How We Work Together

Paul Stewart writes:

I'd been writing books on my own for ten years before teaming up with Chris. I wrote horror, football and travel books, and fantasies which were set in our world, but where one aspect was slightly skewed. During this time, I wouldn't dream of letting anyone but my editor read my work until it was finished.

Although my earlier fiction had pictures, I seldom met the illustrators - in fact, my last illustrator lived in Tasmania, Australia, and we had to communicate by long, detailed letters. As Chris lives just down the road, and has a huge studio, working together is much easier.

Chris draws the whole time. When we started out on the Edge, he gave me sheaves of these drawings. Some, I gave names and characteristics. One, I remember, was a sketch of a huge, shambling beast with long tusks and claws. I called it a 'banderbear' and, because it looked so fierce, decided to make it vulnerable... The banderbear with toothache in Beyond the Deepwoods was born.

He is also an extremely good illustrator. It was easy to describe a spindlebug as a 'giant glass insect' - another thing to draw it, innards and all! I think the rogue glister I described in The Curse of the Gloamglozer gave him his biggest challenge - but, as you can see from the picture, he was more than up to it.

The pair of us have created the Edge Chronicles together, from the plotting and planning stages, right through to the finished books. As far as I know, no other author and illustrator work this way, and so far - touch lufwood - we have not fallen out. In the end, it means that we produce work that surprises us both and that neither of us could have done on our own. And after all, it is the books that count, because hopefully they'll be around a lot longer than we will!

Chris Riddell writes:

The Edge Chronicles started as a map in my sketchbook, which I gave to Paul. I labelled the various places; Sanctaphrax, the Mire, the Twilight Woods, the Deepwoods, and asked him to tell me what went on there. I also produced some sketches of characters, creatures and locations, along with notes, which Paul used in the construction of the story.

Before long, Paul was contributing to these notes and inventing names of characters and creatures of his own for me to illustrate. The pair of us worked together on the story outline. In this way, the first book of the Edge Chronicles - Beyond the Deepwoods - began to develop. It was a long process, but a lot of fun!

At the end, we felt we'd barely scratched the surface of the Edgeworld and decided that we had to produce a trilogy. By this time, I had a black hardbound sketchbook full of potential characters and locations, and Paul had set a story in motion that was taking our hero, Twig, from the Deepwoods, to the streets of Undertown, by way of the Mire and the Twilight Woods. Books 2 and 3 followed Twig's promising career and really got us hooked on this way of working.

The black book became fuller and fuller, and the plots thickened as the Edge Chronicles took on a life of their own. We have just finished Book 6, and have realized that we'll need ten books to complete our story.

Often, illustrators don't meet the writers whose work they illustrate. I think this is an opportunity missed. Working as closely as Paul and I do isn't always easy, but in the end, it is tremendously enjoyable and increasingly addictive.