Here is a page from my pocket notebook of Mac Barnett and Jon Klassen discussing a new picture-book version of “Hansel and Gretel,” which was made by Stephen King adding words to Maurice Sendak’s designs for an opera.

JON: I’d say the illustrator is in the business of reacting to the text, doing work the manuscript doesn’t do. This can mean providing new information, adding a different tone or even subverting the words a little.

MAC: It’s this fluid, playful dynamic between text and image that animates the art form. As Sendak himself put it, the picture book is “an ingenious juxtaposition of picture and word, a counterpoint. … Words are left out — but the picture says it. Pictures are left out — but the word says it.”

That Sendak quote is from his praise for Randolph Caldecott:

Caldecott’s work heralds the beginning of the modern picture book. He devised an ingenious juxtaposition of picture and word, a counterpoint that had never happened before. Words are left out – but the picture says it. Pictures are left out – but the word says it. In short, it is the invention of the picture book.

I fixated on Sendak’s use of the word “counterpoint,” because I sort of remembered him being a classical music geek. (I remembered correctly.)

In another interview, Sendak explained his counterpoint idea in a little more detail:

I think what happens is if you’ve got enough confidence in yourself and you’ve resolved the text, that the pictures then do a second story, not be a mere echo. “Jane walked into the room and was eaten by the plant.” You don’t need to draw that, although maybe you’d like to draw that. But, in fact, you should draw something else. There should be a counterpoint between your pictures and your text. The best-illustrated books are the books where the text does one thing and the pictures say something just a little off-center of the language, so they’re both doing something. Otherwise you have an echo chamber. The most boring books are where the pictures are restating the text.

Who needs that? The text said it much better. So you cannot separate the pictures from the text, you shouldn’t be able to, not in a well-constructed book. They should fit in like machinery.

Because music is really my first love, I am always looking for musical metaphors to help me conceptualize my writing better.

A footnote: This morning I heard R.E.M.’s “It’s The End of the World As We Know It,” and I was thinking about how much I like Mike Mills’ backing vocal response to the main chorus line. (“It’s time I had some time alone.”) It reminded me of The Beatles’ “Getting Better,” how Paul McCartney’s “Got to admit it’s getting better / a little better / all the time” was answered by John Lennon’s sardonic backing vocal, “It couldn’t get no worse!” It’s not technically musical counterpoint, I don’t think, but it’s interplay between voices that deepens the work.