I think I just wanted the book to creep up on you slowly.
While we don’t have any cut sections in this part of the book (except for that one), we do have a few interesting things in here for you to look at. Dave McKean is a prolific and brilliant illustrator: we’ve included versions of the illustrations he did for the book that have never seen print. I went and dug out the battered black notebook I wrote Coraline in, by hand, with occasional notes to myself on what was going to happen later in the book, which tended to be right in spirit but wrong in the details. You’ll find some reproductions of notebook pages, in my handwriting, which I can actually read, although some people doubt this. The ink color, which ranged from a dried-blood brown to a new-wine purple, is unfortunately not reproduced, although all my crossings-out are.
There are also some questions, with answers that may or may not be very helpful but are at least true (or do I mean that the other way around?).
NEIL GAIMAN
April 1, 2002
WHY I WROTE CORALINE
MORE THAN TEN YEARS ago I started to write a children’s book. It was for my daughter, Holly, who was five years old. I wanted it to have a girl as a heroine, and I wanted it to be refreshingly creepy.
When I was a boy I lived in a house that had been made when a larger house had been divided up. The irregular shape of the house meant that one door of the house opened onto a stark brick wall. I would open it from time to time, always suspicious that one day the brick wall would be gone, and a corridor would be there instead.
I started to write a story about a girl named Coraline. I thought that the story would be five or ten pages long. The story itself had other plans.
We moved to America. The story, which I had been writing in my own time, between things that people were waiting for, ground to a halt.
Years passed. One day I looked up and noticed that Holly was now in her teens, and her younger sister, Maddy, was the same age Holly had been when I had started it for her. I sent the story so far to Jennifer Hershey, my editor at HarperCollins. She read it. “I love it,” she said. “What happens next?”
I suggested she give me a contract, and we would both find out. She agreed enthusiastically.
I bought a notebook, and started to write in it. It sat on my bedside table, and for the next couple of years I would scrawl fifty words, sometimes a hundred words, every night, before I went to sleep. A three-day train journey across America was an opportunity to work, uninterrupted, on Coraline. Getting stuck on American Gods, a long novel I was working on, gave me the opportunity I needed to finish Coraline’s story. A year later I wrote a chapter I had meant to write but had never got around to, and Coraline was finished.
Where it all came from—the other mother with her button eyes, the rats, the hand, the sad voices of the ghost-children—I have no real idea. It built itself and told itself, a word at a time.
A decade before, I had begun to write the story of Coraline, who was small for her age, and would find herself in darkest danger. By the time I finished writing, Coraline had seen what lay behind mirrors, and had a close call with a bad hand, and had come face-to-face with her other mother; she had rescued her true parents from a fate worse than death and triumphed against overwhelming odds.
It was a story, I learned when people began to read it, that children experienced as an adventure, but which gave adults nightmares. It’s the strangest book I’ve written, it took the longest time to write, and it’s the book I’m proudest of.
QUESTIONS & ANSWERS
ABOUT CORALINE
How did you think up the name “Coraline”?
It was from typing “Caroline” and it was coming out wrong. Larry Niven, the science fiction author, said in an essay that writers should treasure their typing mistakes. Once I typed it, I knew it was somebody’s name, and I wanted to know what happened to her.
I recently discovered it was actually a real name, although it’s not been used much in English-speaking countries for a long time. And, at the turn of the last century, it was a name for a brand of corset.
Coraline is called a fairy tale. Do you really believe in fairies?
Well, the only fairy in Coraline has been dead for hundreds of years, and some people read the book and never notice her at all. Coraline’s a fairy tale in the same way that “Hansel and Gretel” is a fairy tale.
As for believing in fairies…many years ago I wrote the copyright notice for a comic called The Books of Magic, in which I said words to the effect of “All the characters, human or otherwise, are imaginary, excepting only certain of the faerie folk, whom it might be unwise to offend by casting doubts on their existence. Or lack thereof.” A position I still wholeheartedly support and defend.
Did your parents insist on cooking “recipes” rather than regular food?