The first
thing David Wiesner showed to his editor, Dinah Stevenson, for what would
become Art & Max, was a
bear-shaped creature who was painted in color, but with a different medium
showing through underneath. "I loved that picture but it needed a story,"
said Stevenson. "How did he get to be that way? Who else was involved? And
what happened afterward?"
Sometimes Stevenson will go months without hearing from Wiesner. By the time he showed her a dummy of the story, the bears had turned into lizards. "When he comes in, he always has something to show me," she said. "If there are any puzzling or confusing spots, I point them out." Occasionally, Wiesner poses the question. For instance, he wondered whether anyone would question, in the middle of a desert, an electric fan and vacuum cleaner. Stevenson suggested picturing a house on the title page from which an extension cord could run. "I think a lot of children like everything to connect up somehow," she explained. Another logic question arose from the scene in which Max unwinds Arthur into a pile of random lines. "Initially, David had Arthur talking still, and I thought that defied the logic of the event. We know lizards don't talk, but it was the idea that the presence, although invisible, should not speak. He's gone off and left Max alone, and Max has to deal with it, without Arthur telling him what to do--as Arthur surely would if he were able to."
As the book
progressed, the two lizard characters "began to polarize," Stevenson
recalled, "one as the expert adult, Arthur, the other as the brave and
daring young person, which was Max. The fact that they're lizards gentles it
down a bit; you don't have to think of Arthur as the fine arts teacher or
parent." Stevenson praises many things about Wiesner's approach, one of
them being the timing of the page turn. "It's not a way station, something
to get through on the way to the next thing," she observed. "It's an
event." And, in a book that's a testament to the creative process, she pointed
out that Wiesner has tremendous confidence and trust in his own process. "His
process is consistent in the basics, which is his preference to see something
worked out visually before committing to it, and his tendency to further
develop a concept as the process goes on." Wiesner wasn't sure at first
what Arthur reconstructed should look like, for instance, so he used a
placeholder until he came up with the right solution.
Stevenson described
Art & Max as autobiographical, "because
it's the story of an artist learning to be an artist." She added, "I
think anyone who applies himself will go through a comparable process. You have
to be willing to try, and the further you go, the more adept you get--and you
can save your friend's life when he turns into an unraveled line drawing. It's
the perils and rewards of creativity--David is a career artist who's writing
from experience."