David Walliams: Making Reading a Visual Adventure

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Excerpts from the interview:
Q: It is always a delight to see an author burst upon the scene and so attractively speak to youngsters without talking down to them. That is a gift.
I work very hard. I want them to be entertaining. I want kids to take away something from the book, like a message of some kind, simple messages. I never feel like you want to talk down to children because children are always aspirational, age-wise, aren't they? You know, the 10-year-old wants to play with the 12-year-old, the 12-year-old wants to watch a movie that the 15-year-old could watch, the 15-year-old wants to watch a movie the 18-year-old can watch. It's just the way it is. And so I try and give the books a little bit of an edge. But also I like to deal with sometimes complex themes in relatively simple ways. Like I have a book, 'Grandpa's Great Escape', which is about a grandfather with dementia. But I never use that word. I just say he's confused, which is how if you were 10 or 11 or 12, you'd probably understand it. And so. But at the same time it's wrapped up in comedy and adventure. And so, it's not a book about dementia as such, but it deals with that subject and hopefully in a way that's entertaining for kids.
Q: You do continue to have a life as a performer, as an artist, as a comedian. And yet you made this foray into children's literature with 'The Boy in the Dress', which was a remarkable book in itself. How did that come about?
Well, I just thought I had a story to tell. I thought it was a story about what it is to be different. And the story kept on kind of spinning around in my head and I couldn't stop thinking about it. And I thought, it's a book about a boy, so perhaps children would like to read this story and perhaps they'll get something out of it. I had no idea I could write something that might bring someone to tears. I had a sense of achievement, especially being handed the book when it been published with the beautiful illustrations by Quentin Blake. But I didn't think at that point I was going to write like 40 books. I never thought I would be touring around India doing shows for kids in schools and literary festivals and things.
You tend to peg your stories, if it can be called that, on what would be seen by society at large or in other stories as minor characters, villainous characters, characters who don't deserve to be up right in the front of the stories.
Yes, I certainly try to. At the time I was starting to write, Harry Potter was probably at its peak because the movies were coming out at the same time, new books were coming out and it was an international obsession. So thing to do is something as different as possible. So in 'The Boy in the Dress', I wanted to represent how childhood often is where grown-ups make lots of decisions for you and you don't feel that power at first. At the end of the story, by the time he's defiantly put on a dress with his teammates in the football match and they've all come out wearing dresses together and they've won the match and they've made people see things in a different way. They do triumph and they are powerful. But I didn't want to start off the story with Dennis being powerful. And I also wanted to set something in the real world and reflect hopefully the way people speak, that kind of thing.
How different is it in visualising and writing the script for the book from a TV script or for stand-up comedian acts?
I think it's obviously when you write for either yourself or other people to perform, the script is just sort of part of the process. It's not the finished piece. The finished piece is when it will be filmed or staged or whatever. Whereas the book, the text is the finished product. But the thing is, in a script you can go a car races down a road, but in a book you need to make it much more interesting than that. And the prose has to have a kind of cadence to it to make it exciting. That's something I think I learned a bit from Ian Fleming with the James Bond books. He has lots of short sentences which give you a sense of pace and action. So I found that challenging. I knew I could write dialogue because that's basically what I've been doing, coming up with funny comedy characters and giving them funny things to say. But as for descriptive passages, I was new at that. But if I have a scene which is largely dialogue, I find I can write it very quickly. If I'm describing action, that, to me is a lot harder.
There are so many other platforms through which young readers and teenage readers are accessing images all the time that they actually struggle to read text heavy pages. And so when they come upon a book like yours, which is pure delight, it's completely a human-driven creative product which is a pleasure to immerse oneself in. It is stupendous that you're continuing to do that, isn't it?
When I'm in the UK, when I find myself in a city that I would not normally be in, if I have a morning off, I'll say to the publishers, 'Can we find a school in a deprived area, and can I come along, can we do an event for the kids for an hour and can I give away some books?' And I'd go to these schools and obviously I'd meet kids who are very keen readers, but I would meet kids who've never read a book and may never have a book in their house and are not in the habit of going to local libraries, which in the UK have been closed down a lot. And when I spoke to those kids and I saw their sort of resistance to books, I was even more determined to try and drag them in. And that's why I created The World's Worst series, because I wanted it to be almost like reading a comic book or something like that. I think as an author, the ones I really want to sort of target in a way are the ones who are the reluctant readers. Because if they don't read as a kid, it's not about learning to read, it's about learning to think about the world.