Neil Gaiman

The Graveyard Book
Neil Gaiman

About Author

Neil Gaiman was born in Hampshire in the UK to Jewish parents of Polish descent. He now lives in the United States in Minneapolis. As a child he loved books, reading and stories, especially the Narnia books, Roger Lancelyn Green, Dracula, and GK Chesterton.

His career began in journalism in England. His first book was a Duran Duran biography that took him 3 months and his second was a biography of Douglas Adams.

Neil Gaiman is an established comic book writer, too. He co-created the horror-weird series 'Sandman' for DC Comics, and it won a large number of US awards including nine Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards.

As well as comics, Gaiman is a prolific creator of works of prose, poetry, film, journalism, song lyrics and drama.

He is especially well known to readers of science fiction and fantasy and here, he has achieved cult status: an article about him earlier this year in The New Yorker called him 'Kid Goth' and The Times described him as 'the most famous person you've never heard of'.

His first children's book was 'The Day I Swapped My Dad for two Goldfish' (1997), illustrated by Dave McKean. He also wrote the script for the film 'Mirrormask', directed by Dave McKean: it was later published as a book with artwork from the film.

He also wrote 'Coraline' (2002) for readers of 9-12 years. It was a reworking of a deeply unsettling Victorian children's story "The New Mother", published in 1882. An animated feature film based on the book and released in early 2010 secured a BAFTA and was also nominated for an Oscar.

Gaiman's adult novels include 'Neverwhere' (1995), 'Stardust' (1999), 'American Gods' (2001) and 'Anansi Boys' (2005).

Interview

FORTUNATELY, THE MILK...

BLOOMSBURY CHILDREN'S BOOKS

SEPTEMBER 2013

In Fortunately, the Milk..., master storyteller Neil Gaiman introduces us to talking dinosaurs, pirates and 'Wampires', aliens and Incas, all in the course of a dad's trip to the corner shop to buy a pint of milk.

We spoke to Neil Gaiman about his new book and he told us how Fortunately, the Milk... came about.

Some 20 years ago, he begins, "I wrote a book called The Day I Swapped My Dad for a Goldfish. It was hard to get it published and it didn't appear until 1998. It was my first children's picture book and it was about a dad reading a paper who gets swapped by his kids for two goldfish because he's not very interesting. When they realise what they've done and try to get him back, they find he's already been swapped for something else and they follow the trail of 'swaps' until they finally rescue him, still reading the paper, from a rabbit hutch somewhere. He probably still doesn't even realise he'd been swapped.

"I later found out that people give this picture book as a present for Father's Day and I've been feeling a bit guilty for a long time that here I am, propagating the idea of literary fathers being at their most exciting eating a carrot.

"So, having been a dad, I wanted to redress the balance and that was definitely a starting point for me. I wanted to write a story in which dads are awesome - at least from their own point of view; in my experience, dads' awesomeness generally stems from their own point of view....

"I had an outline for this story, along the lines of 'dad goes out for milk'. I already knew the final punch line, which would be the dad saying, 'It's true, it all happened and I can prove it to you. Here's the milk'. That was in my head but other than that, the story wasn't planned although I knew I would have fun dropping him into trouble and the milk would get him out of trouble - unless it got him into the trouble in the first place.

"I am definitely the kind of dad who would want to get milk for his children's cereal, although I might not have done it if I hadn't needed milk for my tea.... And I agree that Fortunately the Milk is an awful title but there is nothing else you can call that book...

"The story was one of those things that grows in the telling. When I began writing it I thought it would be a little picture book like the Day I Swapped my Father for a Goldfish, so 2,000 words long with big colour illustrations, but it just sort of grew to have a time travelling dinosaur in a hot air balloon and it was just too much fun to stop.

"Because kids these days are really smart and understand genres tropes every bit as much as their parents, I could do complex time travel paradoxes in a way that wouldn't have been allowed in the old days because 'children wouldn't understand them' but these days you assume any kid does understand complicated time travel paradoxes. So I could have enormous fun with the story and not feel guilty at all.

"There was a point where the book just goes off on its own, it's right towards the end where the space dinosaurs turn up and all insist on having their photo taken with the pint of milk that the father has, miraculously, managed to keep hold of.

"I had a notebook for the story that would slowly grow and grow and every now and again I would sit someone down and read a bit to them. It was like stealing chocolates, you could not be grim or depressed or angry when you're writing about Wampires and sparkling ponies!

"My favourite thing in the book is something that doesn't actually happen. We are promised a piranha joke but you never actually get to hear the joke, it never quite gets its moment in the sun although I have to say I also loved writing every other bit of the story, too, and I think that kind of shows in the story. I could play with it, I could have gone off and done something with the sparkly ponies but I did the wampires instead, they were great.

"In many ways it's also a story about the nature of story telling. If there were any key moments I could point to in the original existence of Fortunately, the Milk..., it would be a good 15 or 20 years before I started writing it, when I was sitting at dinner one day talking about stuff and my son Mike - who is now a 30 year old software engineer at Google but was then a 12 or 13 year old school boy - turned to me and said, 'You're just making stuff up again, why dont you stop making stuff up?'. And all I could say was, 'Because that stuff that I make up bought your dinner'.

"I love the process of storytelling and I thought it would be fun to write a story that demonstrated that. There's that lovely moment towards the end of the story when you look around their kitchen and see how the father started to put together his story from all the objects that are there, and then you spot the gold doubloon and you have to stop and ask, is it all true? The thing is, it doesn't matter if it's true or not. What matters is that it's a wonderful story.

"I wrote Fortunately the Milk over about eight months very much while I was writing other things. I definitely wrote one episode of Dr Who in the middle of it. I can sit and see the ocean at the end of my lane and that's where I would often be while I was writing this book. I remember that it was always awkward to write because I would start giggling and if I was on a train then other passengers would start giggling at me...

"Then I was at Edinburgh with the illustrator Chris Riddell - we were going to do a book panel together on Coraline and its ten year anniversary - and I told him about Fortunately, the Milk... and by the end of the meal he had agreed to illustrate it.

"There are a couple of places in the story where things happen completely silently and where I left it for the illustrator to tell the story. For example, we watch the kids being worried by the dad's absence for a long time after he leaves to buy the pint of milk, and also when we see the gold doubloon stuck to the bottom of the milk carton at the end - those were things that I left for the illustrator to tell. But for me the most fun was seeing the dad that Chris had drawn with my kind of hair, looking a bit me-ish.

"Now I have a new book on the go. I have just finished my next Chu's Day picture book, it's called Chu's First Day at School - and he will sneeze - and very, very soon I am going to write a book called Chu's Day at the Seaside. Each of these books moves up the age range and will be a bit more complex than the one before.

"I have the first chapter written for a another book, Odd and the Frost Giants, which I wrote a few years ago for World Book Day. The next one will be called Odd Goes to Jerusalem, which is loosely based on an old Viking saga, the Orkneyinga Saga, about Vikings who built boats and had adventures in Spain and were caught by pirates etc.

"And I am working on a big writing project which will be for children and for all ages, a retelling of the world myths. I have never done anything like that before so when I was asked to do it, I felt it was my opportunity to go to primary sources and discover more about the original stories.

"It's sad when I run into children and adults who don't know the myths or why they are cool. When I say I'm going to re-tell the story of Orpheus, I discover that people don't know the original myth so what would happen if I try to re-tell these myths honestly and truthfully and make them accessible to everyone? In the tradition of myths, you're absolutely allowed to take a myth and tell it in your own way, to make it yours, and that's what I am going to do."

 

 

THE GRAVEYARD BOOK

BLOOMSBURY CHILDREN'S BOOKS

JUNE 2010


In June 2010, Neil Gaiman was announced as the winner of the CILIP Carnegie Medal for The Graveyard Book. Neil Gaiman is the first author to win both the CILIP Carnegie Medal and the prestigious Newbery Medal in the US for the same title.

The Graveyard Book was some 25 years in the making, said Gaiman. "The idea of The Graveyard Book, where a baby wanders into a graveyard and is adopted by ghosts, first came to me when I was a young father.

"I took my then two-year old son to ride his tricycle in a graveyard across the road from our house and he looked so comfortable playing in the graveyard that the idea started to take shape."

Gaiman admits to a "love and terror" of graveyards that emerged during his childhood walk home from school. "There was a shortcut through a graveyard. I mostly took the longer, lighted way home but every now and again I would go through the unlit graveyard and terrify myself."

Gaiman also took inspiration from The Jungle Book in which a young child's parents are murdered and the boy is adopted and brought up by an alien community. "I realised that The Graveyard Book was the same equation as the Jungle Book and I thought it would be interesting to play around with that," he says.

However, he adds, "At that stage I thought the idea was a much better idea than I was a writer so I decided I would wait to write it." Gaiman was at that point working as a journalist and he had had five or six short stories published.

Gaiman also realised with hindsight, once the book was finished, that he had needed the experience of being a parent and seeing his children leave home to properly understand the book he was trying to write.

Several years later, while watching a television documentary about South American death squads and a woman who had hidden from them in a family tomb, Gaiman conceived the idea of the graveyard as a "place of refuge". In The Graveyard Book, it is the town outside the gates that is conceived as the threat. All the time that the boy, Bod (Nobody Owens) remains inside the graveyard, he is safe.

After completing his first children's novel, Coraline, Gaiman returned to The Graveyard Book. He said, "I was shooting a short film in Stoke Newington Cemetery in 2002 and decided I would write The Graveyard Book next."

He made several visits to graveyards and found out about death rituals, winding sheets and coffin design. He also wrote, and abandoned, several chapters of the book. It was not until his daughter Maddie asked him to complete the book that he decided to finish it. He says, "For each of my children's books I have had a reader in mind and Maddie was the one for The Graveyard Book. Having a child reader is like having a key to unlock the door of childhood."

The book is structured, somewhat like the Jungle Book, as a series of eight separate stories that stretch over a 16-year period.

There have been some complaints by adults about the first scenes in the book, when the baby's family is murdered. Gaiman says, "All I say in that scene is that the blade of the knife was wet - there isn't a drop of blood mentioned - and yet people have complained about 'pools' of blood." He adds, "I think that that says more about the reader than the book."

Having completed the book, Gaiman said he took an unusual pride in it. "Normally I have a book in my head and when I write it, I am trying to catch the Platonic ideal of that book but it always seems like such a sad failure." In this case, he said, "The book in my head was really good but the one I wrote somehow managed to be better.

"I realised I had written a book about life and childhood and the value of childhood, but it is also a book about the tragedy of parenting because if you have done your job well as a parent, your child will grow up and leave you."

Bloomsbury published two versions of the book, one for children and another for adults. The children's version is illustrated by Chris Riddell and it was also shortlisted for this year's Greenaway Medal, the first time that a book has appeared on both shortlists for 30 years. Dave McKean illustrated the adult edition.

Gaiman said, "Illustration adds another dimension to a story. If it is done well, the illustration becomes indivisible from the text in a magical and special way."

Author's Titles