Julian Gough: I wanted to mash up Winnie the Pooh and David Attenborough

An unusually harmonious scene from Rabbit and Bear: Rabbit’s Bad Habits. Illustration: Jim Field

People often ask writers, “where do you get your ideas?” And the answer is: we steal them from our children…

One night, I was reading the most boring children’s book in the long history of the world to my daughter, Sophy (who was six at the time). I won’t tell you who wrote it, because

A) I don’t want to embarrass them, and

B) the book was so brain-wipingly boring, I have forgotten the writer’s name.

Anyway, it was a picture book about a nice, friendly, perfectly boring rabbit and a nice, friendly, perfectly boring bear.

What happened in the book?

NOTHING!

At one point, a third friendly, boring animal arrived, just to give the illustrator something new to draw (she must have been getting bored too).

The new animal didn’t do anything either, and it was so boring I can’t even remember what it was.

You couldn’t tell any of the animals apart: they all talked the same, and acted the same, and were nice and friendly to each other, until the book ended, or the reader died of boredom, whichever came first.

There was no conflict; no drama; no STORY. All the animals were polite, well-behaved, and perfect. They had nothing to learn, and nowhere to go. No problem to solve.

Now, I am not nice, friendly, and perfect. My daughter is not nice, friendly, and perfect. Nobody I know is nice, friendly, and perfect. Everyone I know is complicated and sometimes nice and sometimes nasty and sometimes friendly and sometimes angry and sometimes sulky and sometimes funny and sometimes stupid and sometimes clever and always interesting.

And no animal I know is nice, friendly and perfect. How boring would THAT be? Animals wee on the carpet sometimes, and sniff each other’s bottoms ALL the time, and chew the furniture. And that’s just our pet cat, Aífe. (If you don’t keep her litter tray clean, she will deliberately poo in your shoe.) And wild animals… are even wilder than that! What is the point of having bears and rabbits in your story if they aren’t WILD, and doing the crazy, surprising, and often rather rude things real bears and rabbits do?

So my daughter and I started talking about how terrible the book was, and about how it could be better.

“What if the new animal that arrived was a wolf?” said my daughter. “And then the wolf could chase the rabbit!”

“Exactly!!!” I said, sitting up in bed. “Then you have a story!”

And so my daughter and I rebelled against the world’s most boring bedtime story, and started to write a better one. We threw ideas back and forth.

Jim Field: ‘I was lucky enough to visit Yosemite National Park and Kings Canyon in California a couple of years ago, both are utterly incredible places and it was great to have the opportunity to put pencil to paper and try and capture these beautiful landscapes for this book.’ Photograph: Jim Field

“What if the rabbit was grumpy and unfriendly and didn’t like the bear?”

“Great! And what if the rabbit doesn’t help the bear build a snowman? What if the rabbit is jealous, and tries to build his own bigger, better snowman?”

“Great! And what if the rabbit steals the bear’s food!”

I realised that our story was about ten million billion times better than the book we had read. So, when Sophy was asleep, I stayed up late, and wrote it all down…

The next night, I read it to Sophy as her bedtime story. She enjoyed it enormously, but, of course, it wasn’t perfect (because nothing is perfect, especially the very rough first try at a story). And so she told me which bits she liked (“Great!”), and which bits she didn’t like (“Boring!”), and I went away and rewrote it again.

Jim Field: ‘This was the rabbit design that “stuck”, it captured his grumpy qualities and it felt like he had plenty of scope for further characterisation.’ Photograph: Jim Field

But of course it took AN INCREDIBLY LONG TIME to get from our rough and scruffy bedtime story to the finished book (Rabbit’s Bad Habits, which was finally published this year with Jim Field’s amazing pictures). I had to get the story as good as I could get it, before my agent could look for a publisher, and get an award-winning, genius illustrator like Jim to bring it to life. And that took a couple of years, because I did it in my spare time. I was good at writing novels (and plays, and poems, and things like the ending to Minecraft, which I wrote for Notch): but I was still learning to write children’s books.

And I wanted to do something quite hard: to combine the charm and humour and complicated, funny, interesting characters of Winnie the Pooh with the weird, different-kind-of-interesting, real-life facts of David Attenborough’s wildlife documentaries. Because in the real world, wolves try to eat rabbits. And rabbits have some very surprising habits…

Jim Field: ‘Rabbit was really much easier to design, Bear went through many more stages. Bear was originally a male and it was a suggestion by the team at Hodder to change him to a her. An excellent move as it really changed the dynamics of the whole book in a more positive way.’ Photograph: Jim Field

If I could combine the two – David Attenborough meets Winnie the Pooh! – that would be something new, I thought. And, as I writer, I always want to try something new. To have a challenge. To solve a problem. Because solving difficult problems is the fun part of life. And so I did a lot of research on rabbits, and bears, and wolves…

I wrote, and rewrote, Rabbit’s Bad Habits, over many, many drafts. Every couple of drafts, I’d try it out again on Sophy. She laughed at the good bits, frowned at the bad bits, and, at one point (while I was reading her the latest version of a funny scene), burst into tears.

Jim Field: ‘Julian suggested making Bear more of a mother character, actually his description was more “a Big Mumma” so I made her bigger boned and rounded the design more than the previous bears.’ Photograph: Jim Field

“What’s wrong?” I asked, worried.

“You’ve taken out…” she sobbed, “…my favourite line!”

She was quite right, I realised; and so I put it back in. (It’s the line, spoken by Wolf, “I’m sick of my dinner running away from me at forty miles an hour.”)

Now, THAT’S a passionate and committed editor…

Jim Field: ‘I then developed this character sheet which was really useful to keep the character consistent throughout the book. It’s important to refer back to the design sheet as you find the character shifts and changes when you draw it lots of times. It was also very useful for the size reference of Rabbit and Bear.’ Photograph: Jim Field

And, finally – with her help – I think I found a way to combine Winnie the Pooh, and wildlife documentaries. Certainly, the book is getting more five star reviews than anything I’ve ever written. I think readers can tell how much thought, and time, and love, went into it.

And that’s why I dedicated Rabbit’s Bad Habits to my daughter. It’s not because I’m nice and friendly and perfect: it’s not because she is nice and friendly and perfect (though she is my favourite person on earth): It’s because I got her to do loads of unpaid work on the book, and stole all her ideas.

Writers, like animals, are complicated and interesting, and NOT ALWAYS NICE…

Buy Rabbit and Bear: Rabbit’s Bad Habits, by Julian Gough and illustrated by Jim Field, at the Guardian bookshop.