The Graveyard book may be seen as dark and strange, so many may think, what was the author's purpose and inspiration for the writing? Neil Gaiman, the author of The Graveyard Book wrote this novel over a twenty year period. He was inspired to write the story while he was watching his two year old riding his bicycle around a cemetery. However, when he began to write he did not like where it was going so he simply put the draft away, he did not think he was a good enough writer for this story. Gaiman never let the story escape his mind, over years he slowly began to develop more and more ideas to add and slowly but surely his novel was coming together.

After about ten years from first attempting to write the novel, Gaiman saw many different stories and articles about the dead and all of the different beings that are commonly thought of around death. After he continued his story, he was still not happy with what he had gotten so far. One day his daughter asked what he was working on and so he showed her. Once she was done reading his unfinished story, she asked “So what happens next?”, and he wondered the same thing so he decided that the book needed to be finished. Although he had decided the book needed to be finished, he still went through a process of small pieces of the story coming together over a long period of time. He continued on with his research and decided to place the more commonly evil characters as good and helpful.

He started his story over, from the beginning. He began to write each of the separate stories as individual chapters, little by little. Although this novel took the author over a decade to write, he finally understood why he needed to experience the things he was writing about to try to complete the story. At the end of the story the main character grows out of needing the care from the older dead, he had to go off on his own journey. Gaiman needed to experience having let a child off into the world to understand the best way to end his story.

After the story was written and finally published, many shared their love for the novel and for all of the meaning that has been put in all of the characters within the book. The story, when looked at from a broader lens can simply just be seen as a boy that went through loss and then was raised by others that took him in, and when he was ready, he went to live on his own. Neil Gaiman wrote this book to share the things both parents and children may go through during the younger years of their lives. He did this in a creative way by incorporating the dead and showing the creatures can teach lessons like people can as well. Gaiman learned a lot from the process of this novel, which was also his biggest take away, he was so proud of the outcome and he learned that others can get just as much from him as he can from them.