I can write about one of the Wild Things jumping fifty feet in the air, and I don’t have to worry about how a dozen technicians in the Australian wilderness are going to accomplish that. And the great thing is that in a book, you don’t have to figure out how you’ll actually get something done in the real world. But there are some expansions and departures. Of course, a lot of people won’t see significant differences between the two-the movie and novel do conform to the same general arc, and the characters are largely the same. So in a way the movie is more Spike’s version of Maurice’s book, and this novel is more my version. But while I was working on the book, it was funny, because I started going in new directions, different from any of the screenplay versions, pushing it into some territory that was personal to me. And I did end up using a few of those scenes.

So I went into the novelization thinking it would be a place to put all these passages and scenes that wouldn’t fit into the movie. And after a few years of working on the script with Spike, we had a lot of pages and ideas that wouldn’t fit into the actual movie a script is about ninety pages, and even then, they’re ninety pretty sparse pages.

So I thought it would be fun to do an all-ages expansion on the screenplay. They’re both great in their way, of course-the screenplay for “The Wizard of Oz” is something Spike and I studied a lot it’s so incredibly good-but in a book, you just have so much more room to stretch out. I just read the unabridged version of Baum’s “Wizard of Oz,” and it’s amazing how little of the book made it into the movie. I said yes, mainly because Maurice asked, and also because I love it when there are different permutations of the same story. He said there’d been some talk about doing a novelization of the movie, and he asked if I’d be the one to do it. The script was pretty much done, and when the movie was about to begin filming, Maurice called me. I started working on the book a few years after we began the screenplay.

How soon after the screenplay was completed did you start working on the novel? This week’s story, “ Max at Sea,” is taken from your forthcoming novel, “ The Wild Things.” The book is loosely based on the screenplay you and Spike Jonze wrote for the film “Where the Wild Things Are,” which, of course, is based on the book by Maurice Sendak.

The wild things book dave eggers