Eve White: Literary Agent

...has written a pieces on The Grunt and the Grouch to celebrate the fifth birthday of Stripes Publishing. 

To celebrate, Stripes are putting together a digital campaign, which will run from the 19th September for two weeks, to shout about their achievements.  Tracey has written a short piece about The Grunt and the Grouch detailing how these characters leap from a picture book format to a fiction format for younger readers. 

Tracey says: 'My characters are always very real to me. Before they tell me their stories they come to live with my family. Visitors to my home might see scribbled characters peeping at them from the piano stand, or propped up against picture frames on my desk, or plastered all over my notice board.' She adds that this was especially true for The Grunt and The Grouch, Grunty living with her for weeks before he introduced Tracey to The Grouch. Tracey details the importance of really knowing your characters before writing their story. 

Taking the Grunt and the Grouch from the world of picture book to young fiction was an exciting transition, enabled by how well Tracey understood her characters, 'In the end, it came down to being two but one - a clever juxtaposition of character traits balancing the scales perfectly but fundamentally working because and off each other. The trolls couldn’t be more different in their outlook and personality and yet they have something that binds them together, apart from keeping plughole hair in jars!' 

Ultimately Tracey insists that they need each other to be, 'To be characters though, that hopefully children will long to read about. Characters that make them laugh out loud. Characters they feel they know. And characters, I hope, that they’ll want to know forever.'