Mac Barnett & Jon Klassen

United States

Mac Barnett is the author of numerous award-winning books, and is the founder of the Echo Park Time Travel Mart, a convenience store for time travellers. Jon Klassen's picturebooks, ‘I Want My Hat Back’ and ‘This Is Not My Hat’ have sold over a million copies worldwide. Mac and Jon have collaborated on two picturebooks.

In this post, Mac and Jon have a chat about the brilliant ‘Sam & Dave Dig a Hole’, the second picturebook they made together. Conceived over breakfast at an L.A. diner, this smart and engaging story is a celebration of curiosity, imagination and childhood adventure.

Visit Mac Barnett's website
Visit Jon Klassen's blog

Mac: Hello, Jon!
Jon: Hello Mac!
Mac: I am on a plane above Arkansas!
Jon: I am on the ninth floor of a badly renovated building in downtown Los Angeles!
Mac: And yet here we are, together, on the internet, on gchat.
Jon: Just like the old picture book guys used to do.
Mac: The picture book makers, if you will.
Jon: I'll allow it.
Mac: Well we are happy to be here today on this blog, which we both admire, and which I will be billing for this airplane internet (the cost is $450/minute).
Jon: Very happy to be here. It is a great blog (and hopefully a well-sponsored one).
Mac: So let's talk a little bit about how we made our book, ‘Sam & Dave Dig a Hole.’

Jon: Ok. I guess we can start by saying that we came up with the initial premise together.
Mac: Yes. That's true. Really, from the beginning, the process for this book was unlike any other book I've worked on. Since I can't draw, every picture book I write is collaborative. But this one was much more so, even more than ‘Extra Yarn’.
(Which I made with you.)
(To inform our readers, and maybe jog your memory.)

Jon: Yeah, for me as well. When I'm doing the illustrations for a text, usually you get the whole thing finished and ready to go and there's no changing anything and your job is mainly to pace it out visually and figure out what the opportunities are for page turns etc, but with this one we kind of got to make those as we went. It was a weird hybrid of what you do collaboratively and how you work when you're both writing and illustrating the book yourself.

Mac: So, do you want to take us back to the origin, that fateful breakfast at an L.A. diner called Swingers, which I'm afraid will give our readers the wrong idea about the establishment?

Jon: Swingers is a fine family-friendly diner on the west side of town that I have actually only been to that one time. I remember we were talking about books where the stories are kind of inextricably linked to their trim size or dimensions, and we started talking about a book that would go up or down as the main visual idea for the story.

Mac: Yes, and we talked about both possibilities, about moving upward and moving downward, and we decided pretty fast that down was more interesting. And one big reason it's more interesting is because you can't see what's in the dirt next to you. With that, we had two important aspects of this book: that the boys would dig for treasures and just barely miss them, and that the book's trim size would affect the layouts, and the type placement. Maybe you want to talk a little bit more about that second aspect, since it was so immediately apparent to you, and I remember you got very excited and started laying out the book on a napkin.

Jon: I think my initial idea for the type was a little cleaner than what we ended up with—I got really into the idea of the composition working its way up the page the deeper they got, and the text on the facing page following them until both sides got to the top. We didn't end up with something quite as uniform as that, but there are some moments I really like where the type lines up with their position on the page really nicely.

Mac: The third important thing, which was also there from that breakfast, was the ending. The boys would eventually run out of earth to dig. We would see white space below them, and they would tumble down through that space and land somewhere that looked a lot like the place they started, but was different in subtle ways.

In keeping with the mechanism used throughout the book, Sam and Dave would be unaware of these changes, and the text would not acknowledge them.

Jon: It was a long breakfast.
Mac: Classic Swingers.

So with those pieces in place, I went back home (in Northern California) and got to writing. I sent you a manuscript, you liked it, and we sold it to Candlewick. Then you worked on some other books, including ‘This Is Not My Hat’, and after—what, a year or so?—it was time to start working on Sam & Dave. And this is where things really got underway.

Jon: You had the two guys all figured out pretty quick.

Mac: I think their relationship was well established, but there were some big changes to the text after you roughed the book out. I guess I'll say first of all that I feel like a big part of my job in writing a picture book manuscript is to create opportunities for the illustrations to do the storytelling. And really the picture book writing is the art of finishing an unfinished thing. So there were crucial things to the book that I had no idea how you were going to solve: What were the spectacular things Sam and Dave were going to miss? How would falling from the bottom of the earth work visually? And how would you indicate that they'd landed somewhere else?

Jon: The things they were missing took some figuring out. A lot of the way the book looks and moves comes from old video games like Dig Dug and the Mario games (Mario 2 in particular). The first thing they missed was always a diamond just because I figured it was the clearest read and the best way to introduce the joke, but the more we played around with complicating that as it went along, the more I felt like it was dividing attention and muddying the water. As soon as I thought of just growing the diamonds every time they missed one, the big spread with the giant diamond came up and I couldn't resist that.

Mac: Yeah, there was an early version where they missed gems, skeletons, and monster skeletons.

Mac: There were a few times I changed the text because you had a visual idea that was funny or compelling. Which is pretty unusual in picture books, but was pretty common with this picture book. I don't think we've ever talked about this change, though, where Sam and Dave rest. Originally, Sam and Dave just dug and dug. The white space showed up below them and moved closer and closer over a few spreads—the reader would see the end inexorably approaching.

Jon: Right, but it turned out to not really be conducive to the book format. Them breaking through the ‘bottom’ of the dirt after digging down to it was almost more of an animated idea than a picture book one. It would be a funny gag if it were animated, but for books you have to pick the moments between the events so you can picture the action that connects them. So instead of having them just dig right through the bottom, we came up with having them stop just short of the line, and not even show the audience that there was a line just yet. They are at the bottom of the book, but that's as much information as we have.

Mac: And this visual demand required a change of the text—we needed our boys to stop digging. That's how they end up taking a rest. And we got this moment where Sam finally speaks up, where he says he cannot go on and sits down. For once, Dave follows his lead. It’s a nice moment, and an important one that wasn’t in the original manuscript. There were a few times this happened: a visual idea necessitated a revision to the text that ultimately gave Sam and Dave's relationship more depth, more nuance.

But! We still had to figure out how to make these guys fall. I think at one point the ground may have just broken beneath them while they were sleeping, but that risked making it seem like Sam and Dave were dreaming.

Jon: Yeah. Anything that happened while they were asleep ended up looking like it was a dream—we needed somebody who was awake throughout to fix that problem. So we did the only thing you can do when you're up against a story problem: we added the dog.

Mac: That was a big moment, when the dog joined them.
He came along because we needed him there near the end, but he ended up doing such a great job the whole time.

Jon: I was worried initially about having him along the whole time. Being a dog, you expect him to be sniffing out things in the dirt and knowing what is in there when the boys don't. Until now, that had been the audience's job and I worried it was going to be kind of a redundant thing the dog was doing because obviously we can see the diamonds too. But it ended up kind of tying things together instead of complicating them.

Mac: He really strengthened the presiding visual conceit for the book, which cleaves everybody into two camps. The idiots: Sam, Dave, and me, the author (also whoever is reading the book out loud), who have no idea what's going on. And the enlightened: the kids, the illustrator, and, now, the dog.

Jon: It's a lesson I keep having to learn, and maybe one day there'll be a story where it won't apply, but so far it's been the case that if there's any information in the pictures that the characters in the story are ignorant of, it helps a lot to have someone in the book be aware of it. I always resist it, but it always ends up warming up the experience and in this case it really helped us get through to the ending of the story, and even gave us someone who noticed that where the boys land is different from where they started. If nobody in the book noticed that, I think it would've been too creepy and bleak. But with the dog noticing, and getting that last page it turns into kind of a comedy take rather than something potentially much darker.

Mac: Good job, dog.
Jon: Yeah—good boy.

15 September 2015

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Mac Barnett & Jon Klassen

United States

Sam & Dave Dig a Hole

Mac Barnett & Jon Klassen

Candlewick Press (USA), Walker Books (UK), 2014