ABSTRACT
Chapter 7 follows Maurice Sendak’s process as he wrote and illustrated the children’s book Where the Wild Things Are. Sendak called the eight-year lag between an early version about wild horses and returning to the project “his apprenticeship.” The chapter follows the changes from the wild horses draft, through wandering, free-associational drafts, to a final text in which every single word mattered. At times he played with possibilities, recognizing what felt intuitively right when it appeared in his writing and sketching—examples of embodied creation. Often it was the word or image that captured multiple meanings. The chapter also tells how “things” came to replace horses and why Sendak called this book “more myself” than any he created earlier.
