What gave you the idea for 100 Cupboards?
A few years back, a college buddy of mine (holler, Mark Beauchamp) dropped by for some nostalgic laughter. The hour got late and the caffeine was flowing. At some point in the evening, while discussing his innate need to salvage strange things (and how that need affected the overall aesthetic charm of his apartment), he threw out the phrase: “One Hundred Little Cupboards.” I latched onto it, responding with something like, “That sounds like a book title.” Now, to be quite honest, I would have let it die right there. We both would have happily moved on, and the snappy book title could have gone to live where thousands of other snappy book titles had gone before. But instead, my wife chimed in. She laughed. Her eyebrows showered skepticism. “A stupid book,” she said. “Who would read a story about cupboards?” At this point, my eyebrows (and Mark’s) responded. To get right to the punchline, we marveled at her skepticism. To her great amusement, we constructed dozens of different stories, all of them fantastic, all of them for children. But by the end of the evening, we’d settled on the idea of one hundred mismatched doors built into the wall of an old house.
Sidenote on my wife: She’s fabulous. And one of the things that makes her fabulous is the fact that she expects (demands?) follow through. And, more importantly, she throws complete support behind any attempts to follow through. When we got married, I didn’t even own a computer—and I had said I was going to be a writer. She and our infant son would follow me to the office late at night so I could work on my first attempt at a novel. While our son zonked in his wind-up swing, she’d dig into a book or shop online, waiting patiently until I wanted to read aloud. She heard the whole of that pitiful piece virtually paragraph by paragraph, and nobody could have been more enthusiastic.
By the end of that fateful night, my wife was convinced. The next morning, she wanted to know when I was going to start. Thanks to her challenge, I started writing that day. Five months later, the first (bloated 170,000 word) draft of 100 Cupboards had come into existence. There is plenty more to say here. I later broke the story into thirds for Random House. I wrote Leepike Ridge before starting on that second version of the 100 Cupboards story. Other stories I had been working on got themselves absorbed into 100Cs. The influences are a little more obscure than they are with Leepike, and I even gave myself a few rules for writing American fantasy. But all those things can wait for another blogging day. They may have functioned as the proverbial gas leak, but that late night conversation and wifely challenge provided the true sparking cause.
10 Comments