John Green

I think movies and books are fundamentally different and should be treated as such when figuring out how to do an adaptation (or a novelization of a movie).

Like, when you're writing a book, all you have is text. You have to figure out how to make scratches on a page that will turn into ideas and images and feelings in someone else's brain. To me at least, writing and reading are aggressively non-visual. I realize it's visual in the sense that you're looking at text, but the way you "see" things you're reading about is very very different from the way you see things you are actually looking at.

And then with movies you have a fairly rigid time frame (90 minutes to 180 minutes, say) and you have images and music and actors bringing life to the characters and their dialogue, so it's just a completely different thing.

So to me the job of a movie adaptation is not to re-create each scene of a book but to re-create the feeling of reading the book, the experience of it. And I feel like The Fault in Our Stars film did an exceptionally good job of that; it's one of the most faithful movie adaptations I've ever seen. That's thanks to the performances and to a great director and also to brilliant screenwriters.

With Paper Towns, I was lucky to have the same screenwriters, and another brilliant director, so I feel like it is again an adaptation that's very faithful to the themes and ideas and characters in the novel, even when it strays from the novel's plot or dialogue or whatever.

I honestly think in some ways both the Paper Towns movie and The Fault in Our Stars movie are better than the novels upon which they are based.

Please say hi to Chelsea for me! I really enjoy talking to young people living with cancer or other serious illnesses; it's one of the few opportunities I have these days to spend one-on-one time with readers and hear from them directly.

If I had to pick between YouTube and movies, I would pick YouTube. This would be a financially counterintuitive choice, for sure, but I love online video and love working with my brother. Don't tell my brother I said that, though.

1. It's hard to say because on some level you're never not thinking, right? And because I get to make a video every Tuesday, I'm kind of ALWAYS thinking about what might be interesting or fun to talk about next week. So even if I'm watching Liverpool or making my kids dinner or whatever, there's always the churning in the background, my mind being like, "Whether you like it or not, you're going to be making a video on Tuesday."

2. I'm purple. I find it basically impossible not to press buttons.

1. I think we need a LOT more research. (Like, in that study, the average view time is four minutes; for crash course videos, the average view time is over 10 minutes and we have some of the highest viewer retention of any channel on YT.)

2. I also think we need to broaden our ideas around assessment. With Crash Course, we don't want to replace classrooms. We don't want our viewers to have learned everything they need to learn about a topic; we want them to be fired up and excited to continue learning about that topic. And that's a bit harder to assess, except by like asking people, which is not a data-driven way of gathering information.

3. We really, really want to help more teachers to make more videos and also offer them access to other educational material creation tools. I think Khan Academy is doing a pretty good job of this right now, as is Ted-Ed, and we've worked with both of them and will continue to. But we're also beginning to build our own ideas around this stuff. It's difficult because we are still very very small--but for edu video to be scalable, we need LOTS more people making it, and so we're trying to build tools now that will encourage that. Sorry that's vague, but can't announce things that haven't happened yet, etc.

Who knows, maybe someday, but I really like writing for and about teenagers. There are a bunch of reasons for this: 1. I like teenagers because they're experiencing so much stuff for the first time--love and loss and grief and individual sovereignty and driving cars and, in the case of nonredditors, sex. Because those experiences are new, they are extremely intense, and it allows me to think about that stuff in a heightened way that doesn't need to be cut by irony, which is really appealing to me. 2. Teens are extremely intellectually curious, and I love the straightforward way they consider the biggest questions: Is meaning in human life constructed by us or derived from a source greater than us? What do we owe ourselves and each other, and when should we prioritize our own desires over the collective good? Why is suffering unjustly distributed? So writing about and for teenagers allows me just to think about that stuff very directly and without cynicism, which I find extremely enjoyable. 3. Publishing as a YA author also has many, many benefits: Because of schools, your books can hang around in print longer. The economics of YA publishing are not QUITE as blockbuster-driven as adult publishing, so you can have a career without being a household name, and you can keep publishing even when your books aren't selling hundreds of thousands of copies. And most importantly to me, you don't live alongside other "literary fiction" books, or other "mystery" books, or other "romance" books. In the YA world and on the YA shelves, all that stuff lives together--sci-fi and romance and fantasy and mystery and everything. I love that. I love having colleagues who write about fairies and colleagues who write about 17th century American slaves, and colleagues who write about kids growing up today in the Bronx.

So there may be a day when I want to write a story about/for adults, but I really love YA fiction and would be very happy to have a career in it for the rest of my life.

You're welcome.

Yes. There is. Vasectomy.

1. Yeah, on the educational video side of things we are definitely limited by scale and finances. I would love to see 100 Crash Course videos going up every week instead of four, but there's just no financial model for that at the moment.
2. I am not deeply knowledgeable about comedy, but I think Dave Chapelle is very funny.
3. That's an interesting question. Probably Paper Towns, because if everyone on earth had to buy that book I would make like 5 billion dollars.

Yeah I'd be lucky to end up with $5 billion if I sold 7 billion books. But in my case at least, publishers add tremendous value so the deal seems pretty fair to me. (Not all author royalties are fair, certainly, but I think mine are.)

It's funny what sticks in your head and what doesn't. Many of the things that come to mind are private, but this one isn't:

My wife and I went to high school in Alabama together, but we did not know each other in high school. Years later, we became reacquainted in Chicago, where we were both living.

The first time we had dinner together, I told her a story from high school about sitting on a porch swing and thinking about all the things that might happen to me, and how I never thought I'd end up in Chicago across a table from Sarah Urist. And she said, "Imagining the future is a kind of nostalgia," which I put in my book Looking for Alaska.

That observation has really stuck with me. Sometimes I need that form of nostalgia to get me through a day, but even so I try to be conscious that it IS a form of nostalgia, and that you can get lost inside the prospect of the future just as surely as you can get lost inside the past.

I feel so lucky and grateful that you cared about that book so much; it's amazing to see the physical marks of that love when I sign an old book. Means so much to me. So seriously thanks for dipping your book in a pot of coffee!

I think my only really important legacy will be my kids.

I know that in America we are supposed to celebrate individualism and everything, but I feel like everything--books, YouTube, whatever--is really a vast creation that we are all participating in. We participate in it by reading and by watching and by making stuff, and the stuff that gets a billion views matters in that process and the stuff that gets 10 views also matters. It's too vast and complex a process for any individual to really claim significance within it. Like, even someone who is really properly significant--Steve Jobs, say--was part of a much larger web of creation. We'd still have personal computers without Steve Jobs. We'd still have smartphones. They might look different; some of the functionality might be different; but we're all part of a vast web.

I guess some people might find that depressing, but I find it really invigorating. I'd rather feel like I'm part of something than feel like I control something, if that makes sense.

Willy is my dog. He is doing well. He is a seven and in good health, although he lives in an area with a lot of coyotes, so...yeah. Small dogs are never in GREAT health when they are surrounded by coyotes.

I can hear him barking right now, though, so for the moment all is well.

I'm leaving the typo because of your comment.

Yeah.

I mean, I'm not in control of the marketing of the movie obviously, and I might market it a little differently, but I also understand that you have to set people up with a world they think they know if you're going to point out what is demented and evil about that world. That's what the book (hopefully) does, and what the movie (hopefully) does. But that's hard to do in a trailer for a movie, because you don't want the trailer to tell the whole story. You don't want the trailer to deliver the punch that hopefully comes at the end of the movie when Q finally acknowledges that Margo is not a thing to acquire or a miracle but rather a person.

So I think they face a complicated challenge. (I also think they face a challenge because it's a very different story and tone from The Fault in Our Stars, but obviously they want to capitalize on the success of that movie, which might play into some of it.)

I always wanted to be a writer, but it never seemed like a viable career option. (Still kinda doesn't, to be honest.) So I had many plans along the way for day jobs: At various times, I planned to be an earthworm scientist, an Episcopal priest, a Mark Twain scholar, and a paramedic.

Some people believe that in order to be a proper writer you must give everything else up and be ONLY a writer. And maybe they are right. I don't know. But for me, it's better to be a writer AND something else. Every time I haven't had a day job in the 10 years since my first novel came out, I invented a day job for myself.

I have no idea if they'll ever make a Looking for Alaska movie. And if they do, it's impossible to know if it'll be good. So much can go wrong along the way (and in LfA's case, so much HAS gone wrong to keep it from being a movie over the last 10 years).

This is why I like books. You don't need, like, hundreds of people and tens of millions of dollars to make them.

I'd finance that movie myself.

I do still live in Indiana.

The response to the RFRA, and the change to the law the legislature was forced to pass, was very encouraging to me. In Indianapolis, the response to the law was overwhelmingly negative across the political spectrum.

It made me very sad and very angry, because it represented for me the worst kind of governance--the kind that legalizes the oppression of the people who most need the protection of a government. But I didn't want to leave Indiana, no. I wanted to stay and fight.

Well, it's been three years since my last novel was published, so I don't feel particularly well qualified to answer this question.

Also better.

I use reddit search.

Speaking of which, we should all buy each other reddit gold so that someday we might live in a world in which reddit search is not completely shit. I'll start by buying you gold.

TOGETHER WE WILL PAY FOR A NEW REDDIT SEARCH.

That would be so cool. Email me: sparksflyup-at-gmail. Thanks!

Oh no; search is still shit. I'm just hoping that if we all give reddit a ton of money eventually they will make their search better. :)

I have such fond memories of that day--my grandmother was there and it meant to much to me that she saw me become a published author. (She died soon after.)

The Looking for Alaska movie has been in development for over 10 years, but recently the same producers as TFIOS and Paper Towns AND the same screenwriters have taken the project on, so I feel cautiously optimistic.

I have no idea where it will be filmed, though. That stuff is way out of my control.

Maybe, but to be clear, I still won't be remembered. All human effort will be drowned by the rising seas of time, and the species will cease to exist and then the earth will become unable to sustain life, and then the universe as we currently survive in it will end. So...like...in that context none of us will be particularly successful.

I'm not sure what this says about me, but I find the absolute void waiting for us all kind of encouraging. I find it exciting that we are here together for a little while, which is wondrous and precious. As Larkin put it, "We should be careful of each other. We should be kind, while there is still time."

Yes.

No, it's completely surreal and dehumanizing and unnatural. Some people can thrive in that environment, but I'm definitely not one of them.

That said, it's a tiny tiny tiny tiny part of my life. I've spent more time TODAY watching the TV program Doc McStuffins than I've spent on red carpets in my entire life.

Yeah! I've never worked directly with the foundation, but Bill Gates's personal office has helped sponsor several Crash Course projects, including Crash Course Big History.

My wife and I focus our personal giving on female economic empowerment in the developing world and global health and poverty, which lines up in many cases with the priorities of the Gates Foundation, so we certainly support a lot of the same projects and organizations. I really admire the Gates foundation and the way they approach complex health challenges in the developing world, and I'd love to work with them more.

Yeah, her performance in the movie is great, because she's an excellent actress. But also, she is more like Margo Roth Spiegelman than any real person I have ever met in my life.

Well, first, I'd say there's nothing wrong with a "formula." I like a lot of mystery series, for instance, where the same detective finds herself on a case that turns out to be more complex that it initially seemed like it would be, and I do not think these are bad books simply because they utilize genre conventions. (I think there are a lot of genre conventions in "literary fiction" as well, really.)

Secondly, I would say that, you know, all of my books were written by me, and I am just one person and not a particularly smart one, and I have certain obsessions/interests/concerns/etc. that appear not just in my books but also in everything else that I do.

But ultimately I just don't agree. I wrote a comic novel about a child prodigy trying to use a mathematical theorem to understand romantic relationship. I wrote a boarding school novel about grief, a novel about the destructiveness of the male gaze and dehumanizing others by romanticizing them, and a romance about two kids with cancer. To me, the books are tonally and thematically very different.

There are of course similarities: I like writing about smart, curious kids whose intellectual reach slightly exceeds their grasp. And Im very curious about how the way we imagine each other and our world ends up shaping actual non-imagined people and the actual non-imagined world.

I think there are a lot of good criticisms of my work: I think sometimes it's didactic; I think too often I escape the complicated problems I write about by embracing the supernatural or the theistic, which to a lot of my readers feels like a cheat; and I am sympathetic to readers who feel like I don't pay enough attention to story because I get so far up my own ass about the ideas that interest me.

But I find that particular criticism just kind of boring and unconvincing. (And also annoying, obviously, since I'm clearly responding defensively!)

1. Yes. No.
2. Yes.

AIA is the kind of book I'd enjoy reading, but it's not the kind of book I could suffer through writing. I wrote a few pages of it so that Hazel would have something to read in the movie version, and it was a really interesting exercise, but I can't imagine doing that for hundreds of pages.

EDIT: That said, who knows. The future is unpredictable.

This is hero's work and I congratulate you and your wife on the epic undertaking.

My favorite vlogbrothers video I ever made is probably my first Thoughts from Places, the one from Munich, because I was like, "Oh, wow this is a totally different way to make a vlog and I really enjoy it!" I have so many favorite Hank videos it's really hard to pick one. Honestly, he impresses me almost every week with his insight and wit.

As the old saying goes:

If you read only one book this year, you're not reading enough. :)

Grey and I always agree, but he is always more radical than I am. :)

It's extremely important to me that our videos be free for everyone forever. My next concern would be lowering the barrier of entry: Most people in the world can't easily access online video because the Internet speeds required are either unavailable or prohibitively expensive. Then I'm concerned about government and corporate interference in the openness of online video, and about the ability of people to effectively discover the kind of stuff they want to watch.

Those are my biggest concerns. I need YouTube to keep their platform open and hopefully not to distort content discovery too much. They don't have an A+++ history on those fronts, but I actually think they've been pretty effective thus far. I mean, there is a lot of free online video on YouTube that wasn't available 10 years ago.

Anything Meredith writes is hilarious. (Meredith Danko is the lead writer for mental floss, and she's just awesome.) My favorite is, like, 90 Facts about the 90s stuff, because they always contain facts that I genuinely cannot believe and find laugh out loud funny.

The life hacks stuff is also fun to do!

Yes, she is the same Meredith. I agree she deserves a microphone but she doesn't want one!

Thanks for the kind words!

I mean, the way I construct myself online and in my videos is definitely different from how I am in a regular interpersonal setting. (For one thing, I talk more slowly. For another, I talk much less than I do online. Also, I am usually not in interpersonal settings, because I spend a lot of my time--quite happily--alone.)

But when I ask my closest friends this question--do I seem different online than I do in real life--they usually say yes, but that they can recognize the online me as me. So I don't think it reflects anything inaccurate about me; it's just inevitably an incomplete (and curated!) version of me.

But I also think most of us do this online. Most of us are conscious of how the things we say and do online might be read/viewed by strangers.

Not really. I think a lot of the criticism of microfinance is good and healthy; it is not a fix for poverty, and not all microfinance organizations are effective.

But I also think online sometimes we have a tendency to move from one extreme to another rather than allowing for nuance. There's lots of evidence that microfinance works, and I think it's rather hypocritical of those of us who benefit from a credit-based banking system to deny poor people access to that system because we've decided what's good for them.

But we also need to be conscious of microfinance's insufficiencies and not view it as a replacement for other kinds of development, because microfinance is not going to build roads or improve health care systems or get people electricity.

Oh God. That video is so full of lies and childish bravado; it's so humiliating to watch. THANKS FOR POSTING IT.

But yes, Miles and I have some things in common.

I mean, I grew up partly in Alabama and I now live in Indiana, so.

I wrote this about Mario Balotelli before he joined Liverpool, and I stand by it.

I remember reading three books that year that were really important to me:

1. The Blood of the Lamb, by Peter de Vries, which is a far better cancer novel than The Fault in Our Stars. It's hilarious and ambitious and beautifully sad. What a book.

2. Sula by Toni Morrison. I'd read Sula as a freshman in college with a great professor, but I was such a poor student that I never really got into it. Like, I read the words but they never came alive for me. I reread it that year after reading and loving a different Morrison novel, and it lit me up.

3. All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren. I read it and I was like, "Now THIS is how a book should sound."

The truth is, it has affected my daily life mostly by encouraging me to be the kind of person I should be anyway:

So, for instance, I cannot lose my temper in public. One time I yelled at my 5-year-old, "You are not getting a goldfish; and whining will not help your cause," and someone upon hearing my voice asked, "Are you the mental floss guy?"

So, yeah. I try to be courteous and friendly and not a dick in public. And also in private.

Very hard, but I think most working adults experience the same challenge and most of them have far fewer resources to deal with the problem.

Like, I have to travel for work a lot, and that's challenging, but we're also able to afford childcare for our kids and other things that make it a lot easier. So it is difficult because I have the kind of work that doesn't end when I leave the office, but that's true for a lot of people these days.

Yeah sometimes, but Edward Snowden is a lot thinner than I am and has a better jawline. I am very impressed with/envious of Edward Snowden's jawline.

Well, when I was working as a chaplain, I had a lot of very fancy ideas about why people suffer and why horrible things happen to innocent people who do not deserve the suffering they experience.

And then when I saw those things and held the hands of the kids who were dying, none of those fancy ideas mattered anymore, so I realized I would not be a good minister.

(I do still go to church.)

Read a lot. Read broadly. Read the kinds of books that you want to sit next to in the bookstore (or in Amazon recommendations or whatever). Read good books and bad ones.

I really believe that reading is our best apprenticeship--through reading, we can figure out how people have used text over the centuries to create stories and ideas in other people's heads.

And then write a lot as well, and be kind to yourself as you write. That's the best advice I've got.

I hope you'll go to England and see your sign in real life!

As far as vlogging: It's all about the editing. Remember how easy it is to stop paying attention to something and try to make it visually and narratively interesting in every frame if you can. (I don't always do this, but I feel like it's the most effective strategy these days.) But there are a lot of ways to make online video, and lots of people dislike my style of doing it, so don't take my advice too seriously!

Yeah I smoked in high school and college. I was very obsessive about smoking.

For me, smoking was partly a way of dealing with my OCD, or an outgrowth of my OCD. But it was also a socially acceptable way of acting out my self-destructive impulses. For reasons I don't really understand, I think a lot of teenagers feel this intense need to hurt themselves, and I did that by smoking.

In LFA, I tried to use smoking as a metaphor for those self-destructive impulses that we struggle to understand and control. In TFIOS, it's a bit more complicated--Gus thinks it's a metaphor for his control over his life "You put the killing thing between your teeth but don't give it the power to do it's killing"--but in fact it's a metaphor for one's LACK of control over one's life. Even if you never light a cigarette (which is the action most commonly associated with cancer), you're not really in control, because there is this intractable randomness in human life.

tl;dr: Don't smoke.

Man, you should see me try to bench press 100 pounds.

First, thanks for the kind words and hanging around with us lo these many years!

As for the savior stuff, I think it's ridiculous.

For one thing, the "era of wizard and vampires" was completely invented by the media. The era of wizards and vampires saw the publication not just of Looking for Alaska, but also of Walter Dean Myers' Monster, of Laurie Halse Anderson's Speak, of Markus Zusak's The Book Thief and M. T. Anderson's Feed and E. Lockhart's The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau Banks.

Not only that, but since the publication of TFIOS, many excellent novels about wizards and vampires have been published and found readerships. The media only report on YA occasionally, so they have to oversimplify complex narratives, and I get that, but YA does not need saving and never has and even if it did, I would not be its savior. Or anyone's savior. I'm just a dude in Indianapolis waiting to see my gastroenterologist.

I agree that Glozell Green would be a great President, and that Hank could serve ably as her VP.

Crash Course Economics will debut in a couple weeks! :)

Physics is expensive! We'll get it done eventually regardless.

Hey Lauren Myracle! (Guys, this is Lauren Myracle, with whom I collaborated on Let It Snow, and who is generally a great author and a lovely person.) Al is her awesome son. HI AL!

I do think that fame is isolating, yes, and probably a little lonely. But 1. it happened when I'd already written a bunch of books, and I had stable relationships within my family and friends, so I don't think it was as weird or disjointed as it would have been for a first time author, and also 2. while it is isolating in some ways, it's also very connective in some ways, because people have been so supportive of my work and of me and that does make me lifted up.

I still feel very much like myself. The biggest upside is that I don't have to worry about money much, which is an incredible blessing and not one to be taken lightly. The biggest downside is that it's kind of inherently dehumanizing, so people sometimes talk about you as if you aren't a real person, which can be pretty painful.

Hope you are well and that I get to see you soon! (Another downside is that I see author friends less because it's harder to go to conferences and stuff. But that will pass!)

Thanks so much.

I am very fond of Earth.