When I was writing The Polar Express, I just knew, “Well, we’re going to leave. And let’s see where we go.” I knew we were going North, by the way, but I didn’t know what was going happen there. I didn’t know what the boy was going to ask for there. And even when I read it now, when I read that the boy was longing to hear a bell, and then he had an opportunity to choose the bell – usually, when you see stuff like that, you understand, “Well, that was contrived by the author. He got to a point where he wanted the boy to ask for the bell, so then you go back and you put him longing for the bell at the beginning.”
But this story didn’t happen that way. This story was one draft. And the reason I say this – it seems like a kernel of truth, once again – is because it seemed like I was recovering a memory. I wasn’t pushing forward, looking for where the ideas were next. I just sat down, that’s where we went, and that’s what happened. We came back home. And even the sort of coda at the end, where only the boy can hear the bell – that was all there.
The final page, where it turns out that his sister can’t hear it any longer, I felt had to be there; because it didn’t seem right to end right there, and for me, as an adult writing that story, there’s the whole idea of parents caring about children believing in it, and then the transformation that they undergo as they grow older and they stop; but their parents are hoping they don’t, because that’s a kind of a passage in life they hate to see their children give up – because they aren’t kids anymore. It’s like Alan not being able to decide, with Gasazi, if it’s real magic or if someone’s fooling him. You know, when kids still believe in magic, it makes the whole house at Christmastime different.
