To celebrate the publication of The 117-Storey Treehouse – the hilarious new book in Andy Griffiths and Terry Denton’s bestselling Treehouse series – we’re inviting children (of all ages) to create their very own funny story. We’ll then pick our favourites to be published on the Toppsta blog and receive copies of the book for their school library!

To get your creative juices flowing, we asked author Andy Griffiths to share his top tips on writing funny fiction:

Toppsta has asked me to write a short blog on my top tips for writing funny fiction, which is funny, really, because I’m actually a non-fiction writer. I don’t make things up – I just write down everything that happens to me and my best friend Terry while we live – and work – in our treehouse. It’s all true. Really. Even the made-up stuff.

So here are my tip tops – I mean top tips – for writing funny non-fiction:

• Build – and live – in an ever-expanding treehouse with loads of really cool features such as a bowling alley, a tank full of man-eating sharks, a secret underground laboratory and the world’s most dangerous wheelchair access ramp. This will give you plenty of interesting things to write about.

• Find a fun-loving best friend who’s also a really good drawer as this means they can draw everything that happens and this will save you the trouble of having to describe it. Have them also be really good at inventing things like time machines, vegetable vaporisers and flying egg cars. This will give you plenty of opportunities for adventures to write about.

• Get yourself an exercise book and write in it as much as possible. Write down your favourite memories, jokes, dreams and tiny moments in your life that make you happy. Or sad. Or whatever. The more you write in this book, the more you will discover there is to write – and the better you will get at writing.
  
  
• Read and read and then read some more. This will fill your brain with lots of ideas and inspiration for your own stories. Some of my favourite books are Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, The Magic Faraway Tree by Enid Blyton, The Cat in the Hat by Doctor Seuss and The Magic Pudding by Norman Lindsay.
  
  
• Read your stories aloud to yourself, your family and your friends. Observe their reactions. See what they like, what they laugh at and what they don’t laugh at. Then rewrite your stories until they are as clear and as funny as you can make them. Note: I do a LOT of rewriting.
  
  
• Have fun and remember that there are no rules – you can write about ANYTHING that you can imagine!

There is no set word length but you might want to aim for around 100 – 300 words. Your story should be emailed to [email protected] with the subject heading ‘Toppsta Funny Fiction Comp’ by 30th October 2019.

Happy Writing!