Roald Dahl was born in Llandaff, Cardiff, on September 13, 1916, to Norwegian parents. He grew up in Wales and England, went to Repton School, joined Shell, and was working in East Africa when the Second World War started. He joined the Royal Air Force, flew fighters, and was badly hurt in a crash in the Western Desert in 1940. The injuries stayed with him for the rest of his life.
He died in Oxford on November 23, 1990, aged 74. In between he wrote short stories for adults, screenplays for two Ian Fleming adaptations, and the children’s books that made him the best-known children’s author of the century: James and the Giant Peach, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Fantastic Mr Fox, The BFG, The Witches and Matilda. His books have sold more than 300 million copies. Britain marked the first Roald Dahl Day in 2006, on what would have been his ninetieth birthday.
The reason a writer should care is the method. Dahl was a disciplined, odd and ruthless reviser who’d throw away a whole draft, and his books changed more after publication than most readers know.
Who was Roald Dahl before he wrote for children?
A fighter pilot, then a diplomat, then a writer of nasty little stories for grown-ups.
On September 19, 1940, he tried to land his plane in the desert near Mersa Matruh in Egypt after failing to find the airstrip he’d been sent to, and crashed. He fractured his skull, injured his spine and was temporarily blinded. He recovered enough to fly again in Greece and Palestine, but the headaches and back trouble never left him. In 1942 he was posted to Washington as an assistant air attaché at the British Embassy. That posting started the writing career, by accident and almost immediately.
How did a plane crash start Roald Dahl’s writing career?
He met C.S. Forester in Washington. Forester, the author of the Hornblower novels, was writing propaganda pieces for the British and wanted a pilot’s war story. Dahl wrote up his crash. Forester helped get it published, and The Saturday Evening Post bought it for $1,000 and ran it on August 1, 1942, under the title Shot Down Over Libya. Dahl’s own title had been A Piece of Cake.
That’s a war story told by the man it happened to, sold on its first outing to a magazine read in millions of American homes. Most writers spend years collecting rejections before a sale like that. Dahl skipped the line because he had a story nobody else could tell and a famous novelist willing to vouch for him.
His first book followed in 1943. The Gremlins, about mischievous creatures blamed by RAF pilots for mechanical failures, started as a film idea for Walt Disney. The film was never made. The book was credited to Flight Lieutenant Roald Dahl.
What did Roald Dahl write for adults?
Twist stories, and few writers in English did them better. His collection Someone Like You and the one that followed it are full of polite, ordinary people doing horrible things to each other. Someone Like You won an Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America. The stories later became the television series Tales of the Unexpected, and ITV ran it from 1979 to 1988.
The best known is Lamb to the Slaughter. A wife kills her husband with a frozen leg of lamb, puts the murder weapon in the oven, and serves it to the detectives searching the house for it. They eat the evidence while discussing where it could have gone.
The craft in them is setup. A Dahl story gives you every piece you need in the first few pages, dressed up as small talk or scenery, and then turns it over at the end. I love a twisty plot built from small hints, and his are as clean as anybody’s. A reader who goes back finds that nothing was hidden, only placed where nobody looked twice. If you want to write that kind of ending, my notes on writing a plot twist start from the same principle.
He also wrote screenplays. He adapted Ian Fleming twice, for the Bond film You Only Live Twice and for the flying-car musical made from Fleming’s children’s book. He’s credited with the script for the 1971 Willy Wonka film too, and he later disowned it.
How did Roald Dahl write in his garden hut?
The same way every day, for about 35 years. Behind his house in Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire, he had a hut about fifteen feet by ten. He held no meetings there. He wrote for four hours a day in two sessions of two hours, one in the morning and one in the afternoon.
The ritual was exact. He sharpened six yellow Dixon Ticonderoga pencils before starting, so a broken point would never stop him. He wrote on yellow legal paper, always the same kind. He sat in an old armchair that had belonged to his mother, with a hole cut into the back because of his damaged spine, wrapped in a sleeping bag, feet on a trunk, writing on a board covered in green baize laid across the arms. In the hut he kept pieces of his own spine and femur, saved from his operations.
The hut was moved, piece by piece, to the Roald Dahl Museum in 2011.
I write my novels in Microsoft Word. The pencils don’t matter.
The appointment does. Dahl’s hut worked because he went there at the same hours every day and nobody was allowed to interrupt him, and that’s a routine any writer can copy with any tools. My own day runs client work in the morning, my own books in the afternoon and clients again in the evening. The split is different from his. The principle is the same: the work has a fixed place in the day.
How many times did Roald Dahl rewrite his books?
As many as it took, including from scratch.
Matilda is the clearest case. He spent six to nine months on a full draft, decided it was wrong, and started over, rewriting every word. In the first version, Matilda was a badly behaved child who played tricks on people and used her powers to help her teacher fix a horse race, and she died at the end. The girl in the published book is a gentle genius who loves reading and defeats a monstrous headmistress. That’s a different character in a different book, and he got there by throwing the first one away.
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory went through the same process. Unpublished drafts gave out nine or ten golden tickets, and several children were cut before publication, including one called Elvira Entwhistle, who became Veruca Salt. The idea itself came from his schooldays at Repton, when Cadbury sent boxes of new chocolates to the boys to test.
Most writers can’t bring themselves to throw away nine months of work. Dahl could, and Matilda is the result.
Why are Roald Dahl’s books on the children’s side?
Because the adults are the enemy, and he’d spent his life watching which books children picked for themselves. Aunts Spiker and Sponge, the Twits, Miss Trunchbull, the Grand High Witch, Matilda’s parents. Grown-ups in Dahl are stupid, greedy, cruel or all three, and the children beat them. Quentin Blake, who illustrated most of the books from The Enormous Crocodile in 1978 onward, described Dahl as a grown-up who was on your side, and the books never break that promise.
Puffin’s marketing director in the late 1980s, Barry Cunningham, traveled the country with Dahl meeting his readers. A few years later, at Bloomsbury, Cunningham bought the first Harry Potter book. He knew what a children’s book that kids chose for themselves looked like because he’d watched Dahl’s readers line up.
He also invented words, more than 500 of them, scrumdiddlyumptious among them. The BFG, published in 1982, is where the habit runs wildest. The giant mangles English because he never went to school, and the mangled words are funnier and more exact than the real ones. Children understand them instantly from context, and a reader who works out a made-up word has been trusted with something, and kids notice when they’re trusted.
Kids read him on their own because the books respect them.
There’s danger, there’s revenge, people get punished in disgusting ways, and nobody stops to explain the moral. A children’s book kids pick for themselves looks like that, and it’s harder to write than it seems. I’ve written about the craft in ghostwriting children’s books, where every word has to justify itself and the reader quits the moment they feel talked down to.
The Oompa-Loompas are the other case, and Dahl rewrote them himself after publication. In the first edition of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, published in 1964, the Oompa-Loompas were described and drawn as African pygmies brought to the factory by Willy Wonka. When the film adaptation was announced, the NAACP raised concerns that the arrangement resembled slavery. Dahl said he sympathized, and a revised edition in 1973 removed the references to Africa and redrew the characters.
That revision matters for what happened fifty years later. The author made it, while he was alive, under his own name.
Roald Dahl threw away a full draft of Matilda and rewrote every word. Most writers can’t bin nine months of work, and their first drafts end up in print.Share on X
What happened with the 2023 Puffin edits to Roald Dahl’s books?
In February 2023 The Telegraph reported that Puffin, Dahl’s children’s publisher, had made hundreds of changes to new editions of his books. The Roald Dahl Story Company said it had reviewed the texts with Puffin and with Inclusive Minds, an organization that works on inclusion in children’s books, and called the changes small and carefully considered.
Examples included Augustus Gloop going from “enormously fat” to “enormous” and the Oompa-Loompas becoming small people instead of small men. The Witches gained a line about why women wear wigs that Dahl never wrote. The rights had changed hands too. Netflix had bought the Roald Dahl Story Company in September 2021.
The response came from all directions. Suzanne Nossel of PEN America called the changes alarming. Salman Rushdie called it absurd censorship. On February 24, Puffin announced The Roald Dahl Classic Collection, keeping the original texts in print alongside the revised Puffin editions, so readers could choose.
As an editing question, the problem is plain. An editor’s job is to help the author say what the author meant. Changing a dead writer’s sentences, and adding new ones, without telling readers on the cover, puts somebody else’s words under his name. Dahl’s 1973 revision was his call. The 2023 changes weren’t.
The publisher’s own fix, keeping both versions available, concedes the point. Living authors work with sensitivity readers all the time, and that’s an ordinary part of editing when the author agrees to each change and signs off on the result. The difference here is consent. I think writing rules are a bit much and I write in the character’s voice, and Dahl’s voice was rude on purpose. Sand that off and you get a politer book by a different author.
The broader argument about sensitivity edits and warnings is one I’ve covered in Trigger Warnings: Protecting Readers or Censoring Art?
What doesn’t hold up in Roald Dahl?
Some of the man. In 2020 his family published an apology on the official Roald Dahl website for antisemitic remarks he’d made. That’s a matter of public record, and readers are entitled to know it.
Some of the work, too. A handful of the jokes are cruel in ways that go past the children’s revenge and land on people who’ve done nothing wrong, and some of the adult stories are cold. None of that undoes the craft. It means reading him the way you’d read any writer from another era, with your eyes open.
What can a writer take from Roald Dahl?
Keep a fixed appointment. Four hours a day, same place, same times, nobody allowed in. The tools are a matter of taste. The routine isn’t.
Throw away the draft that’s wrong. He did it with Matilda after nine months, and the published book is better for it. A writer who can’t let go of a bad draft will publish it.
Plant the twist in plain sight. The adult stories work because every clue is on the page early and dressed as something ordinary.
Take the reader’s side. His children’s books work because the reader is never the one being lectured. Whoever your reader is, write as if you’re with them against the problem, and they’ll follow you anywhere.
Let the language play. More than 500 invented words, and children read every one of them without a glossary. Context does the teaching if the sentence around the word is clear.
And own your revisions. When the Oompa-Loompas needed changing, Dahl changed them himself. Edits made after the author is gone are somebody else’s book.
How should you mark Roald Dahl Day?
Read one of the adult stories. Most people only know the children’s books, and Someone Like You shows where the twists and the nastiness came from.
Then read Matilda again, knowing there was a first version where she died, and watch how gently he handles a child who could have been a monster.
If you write, try his routine for a week. Two sessions a day at fixed times, nothing else in the room. See what it does to your page count.
And for the film side, my review of James and the Giant Peach (1996) covers the adaptation of his first children’s novel.
Dahl had a writer’s discipline and a child’s sense of justice. That combination is rarer than talent. If you’ve got a book that needs that kind of discipline brought to it, book coaching is where I’d start. The rest of the calendar is on the literary holidays page.