Gaiman Writes The Graveyard Book

Neil Gaiman has been posting remarkably honest updates on his blog as he writes this book. Since these are often buried in posts covering all sorts of other interesting things I’ve put some of them here to entice you to read his blog regularly if you are not already doing so.

January 8th:

I’m more or less happily writing Chapter Six of The Graveyard Book. I say more or less as I’m at that place where I hope that the book knows what it’s doing because right now I don’t have a clue — I’m writing one scene after another like a man walking through a valley in thick fog, just able to see the path a little way ahead, but with no idea where it’s actually going to lead him.

January 21st:

The Graveyard Book is back on track, I think, and the thorny and evil thicket that was Chapter Six has been traversed and, I am told, does not sound like I was making it up as I went along, but sounds as if I knew what it was about the whole time. This makes me happy, because it was miserable writing it.

January 28th:

I’m still in Chapter Seven. Yesterday was very talky. Today stuff may happen.

January 31st:

There’s an odd point in writing, when you reach a bit that you’ve known was going to happen for years. Years and years. And then it doesn’t happen like you thought it would…

It’s as if there’s a ghost-story behind the text and nobody knows it’s there but me.

February 3rd:

Yesterday I reached the moment I’d been dreading for years, where you learn why the things that happened in the first chapter happened (which I hadn’t known when I wrote them. I knew that they had happened, but not why) and as I started to write it, I realised that it was pretty obvious, so I wrote it, and learned a lot.

February 5th:

… But I know that it’s [Chapter Seven] almost done since I’ve started worrying about the eighth and final chapter, and you don’t do that until the one you’re on is nearly done.

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