Popular Australian children's author Andy Griffiths returns to our shores next month and this time he's bringing along his long-term collaborator Terry Denton.

The pair, who have worked together on a number of books during the past 25 years, will be presenting "outrageous" tales from the latest installment of the mega-popular Treehouse series – The 104-Storey Treehouse – at public events in Wellington, Christchurch and Dunedin

Ahead of the whistlestop tour, the 56-year-old Griffiths talked to Stuff about Terry, technology and the inspiration for the Trunkinator.

Andy Griffiths likens to process of making each Treehouse book to farming.

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How did you and Terry first meet?

A publisher put us together 25 years ago when I was doing an educational textbook of creative writing and they thought his sense of humour would complement mine – and of course it did. We've worked together ever since.  

Treehouse book series creators Terry Denton and Andy Griffiths will visit Christchurch, Wellington and Dunedin for public events in late July.

Is this the first time you and Terry have toured together?

We tried very early on in our working relationship to come on stage together and we found it difficult.  That's because I basically do a stand-up comedy routine and Terry is a great drawer and we'd end up doing things that were kind of separate. So, instead of being twice as funny, we'd end up being half as funny because we were making allowances for each other.

So what's changed then?

Technology.  Terry can now draw and be projected onto a large screen. That means the entire audience can see what our actual working conditions are like. I can ask him to draw a man's head exploding and he can do it instantly while the audience throw in their suggestions. I like the unpredictability of what happens when we're on stage together now, because while we go on with a rough plan, it can veer off course at any point. Terry is not just a clown in his drawing, he is on the stage as well. He surprises me and makes me laugh – so it's good for us because we're continually surprised and amusing ourselves and the audience gets in on that as well.

The 104-Storey Treehouse will be released on July 10.

Talk me through the process of how you and Terry work together on a book?

I'll come in with the rough idea of what the plot might look like, then, as we start working, he'll do drawings that will trigger me into ideas that I couldn't have got by myself. Often, he'll draw something far better than what I could have imagined. Alternatively, he could draw something completely irrelevant and I realise that could be better than what we were working with. That then feeds back into the text to accommodate the illustration and then that re-written text will trigger new drawings. It's a process that goes back and forth for roughly for a year.

With a new Treehouse book expected every year now does that mean you are very rigid on what you do and when?

It is very like farming. You plant the crop, grow the crop, harvest the crop - and then you have a rest. February, March, April I'll often spend touring overseas and at that point I'll be pulling together an outline of the plot. Then I'll come home, pitch that to Jill [his wife and editor] and Terry and, if they like the idea, then I go ahead and flesh out the plot. We then bring Terry in for a few days so he can give us illustrations to work with, then Jill and I will really nail the plot down and then it goes to Terry for roughs by the  latter half of the year. They come back around November and that will cause us to rewrite the text completely to accommodate and work out where we were going wrong. Then the following January to April, it is back in Terry's court to do the final artwork, before yet more adjusting and rewriting, right up until the point it goes to the printer.

Terry Denton and Andy Griffiths have been collaborating on children's books for more than 25 years.

How close are the Treehouse characters of Andy and Terry to the real things?

They are just highly exaggerated versions of us. Andy is the slightly more deadline conscious member of the team and Terry is slightly less deadline conscious. He's the one painting cats yellow and throwing them out of the treehouse to make them fly when we should be doing the book. That mirrors our actual working process –I bring a kind of structure to the table and Terry brings a kind of anti-structure. Luckily, we've got Jill in there as adjudicator. It is her job to say "you boys are only entertaining yourselves with this, you've got a whole audience you need to think about".

The Treehouse books have been a huge success around the globe, why do you think that is?

If you'd asked me six years ago, I would have told you that our humour doesn't translate outside of Australia and New Zealand. All of our books before the Treehouse series seemed to be impenetrable to anyone unfamiliar to Australasian knockabout humour. We kind of modified the extremes of our humour with this – the extreme graphic violence and verbal nonsense. Having to pull back on that meant the Treehouse books benefit from our experimentation, despite remaining true to sense of the absurd. And I think that's been our ticket to now more than 30 countries that have embraced them – Norway and Holland are real strongholds and apparently they are extremely popular in Iran. What I've noticed is that kids all over the world enjoy incongruity and irreverence.

The Age

Andy Griffiths says wife Jill is an invaluable arbitor of what will work for a wide audience.

The books have also spawned a successful series of stage plays. How did that come about?

Like most things in the Treehouse, it happened by random. We had an approach from a theatre company looking for a small production to tour all over Australia and I suggested they could have Treehouse. They had the inspiration to get Richard Tulloch as their scriptwriter, who was able to take the essence of what was going on in the books and throw it on the stage like improvised madness – you know, when the kids in the family get together and put on a show for the adults. It's got that same slapdash energy that we have when we write the books.  I find them all very complementary to the books because of that. I don't think they would work as films. Our treehouse doesn't have a literal reality – it changes every book. We don't even know how it hangs together and we delight in its inconsistency.

Whenever you tour, you must get bombarded with audience ideas for levels. Have any of them made it into print?

In each Treehouse book, there's usually a level that was inspired directly by the audience. For example, the Ninja Snail Training Academy in The 52-Storey Treehouse. That was a bizarre suggestion by a group of kids one day and I didn't even have to try to remember it – it was so funny. Likewise,  there was a level in The 39-Storey Treehouse with a boxing elephant called the Trunkenator. This kid had just drawn a picture of an elephant with boxing gloves on his legs and I said, "oh, I would put the boxing glove on his trunk". That randomness is a big part of how we keep the series alive.

On that note, how long do you think you can keep the Treehouse books coming?

Early on, we  joked that because we started off with 13 levels and there were 13 chapter in each book that we would do 13 books.  That was just a dream that seemed so unlikely. Each book is a standalone proposition. We come to it and go, "have we got anything more to say? Is there anything we haven't done?" And so far, through eight books, we keep finding that it's like an Aladdin's Cave, because we introduce 13 new levels each time and they generate or suggest a whole new plot. So we are shooting for 13 books at the moment, but who knows?

While Andy Griffiths and Terry Denton's July 22 event at Christchurch Boys' High School (wordchristchurch.co.nz) has sold out, there are still tickets available for the July 23 Dunedin show at The Regent Theatre (ticketdirect.co.nz) and their Wellington performance at Wellington High School's Riley Centre (litcrawl.co.nz) on July 24.

 - Stuff