FAQ #3: My Recipe

What literary influences/ancestors spawned 100 Cupboards?

I’ve already talked about the situational cause of this series (that late night chat and wifely challenge). But that was the story equivalent of knocking over a large pot of boiling, goopy somethings. But what were those somethings? Who put them in the pot, and why was the burner cranked so high? I blame it all on my parents. And on my teachers. But then my parents were both my teachers at some point or other, and they helped start the school where I simmered K-12. So it all lands on them.

I will now practice a little self-discipline and see if I can let a poor, exploited metaphor go. Unlikely.

Literary influences strung together in a spurt:

Narnia is in my blood. Nothing I can do about it. Nothing I would want to do about it. But the Wardrobe influenced these stories less than The Wood Between the Worlds. You see, the Wardrobe was arbitrary. It worked when you were called. There was nothing mechanical about it. The magic was mysticism. I loved it, but as a kid, it never grabbed me by the throat as much as those endless pools in that quiet wood. I wanted to go through every pool. I imagined the possible worlds behind them, and I loved that it came with a color-coded ring system. While I wasn’t consciously thinking about The Magician’s Nephew while working on 100 Cupboards, I have no doubt that the influence was there. My imagination was encouraged and pushed in particular directions by that book (and that was back when my imagination was young and squishy and easily influence).

H. Rider Haggard thrilled me when my mother finally talked me into reading King’s Solomon’s Mines (at the age of eleven or twelve). It was the same kind of story (the discovery of new worlds), only the hidden world existed within this one. I loved the flavor, and I love it still. Imagine my disappointment as I struggled through the rest of that gentleman’s work and found him to be a complete and utter freak-show.
Spenser’s Faerie Queene. Love it completely, but didn’t thoroughly get to know it until I had to lecture on it after grad school. Some folk assume that Nimiane (that villainess of the cupboards) is influenced by the White Witch. Not so much. She is female. She is a witch. But she’s based off the character of Duessa in the Faerie Queene, with some Greek tints and the flavor of witchery that would work within the stories told by ye olde Geoffrey of Monmouth. Readers will get to know Nimiane a lot better through the next two books.
Sidenote: While in Oxford visiting my sister’s family last year, I spent an afternoon wheedling around the rare book collections of the Bodleian and was able to pull a first printing of the Faerie Queene. Yes, a first printing. My excuse? I needed influence and inspiration for my novel. I turned (and stroked) every page. I read every scrap of student marginalia sprinkled through that copy over the centuries (some hands had even used residual Anglo-Saxon shorthand). And yes, I spent a fair amount of time smelling it. I will visit that book again. I will.

Sir Walter Scott’s Rob Roy. Okay, so not exactly. I was reading an appendix in my edition of Rob Roy and came across the story of the Rev. Robert Kirk. He was a Scottish parson back in the 17th century, a seventh son, and was allegedly abducted by faeries. He also had written a book called The Secret Commonwealth, describing what he knew about faeries and their doings. C.S. Lewis and Scott had both tried to find a first edition of the work (and had both failed). This, in my mind, made him a treasure. I began to build and imagine and develop a mythology around him before I ever got a copy of his book. The book itself is more than a little disappointing (but fun). The ideas he triggered (about the nature of magic and seventh sons, etc.) grew directly into this trilogy.

P.G. Wodehouse. My stories are nothing like his, so it should be fine for me to admit that no writer has influenced my actual prose more than this man. His plots are all identical, and I don’t care. He merits sainthood.

G.K. Chesterton. His fiction is always rough, but his vision is inverted brilliance. He makes the (real) world alive, mysterious, and magical to the point of sentience. That is how I want to see, and I wanted to transfer that way of seeing to young readers.

That’s enough tipping of my hand for now. Someday, I’ll spend some time talking about one unpublished, fantasy story that my father wrote for me when I was in grade school. I can’t really explain the impact it had on me, but I can postpone trying. It merits its own post.