Philip Ardagh

1. Philip, ACHUKA is two years old and you are only the second author of non-fiction titles invited to be a Special Guest. What is your view about the greater attention given here and elsewhere to fiction?

When we talk about books, most of us take it for granted we’re talking about fiction. Fiction’s the exciting stuff isn’t it? It’s the Philip Pullmans and the J.K. Rowlings (though I know you’re not a Harry Potter fan, yourself). That’s what gives us the buzz. We can’t wait for the new one to come out to find out what happens next. Non-fiction books are ‘background’ books, but there are far more of them. We simply treat them differently. If we read a brilliant novel, we tell our friends about the book. If we find out an amazing fact in a non-fiction book, we tell our friend the amazing fact, but rarely tell them about the book we found it in. But that makes sense to me.

I think it’s right for ACHUKA and others to concentrate on fiction, with a nod in the direction of non-fiction once in a while – and many thanks for asking me to be this month’s special guest, by the way. I think people come to non-fiction books from a different angle. They’re interested in a subject, say Egyptian curses and mummies, then find a book on it.

When people complain about boys never reading, I think they often mean never reading fiction. I know children who are supposed to be ‘poor readers’ who have piles of books on sport or cars or music . . . These books all contain words and sentences, don’t they? It’s just that, being non-fiction, they’re seen in a different light.

2. How did you begin writing information books for children?

After a few years in advertising, I decided that I’d rather be putting all that writing energy into something I thought a little more rewarding and (for me) worthwhile. Whilst writing for myself - in other words without a contract or any guarantee of publication - I earned money doing a variety of different jobs including hospital cleaning and working as a highly unqualified public librarian. Whilst in the library service, I applied for a job as a children’s editor. I didn’t get the job but one of the interview panel did hire me to do some freelance writing. It took off from there.

3. What is the biggest challenge when it comes to writing non-fiction for young readers?

Getting to understand a topic myself. I write books on a wide variety of subjects and I’d be a fool and a liar to claim that I’m an expert on any, let alone all, of them. I read around a topic as much as I can, in the time available, and try to talk to real experts when possible. Once I understand something, then the challenge is to put it across simply and in a way that grabs a reader’s attention.

4. Most of your titles are history-based. Do you think of yourself primarily as an historian?

No, no and no. My wife’s the academic in this household. She’s the one with all the letters after her name. I see myself first and foremost as a children’s writer, with a passion for history and archaeology. I actually write picture books for very young children under a different name and have a children’s novel called Awful End being published by Faber & Faber next year . . . October 2000, I think. I’m very lucky to earn a living combining two loves: writing and history.

5. You’ve mentioned a couple of times that you don’t write all your books under the name Philip Ardagh. Why is that?

It started out because I was wanted to write very different types of book, and I thought it’d be less confusing if I used different names. If you’re used to Philip Ardagh writing fun history books, it might be a disappointment to come across a Philip Ardagh book that was totally unlike all the others.

There’s a famous story about Queen Victoria reading Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and Alice Through The looking Glass. Victoria loved them so much that she asked Carroll to send any other books he’d written. She received Syllabus of Plane Algebraical Geometry. Carroll’s real name was the Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson and he was a mathematician! Writing under his name and a pseudonym usually kept these two worlds apart. And, no, I won’t even tell ACHUKA what other names I write under. That’s my secret.

6. Your series of History Detectives - Ancient Egypt, The Aztecs and just-published The Romans - employs the innovative idea of including a separately-bound mini-story book which interacts with the non-fiction text. Can you explain for ACHUKA visitors how the concept works, and how it's designed to enhance the contents of the main book? Was it your idea?

 

It was an editor at Macmillan - the publishers - who had the idea of a two-in-one history book, one fact one fiction, but I was brought in at the very early stages to see how we might develop it from there. The idea is actually very simple. The big book is a fact book all about, say, ancient Rome. But there’s a small book with it, in the case of The Romans, called Kidnapped!. It’s set in Rome and you the reader are a detective sent on a mission but, to solve it, you’ll need more than your detective skills to spot the clues hidden in the pictures and text of the small book. You’ll also need to root out some of the historical facts contained within the big book.

Most double pages in the big book are made up of a big illustration of a place or event in ancient Rome - a theatre, a bath house, a gladiator fight - with photographs of Roman artefacts in a ‘Discovery’ panel at the side. These are the kinds of clue investigated by another type of history detective: the archaeologists who use such finds to build up a picture of life in the past.

7. As you say, the main History Detectives books work to a tight format of two-page spreads for different topics and the side-Discovery-panel you described. I have heard people criticise junior non-fiction for being stuck in a single-page-spread rut, and for not encouraging children to turn the page. In terms of the History Detectives series, can you respond to this criticism?

I think History Detectives tries to address that. The little book has characters going from place to place and helps to breathe life into the Romans and ancient Rome. It also encourages the reader to go back to the big book and jump from place to place. Having said that, I think a well thought out spread working in its own right has merit. Look at the fashion spread in The Romans, for example. It’s set in a port with cargo being unloaded in the background and Romans in different styles of dress filling the scene. Here, we’re not only seeing styles of clothes but also the raw materials used to make them being unloaded. It raises other issues and, hopefully, sends the reader off in different directions.

8. When working on a lavishly illustrated non-fiction book of this type, whose job is it to find and select the illustrations - yours or the illustrator/designer?

I can’t draw to save my life, but that doesn’t stop me doing stick-men-style designs, positioning my buildings, people and proposed labels as accurately as possible. It would be impossible to write a series - particularly one where big non-fiction and little fiction books interact in this way - without having a clear picture in one’s mind’s eye about how it should all come together and look. These roughs of mine are then passed onto the illustrator, Colin King, along with an accurately positioned printout of the text and more detailed notes from the designer and editor.

We have a good laugh about my drawings, but Colin assures me that they really are very helpful. Come to think of it, he could just be saying that to be nice . . .

As for the photographs of artefacts, I put in requests for photos of particular objects from particular museums, or of particular buildings or ruins. Sometimes I even ask for a particular photograph which I’ve found in another book, if I feel it clearly shows what I’m trying to get across. And that’s a lot of particulars! Then it’s down to someone called a picture researcher to get hold of all the photographs, which isn’t always as easy as it sounds. Finally, I go up to London and go through the pictures with the editor and designer to choose the best ones and to agree on the captions.

9. Your new series of GET A LIFE! books from Macmillan focuses on a single historical character per title. Inevitably, history in this style gets compared with Terry Deary's Horrible Histories, but my impression from the early titles in this series is that your primary aim is to explain, and if you can entertain along the way well and good, whereas in the Horrible Histories the priorities often seem the other way round. (Your resume of the Battle of Hastings is a case in point.) Does this seem a fair observation?

Yes. Though explanation and entertainment can go hand-in-hand, I’m very pleased to hear you say that. For me, the great thing about the GET A LIFE! series is that you really do get a sense of a famous person’s life: their growing up, the great events that they’re involved in and then their death. You asked me earlier about page-turnability, and this is what we’ve got here. It is a different approach to history. It’s not a jumble of funny facts about a period in history to dip in and out of, but the history of that person and the events surrounding them; some of their making and some beyond their control.

I think Terry’s 'Horrible Histories' are a deserved success, but the knock-on effect has been book shops flooded with pale imitations rushed out by other publishers, most of which are diabolical – and that’s putting it nicely. With the GET A LIFE! series we want to give a bigger, more rounded, picture of important people in history.

Take Queen Victoria, whom I mentioned earlier. In a typical book, you might read that there were a number of attempts on her life and have them all described in one paragraph. In the GET A LIFE! version of her life, the attempted assassinations crop up one at a time in the order in which they happened, interspersed with other events in her reign, giving the reader a much stronger sense of how they fitted in with everything else that was going on around her.

In July (1999), when William the Conqueror and Queen Elizabeth I first came out, I went down to Pembrokeshire to do some events for the West Wales Children’s Book Group. The response to the books was tremendous. Yes, the children had good fun, but there was a real sense of tackling history too. It certainly helped that three of the events were held in the ruined Bishop’s Palace at St. David’s, a site which William the Conqueror himself had visited in 1081.

10. Of the eight subjects in the projected series, who did you enjoy writing about the most, and was there anyone you would have LIKED to write about, but your editor thought was wrong for the series?

The great thing about the series is that different people have to be tackled in different ways. Someone such as Henry VIII was so tied up in world events, a big part of the process is deciding what to leave out as much as what to put in. In the case of Marie Curie, though - a subject who normally only gets a couple of spreads in a book on famous scientists - it’s only her discoveries that are famous . . . and here I am presented with an opportunity to talk about her childhood and all the incredible things she did in her later life too.

I’m currently writing the eighth book, which is about Oliver Cromwell. What’s fun about him is that so little is known about his early life that earlier ‘historians’ just made it up, so I can look at (and expose) some of the myths as well as looking at the life of the real man.

Rather than saying which of these folk I enjoyed writing about most, it’s probably easier to say which I found hardest: Florence Nightingale. Most of the older books I’ve read about her present her as a too-good-to-be-true saint, and some more recent books have done what the press call ‘a hatchet job’ on her, making her out to be a selfish villain. I suspect that the truth lies somewhere in between. I wanted the GET A LIFE! version of her life to show her as a person.

There are some people whom both my editor and I would like to do books about but don’t really suit the series style. Martin Luther King for example. Although - to use your own words - it’s explain first and entertain second - I think events in Dr. King’s life are too recent and too distressing to be interwoven with funny cartoons. He’s an important subject for a biography, but not right for the GET A LIFE! treatment. The good news is that there are now plans afoot for me to write another batch, and we’re in the process of deciding whom to include this time round. Writers, inventors, explorers, rulers, peacemakers . . . they all appeal to me.

11. 'The Complete Castle', another publication from Macmillan, is described as a 3-dimensional adventure which includes a laminated mat, 38 press-out figures, a fold out castle, and a booklet for which you wrote the text. Are you a toy-soldier type?

The Complete Castle is going back a few years now, but it’s a project I’m very proud to be associated with. It’s sold the world over. When I was in Wales, a Canadian special needs teacher on holiday there came up to me and said what a great book it was for getting her pupils involved! The chances of us both meeting by coincidence like that were mighty slim. Maybe I should try the National Lottery after all. Up till now, I’ve never bought a ticket . . .

...Castle was the brainchild of the paper engineer Nick Denchfield who designed the amazing 3-D fold-out castle itself but, beyond that, it was a real team effort. The editor and I had a number of brainstorming sessions which resulted in much of the detail that Steve Cox, the illustrator, put on the actual castle itself. As with History Detectives, the finished article has a real interactive feel. You have to find out who drowned Able Grout and - if you look hard enough - you'll find his feet sticking up out of a well!

Sorry. I was getting side-tracked there . . . In answer to your actual question: no, I wasn’t a toy soldier fan as in someone who fought pretend wars. I did have a set of plastic ‘cowboys and Indians’, but I was much more interested in making up stories and giving them characters than the ‘bang-bang-you’re-dead’ element. Perhaps that was a clue as to what I was going to end up doing for a living.

12. Can you describe how a non-fiction project comes into being?

Sometimes I get an idea forming in my mind and it’s weeks before I get any thoughts down on paper. Once I’ve put it into words, I might tinker with it to make it better and try to decide whether it’ll work best as a one-off book, or as a series. Then I’ll write a proposal, saying what the book’s about, what makes it different, why I’m just the right person to be writing it. I’ll even include details such as whether I think it needs colour or black and white illustrations and how many pages I think it should have. Then I’ll write a few sample pages, along with some of my stick-drawing designs. Once that’s done, I’ll post it to a friendly editor and then arrange to see them to discuss it. Sometimes it happens the other way around, of course. The phone rings and an editor says, ‘Hi, Philip. We’ve got this fab new book, and we think you’re just the person to write it!’ That can be equally exciting in a different way. The advantage of this second approach is that I know from the start that the publishers definitely want to do it. Some ideas never get beyond the development stage.

13. What kind of working hours do you keep, and do you work on one or more books at a time?

I’m always at my desk by 9:30 and I always break for lunch and Home & Away between 1.00 and 2.00, then it’s back to work until just gone 5.30. Then I watch Neighbours and, sometimes, the news headlines. I need the routine! After that, it’s usually back to work for a few more hours. If I’m not at my desk during these core hours it’s because I’m off at a library or museum or having a meeting with a publisher. It’s very unusual for me to be out on a walk or lying on the beach. Because I work from home, I have the luxury of not having to travel to and from work.

And, yes, I’ve always got a number of books on the go at once. I might be researching one whilst writing up another one or two, whilst checking the artist’s pencil roughs for his or her illustrations on yet another book and sorting out contracts for new work. There are two main reasons for this. Firstly, there aren’t that many writers who earn their money just from writing. Many fiction and non-fiction authors write books as a sideline. They earn most of their money doing other things. Why? Because, unless you’re one of the few very successful authors who write bestsellers, writing children’s books isn’t a brilliantly paid job. Because I’m one of the few who earns his living simply by writing, I have to write LOTS. Secondly, I find that having a number of different projects on the go at once keeps me alert and on my toes . . . and if I get stuck on one thing, I can always have a break and turn to something else. Like any juggling act, it’s a skill that you get better at over time.

14. 'Ancient Egyptians, Myths & Legends' from Belitha Press is the kind of title that gives you the opportunity to write in narrative-style (it is a series of retellings). What differences have you noticed between writing informatively and writing in narrative style.

I wouldn’t describe this as a pure narrative style in the sense of treating it as a straight story. In the back of my mind there’s still a slight non fiction bent to it. Many of the characters in myths and legends are gods and goddesses that the original storytellers believed or half-believed in, so, in a way, many of the more serious myths and legends are almost historical in tone, if that makes any sense.

I’d say that I apply my fiction writing skills to elements of my non-fiction and vice versa. The great thing about this 'Myths & Legends' series is the lavish illustrations. Each title is painted by a different artist and some of their work is breath-taking.

15. You are appearing at the Edinburgh Festival this month (August 1999). What will you be doing there? How important do you think author appearances at such events are?

This year I’ll be doing a GET A LIFE! history event – with a human time line made up of members of the audience, from prehistoric hunter gatherers, through the birth of writing and history, right up to the present day – and a Myths & Legend event, looking at the differences and similarities between these ancient tales from around the world. They’ll both be very different, but should be a lot of fun.

I spend nine-tenths of the year writing, but I do think that making appearances at events can be extremely important and rewarding for all concerned. As well as Edinburgh, I’ll be doing Cheltenham and Swansea in October, and I appeared at the British Museum and the Tate Gallery earlier in the year. It sounds a lot but, if you add up the actual days, they’re very few.

For an author, it’s a chance to meet readers and potential readers. It’s a chance to try out new material and ideas on audiences to see what works and develops into something. It’s also a chance to get feedback on existing books, finding out the likes and dislikes, and being reminded who your readers are.

I think these events are great for children because it’s a chance for them to see what a mixed bunch of people we children’s authors are. I think it must be very exciting to meet heroes such as Quentin Blake, but it’s also fun to discover that writers can be short, tall, big, small, male, female, serious and shy, funny and out-going, because we’re not only encouraging an interest in reading but in WRITING too. Some of these faces in the audiences will be our authors of the future.

16. When working on illustrated texts, proof-reading the final copy must become a complicated affair of checking information, captions and illustrations. Where does final responsibility for this lie - the writer or the publisher?

The last person to see the book before it goes to print is the editor, not the writer. At some stage, the writer has to let go . . . and it’s never easy, especially, if some last minute change has been made and you’re worried that an error might have crept in too. One of the problems with the modern way of printing everything electronically is that changing a caption on page 9, say, may affect some text on page 11 and, because no-one’s expecting that, no one thinks to look at page 11.

I’m considered irritatingly good at spotting typing and positioning errors, and even extra spaces between words, compared to some authors, but the more people checking a manuscript the better. The problem is that we all read what we expect to read, which isn’t always what’s actually on the page.

Between you, me and the visitors to ACHUKA, on one page in GET A LIFE! Queen Elizabeth I, there’s mention of someone called Wlizabeth with a ‘W’, which crept in after I’d done my final check. I had a very nice apologetic e-mail from the proof reader, in which every word began with ‘w’!

Annoying though these types of error are, I’d be more concerned if a fact was inaccurate or down right wrong. By the way, I think the advance copy of The Romans they gave you must be an uncorrected bound proof copy for ACHUKA’s eyes only. Any mistakes you find in there shouldn’t be in the final book!

17. Your forthcoming The Hieroglyphs Handbook (Teach Yourself Ancient Egyptian) from Faber in October, is a brilliant idea. Why hasn't it been done before? Usually books about Ancient Egyptians include a half-page sample hieroglyphic alphabet, but presumably this title endeavours to do a lot more.

I’m glad you like the idea. Rest assured that a copy of the book will be winging its way to ACHUKA just as soon as it’s been printed. The book clubs and book shops are certainly very excited about it, and Faber & Faber are printing plenty of copies! I expect that the reason why such a book hasn’t been attempted before is because it requires a lot of research, thought and careful planning. I hate to say it but, with a number of very notable exceptions, a lot of non-fiction paperbacks nowadays seem to be lacking in originality and look like they’ve been churned out with very little care.

Most children’s books - even respectable ones - treat Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs like a code. They suggest that a glyph (the name for one of the picture symbols) represents a letter, so translate the glyphs into letters, and you have your message . . . except for one or two teeny, weenie important details. Firstly, not all glyphs are, in fact, letters. They have three different functions. Secondly, the Ancient Egyptians didn’t spell their words in English but in Ancient Egyptian! Translate the glyphs into letters and you’ve still got to translate the words you end up with into English.

The Hieroglyphs Handbook takes you through the basics and has you reading and writing sentences in next to no time. It was a fantastic challenge and a lot of fun to do.

18. What is ACHUKA in hieroglyphs?

Since you ask, here’s a world exclusive. This is probably the first time in the history of humankind that the word ACHUKA has been written in this age-old script:

19. One final question, Philip. Now that you’ve revealed that you write fiction as well as non-fiction, with your Faber children’s novel coming out next year, could you tell us what the biggest difference is between writing the two?

That’s easy. Although discipline, routine, and many of the thought processes are the same for creating both fiction and non-fiction, the biggest difference is team work. Writing a children’s novel can be a very solitary process. It’s all down to you and you alone, until you have a finished draft. With non-fiction, there’s much more input from editors, experts, designers, illustrators, consultants. It might only be my name which appears on the front of a non-fiction book, but there’s a whole host of other people working with me to make it come together.