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| From
the July/August 2009 issue of The Horn Book Magazine Neil Gaiman
Neil is a trailblazer and an iconoclast, but not necessarily by design. Born in England, he pursued an early career as a journalist in London, but he quickly began creating comics, publishing into a genre small enough at the time that he in many ways helped to create its orthodoxy, with works like The Sandman, The Books of Magic, Violent Cases, Signal to Noise, and Mr. Punch. In 1990, Neil published his first novel, collaborating with Terry Pratchett on Good Omens. By that time he was living in the United States, near Minneapolis, in a house that became the model for the one in which the eponymous heroine of Coraline lives. Since then, he has been prolific in a number of genres, producing novels, short-story collections, screenplays, picture books, and, occasionally, pieces that defy categorization. For those, Neil and his editor (me, in the lucky instance that the work in question is suited for young readers) tackle the question of how to shape them into book form. The picture book The Dangerous Alphabet, originally produced as a limited-edition broadsheet for friends at Christmas, was one of those works. Stardust was originally a series of comics, then a collected volume, a prose-only novel, and a film, which then created the opportunity for us to publish an edition for teen readers. Neil’s stories are often cited for their allusions — to literature, to mythology, to psychoanalytic thinking and writing. The Graveyard Book, of course, harks back to The Jungle Book, and all of the familiar Kipling characters have their counterparts among the denizens of the graveyard. But the tone of Coraline, The Graveyard Book, and Neil’s other works written with young readers in mind is relaxed and intimate, almost confidential. That may have something to do with the English writers Neil often has cited as his influences, among them Tolkien, Lewis, and G. K. Chesterton, and perhaps with the habit more common among British writers of direct address of the reader (not a particular habit of Neil’s but something suggested by his tone). Or maybe his confidential tone has to do with his generosity as a writer, which extends very often to his three children, Mike, Holly, and Maddy, paired with a gift for turning the details of daily life into soaring fantasy. The dedication in Coraline notes, “I started this for Holly / I finished it for Maddy.” Neil is happy to tell the story of The Graveyard Book’s origins, and it’s been recounted in print a number of times: as a young family, Neil, his wife, and their firstborn, Mike, lived in a tall, narrow house with no yard and no place to ride a tricycle. So Mike rode his tricycle in the graveyard across the way, and that was when Neil first contemplated the story of a young boy raised within a cemetery’s gates. He began the book then, but decided he might not yet be quite up to it and stopped working on it for nearly twenty years. When he picked it up again, he began with chapter four, “The Witch’s Headstone,” which was only partially complete when Neil almost decided it was still not what he wanted it to be. But then Maddy asked him to read it to her and uttered the ultimate writer’s charm: “What happens next?” Neil has shared both of these stories with audiences and interviewers, but there is another Graveyard Book story you are not likely to have heard yet. Though not quite rivaling the book’s gestation period, the novel’s labor and delivery were also somewhat extended. After beginning with chapter four, Neil returned to the beginning of the book and wrote the rest of it, more or less in the order that it appears. But at the same time that he was writing The Graveyard Book, he was occupied with the MirrorMask film and books, the Beowulf screenplay, the Stardust film, and a variety of comics projects, all of which seemed to involve a great deal of travel. When he could return to his desk and clear away other demands, Neil wrote and delivered The Graveyard Book a chapter at a time. Given the episodic nature of the book, it was quite satisfying to read the individual chapters, even if my preference after every one would have been to read the rest of them right away. The real issue was that chapter four had been such a charmer, sweet really (for all that the witch in question, Liza Hempstock, was a little bitter about her early demise and had something of an edge to her). Then arrived chapter one: “There was a hand in the darkness, and it held a knife. The knife had a handle of polished black bone, and a blade finer and sharper than any razor. If it sliced you, you might not even know you had been cut, not immediately.” For weeks and months, as the chapters arrived one by one, I waited, wondered, and, I confess, fretted. (According to a blogger who has compiled a chronology of Neil’s progress reports on the novel, that period actually lasted from 2005 to February 2008.) If there is one thing about editing that Neil Gaiman has taught me, it’s the wisdom to stay out of the way of a writer clearly in full command of his material. And as I read what I had of The Graveyard Book, I knew that this was such a time. But I didn’t know where this tale was heading or how it would get there. The book began with a full-blown crescendo of literary horror, then delivered a sweeter, softer melody. How would Neil reconcile this discordance? I held my breath. It wasn’t until very near the end, between February and April 2008, when the final chapters began to arrive, that I breathed out again. What I saw was this: the story was briefly terrifying, till Bod entered the protection of the graveyard. But as he grew older and became more independent, the graveyard’s protection no longer could hold him so safe. And as Bod begins to travel regularly into the land of the living, the volume begins to increase again, until it reaches another powerful crescendo. Like Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, it all made sense at last. Perhaps even before he did it, the writer had known exactly what he was doing, and it was my job as his editor to trust him. That was not quite a year ago, and it’s been quite a time since then: publication of The Graveyard Book, warm reviews, the Newbery Medal announcement coming serendipitously on the eve of the Coraline movie debut, which created more opportunities for the Newbery news to travel well beyond the usual borders. It’s just now begun to be a little bit quieter again. There’s been talk of a prequel or a sequel, perhaps more among readers than by the author. What’s the story of the man Jack? Or Silas, the vampire? What will happen to Bod? But first, for Neil Gaiman, there’s the Batman publication, the children’s novel Odd and the Frost Giants to come this fall, another movie project or two, and the nonfiction China book — or is it books, and might they include a fiction project or two? Like his readers, I’m willing to wait, and to trust Neil Gaiman.
From the July/August 2009 issue of The Horn Book Magazine |
t’s fitting that Neil Gaiman has become the first Newbery medalist to Tweet his good news, and perhaps equally fitting that his Newbery Tweet quickly became infamous not just for the fact of 
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