Interviews
How I Came to Write 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 the book for her. I sent the story so far to Jennifer Hershey, my editor at Harper Collins. 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 50 words, sometimes 100 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 gotten 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, and, I like to think, the one of which I am most proud.
--Neil Gaiman
