite! Everyone says that poetry books don't sell. I believe that my editor has a bet going about how many copies it will sell in a year, so we'll see what happens. I also have two picture books which I've written, but with pictures by other illustrators: Unknown; and for younger readers, The puzzle duck.

There is also a possibility that How to live forever will become a movie one day, and if not a movie, it will at least become a film script and a novel. I realised there was so much more in the story. I'd quite like to do the same thing with The paradise garden.

Scan: Colin, thank you so much for your time. Good luck with all of your new projects, and we look forward to your participation in the Sailing home book rap. Also, congratulations to you and Anna Pignataro for The staircase cat being shortlisted for the Children's Book Council of Australia Awards.

Chapman, W. 'Literacy through book raps for Years K-2', Scan , 17(4), 1998, pp 12-15.

Colin Thompson: author & illustrator (online) at: http://www.ozemail.com.au/~colinet/

Future Eden (online) at: http://www.futureeden.com/

Needham, K. 'Sci-fi for big fry', The Sydney Morning Herald, February 27, 1999, Icon p. 6.