Andy Griffith's winning formula: Get rid of parents and plunge the kids into a world of adventure

Andy Griffiths, one of Australia's most popular children's authors, was recently in South Africa on a book tour that took him to schools across the country.

He is best known for his Treehouse series, the JUST! books and The Day My Bum Went Psycho. Over the last 20 years Griffiths's books have been New York Times bestsellers, adapted for the stage and television and won more than 50 Australian children's choice awards.

He is a passionate advocate for literacy and an ambassador for the Indigenous Literacy Foundation and the Pyjama Foundation.

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Has your bum ever gone psycho and, if not, what inspired the trilogy?

Psycho might be too strong a word, but it has certainly embarrassed me on many occasions.

As most owners of a bum may well know, bums can make a noise when you least want them to and release gas when you least expect them to.

It's as if bums have a mind of their own, and I thought, well what if they really did have a mind of their own . and arms and legs and could detach themselves? It can't be much fun being a bum, and you certainly get no respect, so I figured the bums of the world would unite and demand that they get to swap places with the heads.

Maybe I spent too much time thinking about this, but every time I mentioned the idea to kids they found it very funny and eventually I thought what a great joke it would be to write an absurdist action novel about bums trying to take over the world.

I also suspected it would be a novel that would persuade many kids that reading can be for fun as well as serious purposes.

What are the five most important children's book characteristics?

I like children's books that:

1) Get rid of the adults and plunge the children into a world of adventure as soon as possible.

2) Reduce description to a minimum, use pictures to convey information and credit the reader with intelligence to be able to join the dots for themselves.

3) Have a well crafted plot with a beginning, middle and an end.

4) Aren't afraid to go into dark, scary and/or sad places

5) Make me laugh and/or gasp with surprise at every turn.

6) Don't lecture, preach or try to teach a important lesson. Oh yeah, and be willing to break the rules (like how you asked me for five characteristics, but I did six.)

How long does it usually take you to write a book and how do your children react to them?

It takes Terry Denton (the illustrator), Jill (my wife and editor) and myself a full year to complete a book.

There's at least a month spent laughing and messing around with ideas, a couple of months organising these ideas into a solid story, three months illustrating the story and then at least six months rewriting and re-illustrating until it's as perfect and as fast flowing as we can make it.

My daughters are often present at our many discussions and sometimes make some excellent suggestions which get incorporated into the books.

But I guess, like us, they're a bit too close to the process of creating the book and so tend to read books not written by me!

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What's the most amusing response you have had to some of your books?

We've run the gamut from delight, to passionate devotion, to outrage. We once wrote a book called The Bad Book, which shocked one bookseller so, that he felt he couldn't stock it and kept it on a high shelf in his back storeroom.

He would sell you a copy if you asked for it, but he wasn't happy about it.

Somebody once said our books are like a secret joke between us and the kids, which sometimes leaves adults scratching their heads in bemused incomprehension.

I love it when kids garble the insane plots of our books to adults who have no idea what to make of it all.

But thanks to the more inclusive humour and approach of the Treehouse series, most of the adults are in on the joke as well.

What's next in the pipeline?

We're adding another 13 levels to our absurd, ever-expanding treehouse. It will be called the91-Storey Treehouse. It will come out in South Africa in October.

I'm not sure our readers will ever let us stop writing this series, and that's fine with us because. I don't think we want to stop writing either.

The Treehouse series is published by Pan MacMillan and is available at all good book stores. See andygriffiths.com.au and treehousebookseries.com

• This article was originally published in The Times