John Greene

I could've, but it would not have been as fun or as comfortable. Here's my reasoning:

1. Early in my career, I missed three very important events because of canceled or delayed flights. I understand of course that road traffic can also be a problem, and all kinds of unfortunate things might befall anyone at any time, but so far I have never missed an event while driving from place to place.

2. When you take 19 airplane flights in 19 days, you spend a lot of time in airports. I like airports, but they're public(ish) spaces, so you can't totally relax in them. (Or I can't, anyway.) The bus is (so far anyway) super relaxing.

3. There is no Super Nintendo on airplanes.

4. I've always liked road trips. Some critics of my books might argue that I like them a bit too much.

Thanks. My best friend Chris and I went on a 100-day health and fitness journey, and filmed the whole thing.

I don't know if we'll do another season of the show. It was somewhat expensive to make, and it's hard to pay for a show with high production values without some kind of corporate sponsorship (which we didn't really want).

That said, I've kept going with exercise in a big way. (In fact, I'm probably in better shape now than I was at the end of the show.) I still work out with Laura, our trainer on the show, twice a week, and I still run a few times a week.

I really enjoy running, and the mental health benefits to exercise have been genuinely life changing for me. One of the challenges of spending the next month on the road is that our schedules are somewhat busy, making exercise difficult--but I'm trying to eat well and get in quick, intense workouts when I can.

Yes, I worried (and worry) about both how my illness might affect them and about their increased risk of mental illness.

But I also worried (and worry) about lots of other things--whether they'll be at increased risk for other chronic illnesses because of our genetics, whether our public lives with negatively impact their lives, et cetera. Every parent brings their own set of strengths and challenges to parenting.

For me, the decision in the end was helped by the fact that I really believe that it is possible for someone to have a chronic mental illness and also live a fulfilling life.

Of course it can be challenging to meet your kids' needs when you're sick--but that's true for anyone with a chronic health problem.

All that said, whether to have kids is a deeply personal decision, and I don't think my decision would necessarily be right for you or anyone else.

It takes more than all of the turtles.

I don't know. The movie rights to LFA were purchased 12 years ago by a studio. They own those rights, and I can't get them back, and so it's not my decision. At the time, the sale of the movie rights was incredibly important to us--it allowed Sarah and I to move to New York so that she could attend graduate school--and so I don't regret selling them, but it has certainly been a long and often painful process over the last 12 years.

That said, there are many new people working at the movie studio in question, so things may be changing. One never knows!

Two other things on this front: First, I think there is something magical about a book that only lives as a book. Harry Potter will forever to me be Daniel Radcliffe, but Holden Caulfield isn't anybody to me except for my Holden Caulfield. Books I love that live only as text feel mine in a way that movies just can't.

Secondly: I got incredibly, lottery-winningly lucky twice in Hollywood. With both The Fault in Our Stars and Paper Towns, I felt respected throughout the process of making and promoting the film. I felt like my work was treated carefully and seriously, and I was lucky to work with genuinely wonderful people. That is rare for authors in Hollywood, and I am very grateful for those experiences.

There is a sunset on the ownership of their rights: It is the heat death of the universe. :)

We've had lots of lawyers look at it. They own the rights, and will forever. (So it goes!)

I'm not picky when it comes to toppings. I just want to eat pizza.

Just, like, don't do anything weird with it, okay? Don't try to tell me that this unrolled burrito is a pizza, or that this turkey sandwich on pizza dough is a pizza. I just want to eat pizza. Regular pizza and lots of it.

Look, I just published a book two days ago. I'm not looking to be super-divisive right now. The last thing I need is pro-pineapple or anti-pineapple people boycotting my book. So I'm just going to say that how you eat your pizza is your business, and how I eat my pizza is with no goddamned pineapple.

I would not want my 12-year-old self to read any of my books, I don't think. Maybe my 14-year-old self. I would give him Turtles All the Way Down first, because I pretty much wrote it for him.

I actually wrote a little section of The Price of Dawn for a fundraiser for the Harry Potter Alliance! (And I wrote a few pages of An Imperial Affliction for the copy that Hazel reads in the movie.) But I don't think I could ever sustain either narrative voice for an entire novel. It would feel like an impersonation, if that makes any sense.

I experienced sixth and seventh grades.

edit: which, to be clear, were the worst.

(Willy is my dog.) Willy has cancer, and has for almost a year, but he is doing well. He has a great dog life--we live in a wooded area and Willy has a great time chasing after small woodland creatures and barking at the neighbors.

I loved both those trips to Scotland! Hope to be back soon.

I don't know what I'll write in the future. Or if I'll write in the future, for that matter. Writing this book over the last six years was really challenging for me, and I sort of made a deal with myself that I'd take a break once I finished.

As for why I like publishing YA: There are several reasons. One is that I like sharing a shelf with so many writers I admire, from M. T. Anderson to Angie Thomas to Jacqueline Woodson. I love that YA includes scifi AND mystery AND romance AND 'literary fiction' AND everything else.

Another reason is that I like teenage characters and teen readers. Teenagers are doing so many things for the first time--like, they're often falling in love for the first time, but they're also asking the big questions of human existence for the first time as entities separate from their parents. They're thinking about whether there is inherent meaning to human life or whether we have to construct meaning (and what meaning we should construct). They're thinking about the role suffering plays in human life. They're thinking about free will and selfhood and how we establish and confer personhood.

And they're doing it all with unironized emotion and enthusiasm that I find incredibly compelling. Like, I think sincerity is maybe the most underrated feeling of contemporary life. I understand that overly sincere people and sentiments feel cringey to us, but to me sincerity is really lovely, and worth celebrating.

Most of TFIOS's readers are adults, and most of TATWD's probably will be, too. And that's awesome. I want to write books that stand up to critical reading but that also appeal to a broad audience. But I really like being read by teenagers. It's an incredible privilege to have a seat at the table in someone's life when they're asking those big questions for the first time.

I'm no good at predicting the future. But I love reading dystopian novels! In fact, the new series of Crash Course literature will be focusing on dystopias.

Chewbacca is a person.

I do not think droids are people. Not even BB8.

It was the top floor of Amsterdam's Central Library. Sarah and I went there to work each day during our months in Amsterdam, and I rewrote most of The Fault in Our Stars there. Still my favorite library!

Mostly just very relieved, to be honest.

Publishing this book was very different from any of my previous experiences. There were almost no reviews until the day of publication, and the publisher was (understandably) very worried about leaks, so only a few people had even read it before maybe a week ago.

So I just didn't know what people would think of it. I don't think I realized how worried I was until Tuesday morning when I read the New York Times review and just started sobbing.

Of course, I understand that not everyone will like the book, and also that's okay! But it was a huge relief to know that early reviewers did.

Hank is working on HIS book, An Absolutely Remarkable Thing, and so does not have as much time for Super Nintendo as I would like.

I am, however, mopping the floor with my seven-year-old at Super Mario Kart.

Great name-specific sign-off, Brooke.

There's always a point, usually 20,000 to 30,000 words into a new story, where I realize it's bad. Like, really bad. And often when I get to that point, I have to abandon the story--which is a bummer, because I've spent three or six or twenty months on it, and then I feel like, this was all for nothing! I have wasted all this time!

But then sometimes I will get to that point of realizing the story is terrible, and I'll think, "You know, I think I can plow through to an end here. I think I've at least got some idea about the characters." And then I make it to the end of the draft a few months later. I'll still have to delete most of that draft in revision, and rewrite and rewrite and rewrite and rewrite before I have a book, but if I make it past that point where I realize it's all bad, I can finish.

And then eventually I will understand that none of the time spent was actually wasted, because I had to puzzle through those stories that couldn't work to get to the one that could.

So for me the hardest part is accepting when something isn't working, and letting it go, and starting again.

I wanted to write this story in part because I have not found that OCD brings me, like, secret super powers. Obsessiveness has not increased my powers of deduction, like you see in Sherlock Holmes or the TV show Monk.

I wanted to write about a detective whose mental illness is, like, massively unhelpful to the investigation. And although I know people often associate mental illness and creative writing, I have found my mental illness to be massively unhelpful to my writing. When I am really sick, I can't write anything. At times, I can't even read a menu.

I write best when I'm well, and while this book is about the experience of losing control over one's thoughts, almost all of it was written while I was in a period of good health.

That's what my new book is about. So let me know what you think of it if you have a chance to read it :)

I was, yeah. But I took a lot of steps to protect myself. Aza's challenges are different from mine in ways that were important to me when it came to protecting my privacy. But this was definitely a much scarier book to publish than anything that came before it, because it is so personal, and because it does reflects aspects of my life that are ongoing problems.

When I was younger, I really liked being outraged. I liked being outraged about the minting of pennies, about the popularity of certain books or songs, about the obvious stupidity of those who disagree with me, etc.

I now find outrage to be somewhat overrated. Anger can lead to real action that creates change or moves the needle of public opinion on an issue, and that sort of activism is so important. But I'm not as interested in outrage for its own sake as I used to be.

I still think the continued existence of the penny is a great example of what's wrong with contemporary U.S. politics.

I probably deleted 80% of the first draft over the course of revisions, which is pretty standard for me. The first draft of Turtles All the Way Down was completely bonkers. (I mean, the finished novel is still quite fantastical in plot, but it's a pale shadow of its former self in terms of bonkersness.)

There was a shootout in a Chuck E. Cheese that lasted through, like, the first THREE drafts before I finally abandoned it.

I'm in a bus with my brother, my wife, and my two kids. There is plenty of Diet Dr. Pepper in this bus, excellent snacks, and passable wifi. It's hard to imagine how I could be happier, to be honest.

The only thing I'd say is that I did not previously understand JUST HOW MUCH SIDE TO SIDE MOTION there is in one of these big RV things. So if you are a person who gets seasick--and I am--it's...pretty nauseating. Very well-appointed, though!

Part of me thinks they just don't find my job interesting enough to read them. (Like, I don't think our kids often pause to consider what their parents do for work, because they're busy thinking about pokemon.) But of course if they want to read them, I'll be happy to share them. As for an age: I don't know. Maybe 14? It's hard to guess, because I have no idea what it's like to have a child over the age of seven.

Thank you for the kind words.

1. I didn't have any understanding of teenage culture or slang or whatever when I was a teenager, and I don't have any understanding of it now. But I think the emotional experiences of adolescent are at least to some extent universal--there's a reason bildingsromans have been around for a long time, asking basically the same questions across the centuries. I think teens are interesting because they're asking those big questions and making big decisions independently for the first time, and there's an intensity and anguish and thrill in doing anything for the first time.

2. I would love to visit India! I almost went last year, but family obligations ended up keeping me here. I travel a lot less than I did before we had kids, and I want to limit my travel until they're old enough to join us, but that shouldn't be too much longer.

Literally none! [context]

It's more coincidental. The podcast reflects what I'm thinking each week, and when I was in the thick of writing this book, I was mostly thinking about the book and its concerns. In a few cases, I talked about something in the pod and then later thought, oh that would be good for the book.

More than anything else we make, the podcast reflects how Hank and I really are with each other and what we're personally passionate about.

Quite a bit! I'm most familiar with Harry Potter fanfiction, but I also read a lot of One Direction fic, because in an earlier draft, Daisy and Aza were into 1D. (I kept some 1D easter eggs in the book for fellow fans.) But once I moved it to Star Wars*, I did read quite a bit.

I really love fanfiction. A lot of it is excellent.

• There were a bunch of reasons I did this, but mostly because the first line of every single movie in this futuristic space opera series is "a long time ago," and the book is very concerned with whether the past is, in fact, in the past. But also, I think Star Wars is this wonderful shared mythology for contemporary humans through which we can look at questions of self and personhood and community and etc.

I like Iron Man all right these days. (Iron Man is an important-ish character in TATWD.) I still think Batman could use his resources a lot more effectively if his goal is to minimize crime in Gotham.

bourbon.

Sure!

Yeah with an issue this important, I don't feel qualified to comment on a matter outside the book's text.

On titles: For me, the title often becomes apparent when my publisher is like, "We are going to announce this book next week, and we cannot announce it without a title." Like, I think the title to The Fault in Our Stars was not fully decided until the day before the book became available for preorder. In general, I'm pretty crap at titles.

As for how books begin: For me, they usually begin with characters and a question. With Turtles All the Way Down, the character was Aza and the question was, How do you find a sense of self when you feel like your self isn't really yours?

Thanks for the question. There are some people who've watched consistently for six or eight or ten years and still watch every video, and that's wonderful.

But the vast majority of people who watch regularly now weren't doing so eight years ago, and the vast majority of people who were watching regularly eight years ago aren't now. And that is also wonderful.

Like, I am overjoyed when people find something in our work that makes them want to stick with us over many years.

But it's also awesome to me if you really loved our work at some point and then went on to love a bunch of other things but still think back on your time with us fondly. I have those bands/projects/people in my own life, and I'm grateful for the role they played in my development as a person and a writer and so on.

As for how long vlogbrothers will go on: I don't know. I love the rhythm of a Tuesday. It gives order and structure to my life, and also requires me to make at least SOMETHING every single week no matter what. And I love the relationship we have with our viewers. If any of that goes away someday, we'll probably wrap it up. But for now, I can't imagine my life without the consistency of vlogbrothers.

That's awesome! Are you ready to propose now? Have you talked about getting married? Have you discussed your plans for the future when it comes to things like career, children, and so on? I NEED MORE INFO.

If you're ready, I'm ready. Let's get this done in Cincinnati next week.

What is your first name and your girlfriend's first name? I will cue you at the appropriate moment. I am not going to tell you in advance what the moment is because that would make it TOO EASY.

THIS IS HAPPENING.

OP DELIVERS.

That's amazing! How did you met, and are you getting married soon? Also, are you registered anywhere?

EDIT: I just realized I didn't answer your question. I am not a psychologist, and do not feel qualified to give advice to people who are suffering from mental health problems. I can only speak to my experience, and my experience has been that on the worst days, I just have to survive minute to minute to minute and know that it WILL GET BETTER, because it will. It truly will. Your now is not your forever.

Thanks so much for using Crash Course (and for teaching). It's great to hear that it's a useful tool for your students.

How involved are you in the Crash Course program now? Are you mostly handing them off to other experts to design and host?

I am involved in the same way I was always involved, which is mostly in helping decide what we cover, overseeing projects, and some hosting. (There's a new literature series hosted by me that will start up next month.) They were always mostly written and designed by people other than us, and that's still the case. The channel is definitely DEEPLY dependent upon the brilliant team of people who work on the channel.

Are there any plans to bring back the defunct Crash Course Geography series? (Props, by the way, for owning up to the first episode's flaws and pulling the series.)

There are plans, but not for 2018, because I think we've set the upload schedule for next year. As we learned, it's an extremely challenging topic, and we don't feel like we've cracked it yet with the right writer, curriculum consultant, and Crash Course producer combination yet.

Do you have plans to extend any more of your series like you did with the second season of World History?

I think we'll continue to do 10-12 episode of literature videos per year, and we are looking toward doing more "seasons" approaches, but if we go back to World History, it probably won't be hosted by me. I think it's important to get new voices and perspectives in that conversation.

Just tried to check, but it said, "Update to Continue."

One time someone wrote me and said--I'm quoting directly here--"Your book made me feel something I hadn't felt before. Not like I needed to poop or was about to throw up, but something else."

I've always thought that was quite a compliment.

Love Handle is great. My favorite restaurant in the city right now is probably Milktooth.

Indianapolis has changed a lot in the past decade, and mostly for the better I think. It's a very average midsized American city, which is one of the things I love about it, but I think investments in and around downtown have really paid off.

I wish we had better public transportation and more investment in arts and public spaces, because I think that helps attract young people to a city. (I do find it difficult to recruit to Indianapolis, a concern that is shared with many much larger employers.)

And selfishly, I wish we'd do more to clean up the White River. We have an amazing nature reserve that stretches through the entire city in the form of the White River, and we need to stop dumping raw sewage into it.

Liverpool aren't stressing me out nearly as much as AFC Wimbledon are at the moment.

When you have experiences that are abstract and internal, it's very difficult to find language for them. Language struggles in the face of pain (especially chronic physical pain); Elaine Scarry in her brilliant book The Body in Pain wrote that pain destroys language. Think of the way you moan or groan when you're in terrible pain rather than being able to find words to express it directly and clearly. When reading Infinite Jest and parts of The Pale King, I felt like Wallace had found some form for my pain, a way of holding it and looking at it, and I will always be grateful for that. Whether and how it affected my writing is harder to say, but as a reader and person, is was a tremendous gift to me.

Thanks. That is very kind.

"O Jamesy let me up out of this." from the last chapter of Ulysses.

Thanks for reading the book and for your kind words about it. You aren't alone, and I'm glad the book helped you feel it.

I couldn't have written the book if I hadn't lived with OCD for most of my life. But I also couldn't write the book while my OCD was poorly managed, because when I'm sick I can't write (and sometimes can't even read).

I don't want to further the dangerous romantic lie that artists need to be close to madness or whatever to do their work. It's true that people working in creative fields have higher than average rates of mental illness, but so do lawyers. So do teachers. I don't write best when I'm putting myself in danger; I write best when I'm treating my chronic health problem with care and consistency.

So my experience with OCD shaped the book profoundly, because when writing about Aza's experiences I was leaning a lot upon my own. And it was definitely the first time I was writing about something that was in my past but also still in my present, because I still have this and expect to live with it the rest of my life. But I could only write the book because I had a longish period of wellness (thanks to a combination of stability/medication/exercise/therapy).

I've tried very hard to fight against both the stigmatization and the romanticization of mental and physical illness. That's pretty much entirely what my new book is about. And if I've failed, in this book or elsewhere, I'm sorry.

I used to think the Internet was an unambiguous force for good.

Frozen Snickers are great. I would eat 378 of them.

Ice cream Snickers are not Snickers; they are a filthy lie.

I got really sick. When I have a period of poor mental health, and I have this experience of not being able to control my thoughts for weeks at a time, I have to do whatever is necessary to get my sense of self/personhood back, and a lot of times that means scaling back on the amount of input that comes into my life from the outside. So that's the reason I've pulled back.

Very nice, and extraordinarily knowledgeable. I think the Gates Foundation's motto is something like, "Dedicated to the idea that all people deserve the chance to live a healthy and productive life." And during the time I spent with Bill, I felt that he was truly, truly dedicated to that idea.

Probably Sula or Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison. Both those books absolutely lit me up when I first read them, and changed the way I look at the world in an ongoing way.

Quoted from above:

Look, I just published a book two days ago. I'm not looking to be super-divisive right now. The last thing I need is pro-pineapple or anti-pineapple people boycotting my book. So I'm just going to say that how you eat your pizza is your business, and how I eat my pizza is with no goddamned pineapple.

I can't pick just one! I listened to early stuff a lot while writing this book. Songs that were on frequent rotation included "Source Decay," "Going to Maine," and "Going to Marrakesh."

I loved that song, actually. That whole album meant so much to me, because I was a goth kid in the early 1990s. (My first concert was The Cure!) And so it took me back to a part of my past I hadn't been able to visit in a long time. Really great album.

Thanks for this question, which I think is a really important one. I'm sorry that these once-happy memories have become painful ones.

(For those unaware, several male YouTubers abused and/or assaulted young female fans. Some of them released music through our merch distribution company, although we obviously parted ways with them when we became aware of what had happened.)

As to your question: I think it's really difficult when someone you admire and trust violates that trust by abusing the platform they've been given. It's a real betrayal, and as you describe very beautifully, it's awful to have treasured pictures become repulsive and scary. But your friendships--the help you gave other people, the help they gave you, the love you shared together--were still real and important, and I hope you're able to feel that. I suppose that's not really advice so much as commiseration, but again, I'm sorry, and I appreciate you sharing this, because so many people are going through similar experiences now amid other news of people using their power to abuse.

That's the thing. There is no last turtle.

I'm sure will stop someday, because, you know, everything ends--but I don't foresee that day now. I love the structure that vlogbrothers brings to my life, and I love the connection Hank and I have to each other and to the community of viewers. It's still so fun.

We're playing Mario Kart. I'm trying to teach Henry why this was the best racing game of all time.

hahahahaha thanks for the kind words! Cereal appears in a lot of my books, now that you mention it. It's also somewhat prominent in Paper Towns. I have no idea why. I'm going to have to interrogate my consciousness on this one.

She's certainly a poor observer of the world outside of herself, both when it comes to character and when it comes to everything else. That was intentional, and it was important to me, because to me one of the horrors of obsessive thought spirals is that they're intensely isolating. They make it so that Aza can't connect to the people around her in the way she wants, and also the people who love her can't connect with her as deeply as they want to.

My hope was that the reader would be able to see more of Daisy and Davis than Aza could, but it's no coincidence that Daisy and Davis's names are so similar. Aza struggles to see other people, even vastly different people, as anything other than not-Aza.

I think TATWD is a very interior novel, which would make it much harder to film than The Fault in Our Stars or Paper Towns. That might've been a subconscious response to movie stuff, but mostly I wanted to think about what language can and can't do when it comes to showing and understanding pain.

I definitely did not think about this book ever becoming a movie. Whether it will, I don't know.

I think the most was green, which was around 30%. Red and blue were next, probably around 20% each. I got really fond of the reddish purple color--Sharpie calls it berry--so that might've gotten another 15%. The rarest color was silver; I only signed about 300 in silver, because I don't like the way silver sharpies glide across paper.

(I spent a lot of time thinking about this stuff.)

I really admire my brother. Don't tell him though.

gah that's such a cool p.s. Thanks for making my little book a part of your big day!

Adult life is always a balancing act between professional responsibilities and personal ones, but I am incredibly lucky to have a lot of flexibility in how I spend my time, and luckier still to have brilliant collaborators to make stuff with. So with the Project for Awesome, for instance, the real work is being done by the people who are procuring perks and building a livestream schedule and securing matching donors and so on.

I try really hard to turn off my computer by 6 PM every night and spend time with my kids, and not open the computer again until they go to school. I don't always succeed--especially not in the last six months as things have built toward the release of this book--but that's the goal.