John Green

Well, I loved writing Will Grayson, Will Grayson with David Levithan, and I loved writing Let It Snow with Lauren Myracle and Maureen Johnson. It would be wonderful to collaborate with any of them in the future.

But one thing I've learned over the years is that I am kind of horrible to work with? As my wife once said, my creative process is fueled by doubt and anxiety, which isn't like an A#1 experience to welcome friends into.

One last answer to your question: EVERY book I've written has been written with two collaborators: Sarah (my wife) and Julie Strauss-Gabel, my editor and publisher. My collaborative relationship with Julie is extremely important to me, and she helps guide my stories from the moment I read her a few paragraphs over the phone to the final copyedits.

Ransom and I have been friends since college and we actually HAVE collaborated. If you search youtube thoroughly enough you can find some very weird (and not terribly funny) comedy sketches we wrote together at Kenyon.

Hank is a mass of incandescent gas.

Difficult question but honestly probably my grandmother. Yes, it would be nice to find out what Jesus or Muhammad or Cleopatra really thought and valued, but I miss my grandmother a lot and would like to hear some of her stories about growing up in Skullbone, Tennessee just one last time.

Harvey is the one movie that I think genuinely may have changed the course of my life, but my favorite movie is probably Rushmore. As a boarding school kid who wasn't a great student, it really resonates with me. Also Rushmore is a big point of connection between my wife and me, by which I mean we were watching it the first time we made out.

What was the one where they lived at the bottom of the ocean? Snorks? And what was the one where the animals wore shirts???

Those two.

SHIRT TALES. YOU GET GOLD.

Absolutely. If you want to be a nerd fighter you are one. One of the central ideas around nerdfighter as an identity is that it's something all of us are making up together all the time. We don't want it to be a rigidly defined thing but instead a community driven by shared values (decreasing worldsuck, for instance) and engaged conversations.

Right now I'm reading "Brown Girl Dreaming" by Jacqueline Woodson, a book of poetry published for kids but also great for adults. Like all of Jackie's work, its beauty draws you in and then the gut punches of the world hit you so hard. It's great.

Just finished and am still haunted by "An Untamed State" by Roxane Gay. What a novel! Just wow.

And I'm rereading "Behind the Beautiful Forevers" for the nerdfighter summer book club.

It's really hard to let go of your self-consciousness, but it's also vital, because you have to create the most authentic relationship possible with your viewers.

Also, like anything, you can't expect to be great at it from the beginning. Work hard at getting better--more precise, better edited, etc. it's a craft and you have to give yourself over to it.

Lastly be patient with yourself. We made 110 videos before we had 200 subscribers. What matters to me is not how many people watch our videos but how much they matter to the people who do watch.

I wish you great success!

If pineapple pizza shows up at my house, I'm going to eat it. There's not much you can do to a pizza to keep me from eating it. But in general I would never CHOOSE to put fruit on a pizza.

I love my Volt. It's so fun to drive and very fuel efficient (I often go a thousand miles on 10 gallons of gas). Cannot recommend it highly enough. It's not really an economically rational choice (there I would've gone Camry or Ford Fusion), but when The Fault in Our Stars took off I was like, "I'm going to buy my dream car." So I did.

I like my Volt. Sure, I dream about having a Tesla, but in the morning, I always tell my Volt, "I had a dream about another car last night, but then I woke and realized I have precisely the cybergray machine I've always wanted," and then I start singing that song from The Bodyguard to my Volt.

I mean, I do spend a lot of time on reddit, if that's what you're asking.

It's very challenging these days, because you need so many skills: You need to be a good communicator, a good researcher, a good video editor, a good animator, etc. I'm lucky that I started out back when you could be good at basically nothing and find an audience because there was much less content. My advice would be to start making videos. Just start making them and let yourself get better as you go, and really give as much of yourself as possible to improving each time you upload, and not to worry about quantity of audience so much as quality of engagement.

Like, a lot of people watch CSI, right? A LOT. And it's a good, entertaining program. (Probably. I don't think I've ever seen it.) But the quality of connection is not that high. Very few people say things like, "CSI changed my life," or "I live a different and more engaged life today because CSI taught me the magic of Enhancing." It's a lot cooler in my opinion to make stuff that people find really important and/or useful than it is to make stuff that a lot of people watch.

SORRY! But now I can just deny that your comment ever had any validity. I don't what you're talking about! There were no typos in my answer. YOU NEED TO GO TO BED.

I give this comment Reddit Silver.

It's from Macbeth originally. Macbeth says life is... "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." Then Faulkner repurposed it for the title of his great novel "The Sound and the Fury." Then I rerepurposed it for a reddit username.

I sold the movie rights to Paramount in 2005 when we desperately needed money, because we were moving to New York and Sarah (my wife) was starting graduate school. It was life-changing for us, and I'll always be grateful to everyone involved in that deal for making it happen.

But it did not lead to a movie. (At least not yet.) The reasons for this are complicated, but it boils down to this: It is really, really hard to get people to say "I want to spend $15,000,000 to make a movie out of a book not that many people have read."

I am really proud of The Fault in Our Stars movie, and I think it turned out unbelievably well. It's one of the most faithful movie adaptations I've ever seen, and I'm tremendously grateful to everyone who made it. But that is a rare, rare thing. Usually an author's relationship with their movie adaptations is much more....complicated. And so I have to say, I'm not bummed out that Alaska hasn't been made into a movie. (It may someday; I don't control the rights and never will.) There's something magical to a story belonging to its readers and only to its readers, and I'm very grateful that Alaska has continued to find its way in the world without the boost of a movie adaptation.

Harry Potter will forever be Daniel Radcliffe to me. I can't remember how I imagined Harry before the movies. But your Pudge and your Alaska...they still belong to you. They are still inside your head, and yours alone. There's something wonderful about that.

I think a movie adaptation's first responsibility is to be a good movie. I would rather the movie be good than faithful.

That said, I'm a lot more concerned with tones and ideas than with plot. Keeping the FEELING of the story seems like the biggest challenge to me, and one of the reasons I'm so so so proud of the TFIOS movie is that people keep telling me that it made them feel the way the book made them feel. All the credit for that goes to the screenwriters, the director, the cast, and the crew, but I really do think they did a great job.

My advice is to get help--to find a good therapist and figure out what works for you.

For me: I take medication daily and have for many years. I also try to exercise a lot, because there's some evidence that exercise lessens the symptoms of anxiety, and I try to use the strategies that I've learned in cognitive behavioral therapy to cope with my illness. But it's a chronic illness and it hasn't, like, gone into remission or anything for me. It's something I live with, something that I've integrated into my life. And we all have to integrate stuff into our lives, whether it's mental illness or physical disability or whatever.

There is hope. There is treatment. You are not alone, and while I know the struggle feels at times completely hopeless and futile, there is a far shore for the vast majority of people, and I wish you the best.

Well, just to be clear, I am a retired professional FIFA player, because I no longer make money from being terrible at FIFA. The money I make from being terrible at FIFA goes to sponsor the great AFC Wimbledon, a fourth-tier English football club owned by its fans.

But to your question: In an ideal world, I write in the morning and do other stuff (email, booking travel, shooting crash course/art assignment/mental floss, etc.) in the afternoon. But right now I'm not writing much because the movie stuff has been very hectic and overwhelming. Hopefully things will return to normal after the film comes out and I'll be back to writing every morning, because I love to write and feel much less sane when I'm not doing it.

My loyalty is defined ENTIRELY by who has donated the most to sarcoma research so at the moment I think the United States is the unquestionable favorite and is so certain to win the Cup that they basically should just send it to the U.S. before play even begins.

If you donate a thousand dollars on behalf of Germany, though, my opinion will change dramatically.

Yes, we're going to continue expanding Crash Course as resources allow. People who watch Crash Course have been really awesome about funding the show through Subbable, which has allowed us to achieve financial stability. The challenge now is expanding our offerings so that Crash Course can be useful to a wider variety of students and people who are just interested in learning.

The first step on that front is a 10-episode Big History course, an interdisciplinary approach to history that begins with the Big Bang and charts the formation of the Solar System and eventual emergence of life. That project is funded by a Bill Gates organization, and we're really excited about it. But there will be a wider variety of courses in the future.

kinda.

Yes, I hate Atlas Shrugged.

This is a great question, and it's something that Hank and I talk about a lot.

There were a few hundred nerdfighters in July of 2007, and then Hank's song "Accio Deathly Hallows" went viral and there were suddenly several thousand nerdfighters. That transition was very challenging for us personally and for the community, but I really think we emerged from it with a stronger sense of our shared values as nerdfighters and a better platform for doing stuff together like the Project for Awesome.

In our videos, we aren't talking that much about all the attention and scrutiny that accompanies the TFIOS movie because we mostly just want to keep the community the same. (I mean, my first video after TFIOS comes out will be about Behind the Beautiful Forevers, this summer's nerdfighter book club selection.)

I think it will be challenging for a while, but I also think nerdfighters are generally a pretty welcoming and supportive bunch. I'm very grateful to everybody for their patience with me in my time of intense crazy, though.

Tough call, but probably The Sunset Tree.

Follow editors on twitter and tumblr. See what they find interesting. Read a lot. Read a lot of new books, including ones you might not like that much. Find out what kind of books interest you: YA novels? Cookbooks? Trivia? What sections of the bookstore do you want to edit the books in? Then move to New York. That's my honest advice. Move to New York and try to get your foot in the door somewhere and work your ass off.

Well, I realize it's a bit strange to be like, "AMA on reddit! Follow me on tumblr! Read my tweets about what I had for breakfast! BUT DO NOT COME NEAR MY FAMILY OR VIOLATE OUR PRIVACY."

But yeah. It's inappropriate to go to people's houses, and we do--too often--have people come by the house and knock on the door or leave stuff in the mailbox. That's very scary to me, but it's also weird and disorienting for my kids to be playing in the front yard and have people they don't know drive by and shout "Hi Henry! Hi Alice!"

There is a difference between the person I am professionally and the person I am privately, and I need to hold onto that in order not to lose my mind, and also in order to be a good father and husband. So I do seek privacy in my personal life insofar as possible.

That said, if you ever see me at like Target or whatever, feel free to come up and say hi. If I'm in public, I know that I'm in public, and it's always nice to meet people who like the stuff I make, and I genuinely want you to say hi. (That's not the case for many people, I know, but it is the case for me.)

I had to learn a lot about math to write Katherines, even though Daniel Biss did all the actual math in the book. But I needed to understand the ideas in order to write about them.

As for names: One of the benefits of naming characters that you don't have when, say, naming a baby is that you actually know the person when you name them. So you can use the name to reflect stuff about them.

Like, take Hazel: Hazel is an in-between color, and she's in between a lot of things: In between healthy and sick, in between adulthood and childhood, in between breathing air and breathing water, etc. So that seemed like a small way of communicating the instability and fear (but also excitement) of that time of life.

With Augustus: Augustus is the name of Roman emperors, right? It's a grand name associated with traditional notions of greatness. But Gus is a kid's name. It's short and cute. In the novel, he makes the journey from strength to weakness, which is the opposite of the usual hero's journey. He starts out this confident, pretentious kid who's extremely performative in his every action. And then he becomes vulnerable. He becomes cracked open. For Gus, this is a brutal process. (Remember that moment toward the end when he says to Hazel, "You used to call me Augustus?") But his ability to be in it with her, and to allow himself to love and be loved despite the loss of the self he so carefully cultivated, is to my mind way more heroic than those traditional notions of Great Men Doing Great Things.

In the case of Katherines, I called them Katherine because it's a good name for anagramming. There are a lot of anagrams in Katherines, and I suck at anagramming, so I cheated by picking a name that has the right mix of consonants and vowels.

Maybe. I really like what they do! (I do sometimes feel, though, that they don't dig deeply enough into WHY critical reading is important. For me at least, it's not about getting a good grade on a test. It's about finding ways deep into big and difficult questions about consciousness.)

Yes, I do.

My hardcore badass feminist mom told both my brother and me that we were feminists from the time we were like two years old, so if she ever heard me saying I wasn't a feminist she'd fly to my house and smack me upside the head.

Don't worry about it. Those conversations are always weird and hard and I often fret about them for years after they happen, but the truth is that it's hard to express this stuff. It's hard for me to tell you how genuinely grateful I am that you've found something valuable in my work. So I'm sure I walked away from that conversation thinking that you were perfectly lovely and I was a complete grapefruit.

As for TFIOS: The cancer support group days with Mike Birbiglia and all the teens living with cancer were the coolest days for me to see come to life. But really, every day was wonderful. It really was just a dream movie experience--the opposite of what usually happens to authors--and while the movie is not mine in any way, I'm so proud of the people who made it.

Puff levels are pretty high at the moment around here. This is without question the most intense and stressful and weird and non-normal period of my life.

As for Crash Course: I'd love to do more interdisciplinary stuff where we learn stuff together but don't necessarily follow a traditional curriculum. And I'd love to do a course on civics and government.

The biggest inspiration for the approach to World History is my high school history teacher, Raoul Meyer, who writes the videos and whose commitment to a non-Eurocentric view of world history was hugely important to me in high school and still is.

Mostly I want to take multiple approaches to the study of history because we need to understand that the way we remember is shaped by the voices we listen to, and by the assumptions that we make about the world.

This is a pretty good airplane seat. When you fly all the time, they let you sit up front for free, so that helps.

Yeah, I definitely do.

I mean, there was a lot more pressure in 2003, when I desperately wanted to publish a novel and had no idea if I'd ever finish Looking for Alaska or if anyone would ever publish it or if anyone would ever read it. This is a much nicer kind of pressure.

I will not write TFIOS again. I got really lucky with that book on many fronts, and I know that my next book will have (as my previous books have had) a very different kind of life. That's okay.

And the great blessing of my professional life is that when I feel overwhelmed and/or freaked out about the prospect of writing, I can do other stuff. I can devote myself to Crash Course and The Art Assignment and working with nerdfighter artists and designers through DFTBA Records.

Well, I imagined writing very romantically: You go to excellent parties and meet fascinating people who discuss nothing but books and high ideas, and then you go home to a modern house made of glass and steel that you bought with all of your sweet, sweet book riches and then you polish your Pulitzer prizes and go to bed.

In reality of course it is mostly staring at a computer and thinking. It's extremely isolating work in a lot of ways, which suits me very well, and I never feel happier than when I'm writing. But it's not what I imagined at all. I imagined the joy would be in the Being A Writer part of being a writer. But in reality, for me, almost all of the joy is in the Writing part of being a writer.

Well, I am an old person, so I have no real perspective on this, because I like bookstores and think they are vital to my process of discovery. Booksellers have turned me onto writers I never would've discovered otherwise, and I like having experts (librarians, booksellers, etc.) to help guide my reading choices.

But the one thing I will say is this: We need more than one outlet for books. I'm very, very scared that in the future there will only be two kinds of books: Those that are available only through Amazon, and those that are widely available via Big Box stores like Wal-Mart and Target. In that world, traditional publishers could only add value to widely distributed books, which would basically mean that Wal-Mart decides what American literature is widely distributed, which I think would suck. Then over at Amazon, you'd have a huge and very flat marketplace in which lots of stuff will struggle to find the audience it deserves. I'm not worried about me in that world; I'm "good at the Internet" or whatever and have a direct relationship with my audience. But I am worried about, say, the next Toni Morrison. Beloved became a massive bestseller when it was published 40 years ago. It's hard for me to imagine that happening in an amazon-only future.

With An Imperial Affliction, I was trying to create a mirror to the story in TFIOS, so that Hazel would feel a deep connection to that story. Her fascination with what happens to Anna's mother is of course really about what's going to happen to Hazel's own mother after she dies, and she sees in the ambiguity of the ending the ambiguity in her own life: Hazel will never be able to know for certain that her mom is going to be okay, because she'll be gone. When I went back to the story (I'd been trying to write something similar off and on for ten years) in 2010, I started thinking that maybe Hazel and Gus could be joined by a book that Hazel found particularly powerful, and that maybe their Wish could be to meet the author of that book. I'm sure that was in my mind partly because I'd been part of my friend Esther's wish.

I don't really know if there are cons to it? Adults used to be less likely to take my work seriously, but that hasn't been the case with TFIOS.

The pros, for me: Teenagers give a shit. They are unironically enthusiastic, and they look at big questions about meaning and suffering and responsibility directly and without embarrassment. This inspires me, because I also like thinking about those questions but sometimes feel that there's something naive or childish about, like, seeking authentic and sincere emotional and intellectual ways of engaging. I really like that about them.

Plus, they're forming their values, which is a hugely important process, and it's a great honor to be offered a seat at the table in that conversation.

I didn't have any control, but I was lucky to be welcomed into the entire process by the producers and the director of the movie, and I always felt like my voice was heard. This is very rare for authors, and I am so grateful to everyone involved for letting me be part of it. I also became very close friends with the actors in the movie (and remain close friends with them), and I hope that my presence and friendship was helpful to them, but they're all very talented people and I don't think they need me.

While i was on the set of the movie, I really did think it would be good, but until I saw it all cut together, I had no idea HOW good. It's just such an extraordinarily faithful adaptation, not only to the story's plot but to its ideas.

There's a similarish line from Hemingway: "How did you go bankrupt?" "Two ways: Gradually, then suddenly." So maybe there? That was my initial inspiration for the line.

Tyrell, by Coe Booth - a major novel about poverty and heroism

The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, by M. T. Anderson - an absolutely brilliant work of historical fiction that is one of the best books of the 21st century imho

The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau Banks, by E. Lockhart - Wicked smart feminist boarding school novel

After Tupac and D Foster by Jacqueline Woodson - Poetic in the best sense of the word and just absolutely engrossing

The White Cat series by Holly Black - maybe my favorite fantasy series ever

THERE ARE SO MANY

Hamlet, probably?

I have good news, my soon-to-no-longer-be-seventh-graders: The worst is over. It has just ended. That was the worst. So many great and terrible things will happen to you in your lives, but no matter how challenging it gets, you will always be able to take a deep breath and say, "Well, at least I'm not in seventh grade anymore."

I am a terribly unqualified person to offer advice on this subject. I literally hid under a chair recently at a birthday part for one of my son's friends.

Yes.

To be totally honest with you, the celebrity part of celebrity is not pleasant. There are facets of it--like getting to meet people you admire and occasionally companies sending you free socks--that are super pleasant. But the part in which people you don't know say things about you and make assumptions about you is not so pleasant.

I DID (and do) invite that attention, and I understand that. But my anxiety disorder and obsessiveness make it challenging at times for sure. But I wouldn't trade it, because I love making videos and I love the nerdfighter community and I love being so close to my brother. Also, the current level of attention is temporary. I hope that I write many more books and that they find broad audiences, but it will never again be as intense or as consuming as it is right now.

When I was younger, I thought that if strangers cared about me--if they liked the stuff that I made or thought I was cool or whatever--I would be happy. I kind of thought that was the DEFINITION of happiness, really. But it turns out that attention from strangers does not fill the void inside of you, or really change anything about your internal relationship with yourself. It's only deep connection with people who know you intimately that provides the kind of stability and happiness that you need. Or at least that I need, anyway.

"I must go in. The fog is rising." -Emily Dickinson

1. Thanks for sharing my books through your job!

2. I like writing YA fiction. I like my audience, but I also like the being on the YA shelves with lots of different genres. I like that sci fi and romance and historical fiction and fantasy are all in conversation with each other in the YA world. I would miss that if I started publishing for adults.

Thanks; that means a lot to me, and no, it's not weird. I'm really sorry that you lost your mom, and I'm very grateful if you could find things to connect with in TFIOS that were helpful to you.

Yes, I am.

I mean, my liver is not going to be of use to me after I am deceased, but it might be of use to someone else. This seems like a pretty clear-cut choice to me.

Poorly.

Already have!

Afasi och Filthy, of course.

No. no no no no no no no no no no. No. No.

I realize this is an unpopular opinion, but I actually admire people who serve in elected office, because it is difficult and complicated work and I think most of them really are trying to do right by their constituents. But...no.

One of the things I dislike most about human social orders is the concept of the "meeting," in which a bunch of people sit together for a long period of time discussing a project to death and then form a task force to discuss it further so that the task force can produce a report which will then be considered at another series of meetings by a different group of people.

God, I hate meetings with such ferocity. I can't even tell you. When I am forced to sit in a meeting, I usually rock back and forth in my chair for a while before eventually saying to the people I work with, "I'm sorry but if this meeting goes on any longer I am going to actually and literally die."

Anyway, politics involves a lot of meetings. So no.

I talk about my religion reasonably often. (there's a great line in my wikipedia article--not that I obsessively read my wikipedia article--that goes, "Green has stated that he is Episcopalian." Hank is, so far as I know, an atheist. No, this is not weird for us. And no, it does not mean that we have different values or approaches to morality or anything.

I am Episcopalian. I find a lot of the conversation about religion online really, really boring. (For instance, I am not very interested in the question of whether there is actually a God, because I think it's very hard to define the words "is" and "actually" in that sentence, and that it quickly becomes a kind of how-many-angels-can-you-fit-on-the-head-of-a-pin conversation.) But i go to church (although not every week), and continue to find my faith an important and engaging part of my life.

Politically, I guess I lean to the left in the U.S., but in most of Europe, I would lean to the right. Depends on the issue. I think free markets are mostly good for economies, but that income inequality is a massive problem for social orders, and that markets cannot address that problem.

There is always a relevant XKCD.

The only like really cool perk of being a celebrity that I ever experienced: I really like these socks called Happy Socks. I wear them a lot, and they're very comfortable, and they have lots of great argyle designs. (I like argyle socks.)

And I guess someone who works at Happy Socks has a kid who is a nerdfighter, and so they sent me some free Happy Socks. Hank and I have a rule that we don't do product placement or accept gifts from companies in exchange for talking about them. This has resulted in me having to turn down some pretty sweet gifts, including, like, cars.

BUT NOT THE HAPPY SOCKS. I TOOK THOSE HAPPY SOCKS. I COULD NOT RESIST. I AM WEARING THEM RIGHT NOW.

Oh the other perk is that whenever I travel for the movie, Fox gets me a person who puts makeup on me in the morning, and it turns out I really love wearing makeup, and these people do such a good job of making me look young and untired and etc., and I just love it and wish a makeup artist would come to my house every morning and put makeup on me.

Kinda. We ate dinner together as a family pretty much every night, and there was a lot of conversation about the news and the meaning of life and all that stuff. It was a very intellectually invigorating childhood, and my brother responded by being a wonderful student and a great person. I responded by being a terrible student who caused my parents endless misery.

That's very kind of you to say. Thanks.

I was good friends with a young woman named Esther Earl who died of cancer in 2010 when she was 16. And I could never have written TFIOS without knowing and loving Esther. (That said, Esther and Hazel are very different people.) But ultimately fiction is always about imagining and trying to empathize, so I just tried to imagine her as best I could. I'm sure there's a lot of stuff I got wrong, but the fundamental emotional experience of being a person who is living with illness or disability but not wholly defined by illness...I think that's pretty universal, and I'm very grateful if I got it right enough for you to feel the connection.

The scene I was in takes place at the airport as Hazel and Gus leave for Amsterdam. A girl (I play her father) asks Hazel about her cannula and then tries them on.

This scene happens in the book, but the context and timing are different.

It was cut from the movie not because I was terrible (although I was!) but because the scene really did not need to be in the movie. It created an unnecessary pause between finding out they were going to Amsterdam and actually going to Amsterdam, and Josh felt (I agree) that it needed to flow directly into the trip itself.

That said, I think it is ABSOLUTELY HILARIOUS that I got cut from the movie adaptation of my own book, and that's why I won't shut up about it.

I totally agree with you. I think part of the reason we haven't seen the kind of diverse content in online video we need is economic. Sesame Street is not a show that could have built up its audience in broadcast or cable TV; it needed the grants/public funding model you find in public broadcasting.

So we need the funding to be there, to move from old media into new media spaces, but we also need to find and lift up more diverse voices to talk to (and teach) those kids. I don't know which comes first, but they're both desperately needed right now in the YouTube EDU space.

With The Art Assignment, we're able to work for a smaller but more passionate and diverse audience because we're working with PBS Digital Studios and they value diversity and depth of engagement not just maximizing the number of eyeballs.

Sure. There's a line from an e.e. cummings poem I've always liked: Kisses are a better fate than wisdom, lady, I swear by all flowers.

I put it like every book I ever wrote, and Julie (my editor) kept telling me to cut it (with good reason) and then finally I think I got it into Will Grayson Will Grayson, so I could let it go. But that kind of stuff happens all the time. I'm a big believer in scrapping abandoned stories and drafts for parts.

Well, I could finally afford to buy my awesome Chevy Volt. But also it has given our work a lot more flexibility. (For example, I don't get paid to make Crash Course anymore because I don't need to, which is great because we can put that money toward developing better videos and other resources for students.

Well, you're both right, because books belong to their readers, but I am sympathetic to your position. Some people seem to think that in order to have enjoyed a book with sad parts, you MUST CRY. But I think there are lots of ways to enjoy a book, and if you say you liked it, I believe you, and I don't think you are like a heartless monster or anything.

That said, I am also grateful to people who cry, because I need to drink human tears in order to go out in the daytime. #vampirism

Thanks for writing me lo those many years ago, and for introducing the great nation of New Zealand to Colin Singleton.

We've been lucky enough to live in great cities from Chicago to New York to Amsterdam, but my favorite place to live is in Indianapolis, where I live now. It has become home for us, and I love it with all its many flaws.

Books belong to their readers, but I hope that my books battle the idea that women are objects to be desired and/or worshipped by men rather than reinforcing that idea.

In Looking for Alaska, it is Pudge's (and everyone else's) failure to see Alaska as a person--a person whose pain is as real as anyone else's--that leaves them feeling, rightly, guilty. In Paper Towns, the lie of the manic pixie dream girl is attacked very directly (I hope) as we see what happens when young men dehumanize young women by idolizing them and buying into this trope that girls exist to swoop down into your life and change you.

In Paper Towns, Quentin cannot find Margo until he stops thinking of her as a thing and starts thinking of her as a person, complete with all the complexities and weaknesses of any other person, and I think it's pretty explicit in the text: "Margo was not a miracle. She was not an adventure. She was not a fine and precious thing. She was a girl."

It's only once Q can imagine Margo as a complex human being separate from his ideas of her that he's able to make a real connection with her.

But yeah, regardless of whether I've succeeded, I personally think the MPDG trope is dangerous and destructive.

My hope was that Margo would be by the end of the novel aware that she was playing with the trope semi-consciously, and that this would be her change. By the time he catches up with her, she's not interested anymore in trying to meet the expectations of the trope. She's interested in having a direct and unironic conversation, in allowing Q and her both to be cracked open in a personal and not at all performed.

I think we judge people who use the MPDG trope in their own understanding of themselves or performance of themselves a little too harshly. They've been told throughout their lives that this is one of the roles that women ought to play. Obviously the story is told from Q's perspective not Margo's, so all that stuff is a little more subtle, but my hope is that when she reappeared and started talking to Q, it would be clear pretty quickly that she'd abandoned a lot of the performantive qualities of her constructed self.

I spoke at a TEDx event in Indianapolis (video here), and I think I said most of what I had to say in a TED-style event, so I'm not sure what I'd be able to talk about.

One of the things I really like about teenagers is that they don't draw a bright line between high culture and low culture. They're comfortable liking what they like, and don't see anything incongruous about loving America's Next Top Model and Emily Dickinson.

I chose ANTM in particular because it is just--and I say this lovingly--exceedingly vapid. And one of the things I always hear from people when they talk about the sick or the dying is, "I can't believe they spent their last days doing THAT," referring to watching bad TV or worrying over football games or whatever. But the argument I was trying to make is that people who are dying are not fundamentally other. They are still people. They still like all the same things that people like, including reality television programs.

Favorite: The mashup/reblog culture. Tumblr allows us to build upon each other's work and respond to work creatively in a way that I find really exhilarating. I also learn things from tumblr that I don't learn elsewhere--by following blogs about cartography and 18th century American novelists and etc.

Least favorite: The lack of nuance that often marks conversations there. I think this is partly due to the reblog/comment nature of the platform; it's very difficult to allow for complexity in that structure.

Sweet username.

Is it a sandwich when you put a piece of pizza against another piece of pizza and then eat both of them at the same time?

Don't worry about it! It's so so so so hard to say anything productive or normal in those lines, especially if you're anxious (which I think most people are). So please, please don't worry about it.

My favorite art assignment so far has been the intimate, indispensable gif assignment by Toyin. It made me think so much about what matters to me, and why I struggle to share what's most intimate, and it was brilliant to ask us all to do that in this format that's associated with distraction and silliness.

The connection is definitely different, but just as it's hard for the audience to imagine us complexly, it's really hard for us to think of the audience non-monolithically. My brain can't really get itself around the idea of "hundreds of thousands" of people. It's hard not to generalize about that group of people and not to make assumptions.

But that's precisely the challenge we're faced with, and I want to do the best job I can. You are not like any other nerdfighter, and I can't make sweeping assessments of you based on that one identity. That's one of the reasons we just did another nerdfighteria census; Hank and I wanted to look at how the community is changing on an individual level and to see how we can best foster spaces where nerdfighters can connect to each other and make cool stuff with us AND without us.

It's a crazy time right now, but I feel really hopeful. We're going to have resources now to do cool stuff without having to worry so much about how to pay for it, and there are lots of new small communities forming within nerdfighteria around shared passions, from microfinance to minecraft, and I find that very encouraging.

My selfie game is so strong.

Thanks, Willem, and thanks for allowing me and my books into your life.

A side note about that day: I was so sick. I didn't know it at the time, but I needed to have my gallbladder out. At the time, I just knew that I was extremely sick, and I felt like the book I was writing (TFIOS) was actually going to kill me. I wrote on the train the whole way from Amsterdam, and I was really sad and scared because I'd lost so much weight and I was generally struggling a lot with my mental health, so it was a great gift that day to be able to meet you and your fellow students in Hoogeveen. I needed it, so thanks.

I think a Crash Course World History about contemporary Mongolia is actually a great idea. Thanks for the idea, and I apologize in advance for when I don't give you credit for it.

I like writing about and for teenagers, and even though I am now extremely old, I'm going to continue to write YA novels as long as I have an audience.

I don't think YA novels need to be written from a teen perspective (The Book Thief is narrated by death, after all), but they need to be about teenagers and not written with too much narrative distance. (Like, for me at least a YA novel is a book about adolescence that feels like it's happening NOW instead of a book looking back upon adolescence.)

Yes, probably the poop in the Nintendo. Although I think he was at camp when that happened.

There are lots of ways you can contribute to nerdfighteria without any money. For instance, we're always looking for people to transcribe videos so that people who can't hear can still enjoy them, and also because it makes it easier to translate them into other languages.

Sitting through ads is also a very useful thing you can do for creators whose content you like. I can only speak for myself, but for me, the gift is you watching the video, just as my gift to you is making the video and trying to do a good job with it. That seems like a fair exchange to me, and I don't feel like you owe me anything.

I also think that someday you will grow up and maybe you will have money, and maybe I will not have money, and I will want to do something that requires money. And I think you can help me then. That's why Reading Rainbow got a million dollars in under a day on kickstarter. A generation of people who had no money then but were totally transformed by Reading Rainbow have money now, and want to see the program grow and succeed.

I have the book! It's on my shelf at home! Thank you!

Looks legit to me.

Well, I've always had actual educators write them and then rewritten them to suit my voice and my feelings, and I still do. I wrote a few from scratch, but very few. I'm not an educator, and don't really know anything about curricula or what students need to learn about various subjects, so we have to trust our writers and educational consultants on those fronts.

I wish I had been nicer to people.

Boone and I never really disagreed. I mean, I don't know anything about how to make a movie, so there wasn't much for me to disagree about. I remember on one of the first days, Gus was wearing a New York Knicks cap and really fashionable skinny jeans and a silver tank top, and I said to Boone, "I'm not sure that's what Gus would wear," and Boone said, "It's rehearsal. That's just Ansel dressed as Ansel." That was about the only time I gave him advice.

I do not think advertising is a sustainable funding model for high production value content on YouTube. I don't think it will be possible to make stuff for niche audiences with such low advertising rates, and I don't really see a point to online video if it's just going to be broad, let's-maximize-the-number-of-eyeballs content like we see on TV these days.

I think we need to find better ways to measure value. It's not so much about what you watch these days, because we all watch lots of stuff. It's about what you CARE ABOUT. How do we find a way to measure and fund that? I don't know yet, but I desperately want a path there, because I want online video to hold on to its fantastic breadth.

Yeah, I was very reluctant to sell the movie rights. TFIOS is a personal story to me, and it's important to me, and even a week or two after it had come out, I could tell that it was important to a lot of readers.

And I did turn down some initial interest in the book from Hollywood. But Wyck and Isaac (who produced the movie) and Elizabeth and Erin at Fox (who saw it through on the studio side) really cared about the book, and that was immediately clear to me, and they were absolutely committed to holding onto the story and its tone. I just believed they would keep their promises to me. And they really have. So mostly I got lucky.

I have not regretted the decision to sell the rights, no. I have regretted it at times with other projects, but never with TFIOS.