Whether I can dignify my frequent feeling of being out of my depth by calling it “pioneering” I don’t know, but despite my wonderful husband’s help, it was very hard, and I was always looking feverishly for ideas. Some of my best ones came in the spontaneous form of bedtime stories, and, since I was usually busy writing adult novels at that time, I would tell them and forget them.
But once when a publisher asked me to write a children’s book, and I was desperate, my youngest son reminded me of a bedtime story I’d told him several years before, about a little bathroom cupboard we found in our first London house that brought plastic toys to life. He’d remembered it so clearly that he was able to help me while I was writing it. So I wrote it very quickly (in only about three months) and I left in it a lot of names – including his, Omri, the hero of the story – and places and things and even animals, that I had originally put in my “telling” story for my son’s benefit. Omri’s name, from being almost unknown outside Israel, is now quite famous, but I didn’t anticipate that at the time.
The cupboard was one of the real things, and I still have it. Unlike a lot of other things in the book, which were based on reality but which I changed for the story, the cupboard is exactly as I described it – a small, shabby, white-painted metal cabinet “with a mirror in the door, the kind you find over the basin in old-fashioned bathrooms”. It is now very important to me, as you can imagine. For example, when recently I was in a hotel in Seattle which caught fire and a woman ran past our door screaming at us to leave the hotel immediately, I turned back (as one is forbidden to do) and picked up the cupboard in its carrying bag before running down the back stairs. I carry this cupboard about with me and show it to children when I visit schools. They’re often surprised at its plainness. I tell them, “Don’t judge a book by its cover and don’t judge an object by its surface appearance. This is a magic cupboard.” How else to explain how it changed my life, brought me fame, prizes, money, new friends and wonderful travel opportunities? Of course it’s magic.
This book, which I had thought was just a book, proved to be the biggest success I’d written since my first novel, The L-Shaped Room (which wasn’t for children). The Indian in the Cupboard changed the tide for us – I mean, for our family finances – and it changed my career. I began writing more and more for children, less and less for grown-ups. Writing for grown-ups is a challenge you shouldn’t turn away from, but it’s hard when there’s a lot of demand and reward for one kind of writing, not to do more and more of that. Children wrote me letters begging for more adventures of Omri and the Indian, so I tried to oblige. I’ve written five books about them now, and a lot of other children’s books as well. I’ve really enjoyed the life I’ve had since The Indian in the Cupboard came into it.
Of course, it hasn’t all been plain sailing. I wrote the original book in a light-hearted vein and I didn’t think too much about strict accuracy. I did a little research about the Iroquois, but not nearly as much as I should have. The success of the book in the United States coincided with the rapid development of ethnic consciousness among American Indians and the resentment of some of them about stereotyping by non-Indian writers.
Attacks on the books by certain tribal members has caused me a lot of pain, but it has had a good effect. In later books I took more and more trouble to check my facts. For the fifth book in the series, The Key to the Indian, I travelled to Canada to talk to some of today’s Mohawks (one of the Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy) and I think I’ve made fewer mistakes in this book. As a result of these efforts, I feel that the books have deepened and become more true. That is now one of my criteria of good writing, and the fact that I am writing fantasy doesn’t let me off getting the real things right.
LYNNE REID BANKS
July 2000
RETURN OF THE INDIAN
Lynne Reid Banks
ILLUSTRATED BY PIERS SANFORD
To all those who wrote to me, giving me ideas!
And to Omri, my darling son.
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