News and Reviews for the Youth Librarian is pleased to present this interview with Cynthia Voigt, whose new book Mister Max: The Book of Lost Things will be released on August 27th.
Mystery isn't your usual genre--have you been wanting to write some? Or did this trilogy start with a character, who happened to be a detective?
It isn't exactly that I've been wanting to write mysteries, although from my first Nancy Drew book, many and many years ago, I've enjoyed and admired detective stories. Mostly, it's that as a plotting-impaired writer, I find such stories particularly difficult to devise and execute, not to mention to write and, especially, revise—which means of course that they require the use of skills I am ambitious to possess. In short, they are a fine old challenge. So that, when a character named Mister Max appeared in my imagination, he seemed a natural ally in the battle against my own limitations.
Max is named for your grandson—but do their personalities match? How much of an inspiration was he?
Grandson Max is not Max Starling: They just have the same name, sometimes. My grandson was a toothless, wordless infant when he acquired the name. At seven, he's more like Pia Bendiff than Max Starling—except for being contented to be learning things in school, successfully sociable and entirely confident of his place in the hearts of his entire extended family.
Max has a fierce need to be independent, and to live up to his father's pronouncement that 12 is the age of independence. Do you think that's true? Why 12? Does it make a difference that the books are set in the early 1900s? Or do you think a modern 12-year-old could really fend for themselves?
Of course being set in the early 1900's makes a difference to what is expected of and possible for a twelve-year-old. Society has greatly changed in its attitude to children (changed for good and for ill) in the last hundred years. But I do believe that a person of twelve years who finds him/herself in a difficult situation, who needs to take on unusual responsibilities, is entirely capable of doing just that, and doing it well. Isn't 12 a traditional age for the rite-of-passage ceremonies in a wide variety of societies?
Max isn't your typical fictional "detective": he doesn't have supernatural skills, he's not a savant, or ridiculously smart. He's thoughtful. He's diligent. And he knows a lot of plays! And hence—he knows quite a bit about people. But really, he's a very unassuming hero. Did you purposely want him to be an every-kid kind of hero?
But NO kid is an every-kid. Each and every one of them, like each and every one else, is distinct from each and every other, singular. That's one of the things that makes writing so interesting an occupation, and teaching too.
Max is able to slip into so many different roles—but the one thing everyone notices about him is his unusual eyes—where did that detail come from? It's a bit of an Achilles heel for him, really—was that the point?
Max's eyes are a detail with a clear source, and may even exemplify my creative process—insofar as I lay claim to one of those. When I realized that I couldn't cook up a plot for the title Mister Max and his Flying Grandmothers, I tried another idea, this one based not on the name but on my daughter's observation that this nephew had eyes the color of mushroom underbellies. As we drove about, I amused myself and included pre-lingual Max, in his infant's car seat behind me, trying to write a street ballad (think Mack the Knife meets The Scarlet Pimpernel) that began, "Mister Max has mushroom eyes, / They are what he can't disguise."
This first book in the trilogy is all about lost things—missing parents, a missing child, a runaway pet, a lost love...you must have had fun thinking of all kinds of things that could be missing for Max to find. Were there some things you considered that didn't end up in the final book?
Oh, yes, many lost things got left behind—lost tempers, lost grips, lost faces, lost zest for life, lost confidence, lost hearts, lost ways, lost hopes. My original first sentence introduced Max as a boy who lost his parents, and offered many ways to understand that phrase. (I like the new first sentence much better, in case anyone wonders.)
The next book, out in Fall 2014, is called Mister Max: the Book of Secrets—can you give us a taste of what secrets are at stake? And why did you pick that as the next theme?
I'm afraid I can't give a taste of the next book. Summarizing my own stories is a skill I entirely lack. But it's pretty obvious that if you are an impaired plotter at work on a mystery, the secrets that people want to keep, or have to keep, or try to keep, or even keep for someone else, is a natural place to look for ideas.
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