I like to test raw manuscripts out on my three-year-old too. I sit down with my manuscript and read it aloud to myself over and over and over again. But it’s how Sendak broke those 10 sentences that created such dynamic pacing and anticipation for the reader.įor me, pagination is a feeling. The entire book is only made up of 10 sentences, totaling about 338 words. I imagine it would have looked a bit like a short paragraph. Sometimes I wonder what Ursula Nordstrom, Sendak’s editor, thought of his manuscript the first time she saw it.
Max misbehaves and lets his inner monster out, but it doesn’t change his mother’s unconditional love for him.
It allows the reader to understand that even at our worst, there is still love. It’s satisfying, and yet leaves us wanting to know more. It leaves the reader wondering how much time has actually passed? Did Max really leave? So many questions arise from this simple collection of words. The pagination of this line is brilliant. On the final page, the text reads “and it was still hot.” The line is in reference to Max’s dinner, which we know Max’s mother sends him to bed without in the beginning of the story. I remember the first time I re-read WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE as adult. Even today, I rarely see authors do that without an ellipsis. In 1963, that was pretty revolutionary for a picture book. Sendak breaks sentences in the middle, straddling them across the pages throughout the book, not necessarily in conjunction with the punctuation. WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE is the greatest picture book of all time for many reasons, but pagination is a big part of that. He understood that it wasn’t the structure of the sentence that mattered so much as how he broke it up amongst the pages. But it doesn’t matter, because Sendak is a genius. Maurice Sendak has some seriously long, run-on sentences in that book that would even give Nathaniel Hawthorne a run for his money. Take, for example, WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE.
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