But by day three I was sitting in a deck chair and I started writing chapter four, “The Witch’s Headstone.” My daughter had been off swimming and she got back and she said, “What are you writing.” Then she asked, “Would you read it to me,” and so I did. I’m great for the first two days doing things like sleeping and swimming and being in deck chairs. We’d fled the Minneapolis cold and I’d gone off to Antigua. I’d had this idea for The Graveyard Book and I thought, “I’m not going to be any better a writer so I may as well go ahead and write it.”Ībout two years ago I was on holiday. In 2003, Coraline had been published and also The Wolves in the Walls.
Well, I started it right away and thought, “This is such a good idea, but I need to be a better writer.” Every now and again I’d pick it up. That’s quite a long while to have been thinking about writing a book, isn’t it? I thought, “I could have a boy abandoned in a graveyard who is taught the things that whoever lives in the graveyard knows!” In The Jungle Book, Mowgli is abandoned in the jungle and adopted by animals and taught the things that animals know. One day I thought, I could do something just like The Jungle Book! And I would sit on the steps outside watching him in the graveyard. I would take my son and his tricycle down all the stairs and across the lane where he would go tricycling around the graveyard very happily. But just across the lane we had a country graveyard. You can’t really let an 18-month-old with a tricycle ride around in a house with all these stairs because he would just go tumbling down. I had an 18-month-old son and he had a little tricycle. It was tall, thin and practically every room was on a different floor. Twenty-three and a half years ago I was living in Sussex in a very, very narrow house.
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