In comments to the previous post, YossiTime asks, "Is there anything you wish you could change about the books you have written now that they are out? (If I'm not mistaken you did change the 5AG's versions of the Advanced Readers Copies of Paper Towns.)"
The 5AGs, for those of you who do not spend a lot of time on youtube, are the Five Awesome Girls (previously seen here, singing nerdfighter rock). And I did indeed insist on blacking out one late-deleted section of their ARCs of Paper Towns. I don't stop revising until I have to, but now I have to, and that's okay. A book has to become finished somehow--and running out of time seems to be the only way.
(The deleted section is only a couple sentences. Julie actually brought up the possibility of deleting it years ago (literally), but I didn't realize how right she was until the last second. In a recent post, I said that "editors are almost always right," and Julie commented, "Almost?" I am inclined to cede the point.)
Anyway, I haven't read Alaska since the fall of 2004, and I've only read Katherines once since it came out, but I remember them both pretty well. I'm sure I'd make small changes to the text if I could, but I don't think I'd make big ones. This is not to say the books are great books (I don't think they are), or even that I am pleased with them. They're just finished.
That feeling of finishedness does not come all at once, and it is not easily won, but I think once you get there it is hard to go back. But I do think I've taken things away from the experience of writing my previous books and having them read that feed into my writing all the time. (Example: Many people will say that Paper Towns is 'like' Alaska, that some of the relationships are analogous and so on. I don't agree with this, but it is true that in some subtle ways PT is written against Alaska, as a kind of response to what I see as the insufficiencies inherent to telling that story.
And now we are edging dangerously close toward preemptive responses to expected criticisms, which is an exceptionally bad idea.
All is well here in Indianapolis, although the humidity reminds me of the beginning of Absalom, Absalom--that "long still hot weary dead September afternoon."
(And thank you, Mr. Faulkner, for reminding me that it will be worse after noon, and worse still in September.)
Sometimes, I take your questions from comments, and I answer them.
Q. What do you think of writers who have a formula, and write, for instance, a book a year, a la Danielle Steele? A. Well, these days writing only one book a year seems downright quaint. (James Patterson, for instance, writes four or five books a day.) I have no problem with people who write the same book over and over again, but I'm glad I don't have their job. (I should add that many great books have been written in less than a year, and that not all prolific writers are formulaic. See, for instance, Joyce Carol Oates.)
Q. What makes a book literary? Is it the style it's written in, the language, the timelessness? What exactly does this mean? A. Good question. The only answer I can think of is that you make a book literary (or not). You are ultimately the person who engages with a novel's symbols and themes as well as its characters and story. If this happens, the book is literary. If it doesn't, it isn't.
Q. What's new with Paper Towns? A. If you click that link, you can see a silly little video. (In unusually high quality!)
Q. Do you know where you and Hank are going to be touring and organizing Nerdfighter Events this fall? A. No. When we do know, I will tell you OVER AND OVER AND OVER. Do not worry. You will not be underinformed when it comes to my tour schedule. I will repeat it so many times that you will know it like you once knew your state capitals.
Q. The paperback for An Abundance of Katherineswill only cost four bucks? (OMFG NEW COVER!) A. No. It costs less than four bucks! (Although not much less.)
Q. Did you get Willy from a breeder or a shelter? A. We got Willy from a family who bred a litter of Westies to give to their adult children, but then two of their kids deployed overseas with the military.
Q. Do you still watch Lonelygirl15? A. No, but Brotherhood 2.0 would never have happened if it hadn't been for LG15, so I'm very grateful to that show and the community that built up around it in those first few weeks.
Q. How do you say Buhfriedo? A. Well, it is a made-up word, but I say Buh-FREE-doe.
Q. What's the weirdest job you've ever had? A. The one I have now is pretty weird. The graveyard shift at Steak 'n Shake was also fairly odd.
Q. What is the first book you want to read to your children? A. I always said that when I had a kid, I would immediately read him/her Absalom, Absalomin its entirety. It's a book that teaches an infant two important lessons: 1. The past is not dead--the world you've just entered is "peopled with garrulous outraged baffled ghosts." Also, 2. Only Faulkner can get away with so many adjectives and so few commas.
Anyone who likes books and spends a lot of time on the internet (which is to say, you) should read this (or at least skim it).
Let me know what you think.
LATE UPDATE: I realize the headline is dumb. I'm just asking whether the underlying argument is right--that people who spend a lot of time online find, over time, that they have more difficulty reading long-form texts with the kind of focus they demand. (I know that I have found this to be a problem in the last couple years.)
(I am here for a wedding. And now, let us discuss your fascinating questions. And thanks in advance for the questions you will leave in comments to this post; it keeps me from going on ill-advised rants.)
Q. I loved The Babysitters' Club. Who was your favorite babysitter? A. Stacey. Although I have to say that on some level, the differences among the babysitters seemed sort of superficial and irrelevant to me. The point was that the stakes of kid-sized problems were high for all of them, which made them like me.
Q. What sparked your interest in conjoined twins? A. I don't know. I have no idea what sparked any of my interests, really. I mean, why do I like soccer? Why do people like ice sculpture? (These are non-rhetorical questions. I really don't get it.)
Q. Have you read The Girls? A. Yes. You're going to have a hard time finding a conjoined twin book I have not read.
Q. My cousin-in-law Blake says, "OK, you have to explain to me why you liked Song of Solomon." A. As it happens, I already answered this question over Fritos and salsa yesterday, because the wedding that has brought me to Minneapolis features his sister in a starring role. But broadly speaking, Blake dislikes Song of Solomon because the story is exceptionally slow and no one really changes. (I would argue that Milkman changes, but overall, fair criticism.) I don't love the book narratively; I love it for its rich and fully realized symbolic world. I love it as a work of art that you can keep going back to. If you study literature, at some point you find a book with a symbolic world that engages you emotionally. That's sort of life-changing for a reader. Song of Solomon was that book for me.
Q. What were you doing in LA? A. I hope to be able to tell you in a few days.
Q. If we are aware that fictional characters are truly non-existent, why, in your opinion, do we apply actual human emotions to them? A. Well, that's the trick novelists try to play, to make you believe in something that isn't real. And if they pull the trick effectively, it works. I think the reason it works is because we are always in the business of imagining how others are feeling.
Q. How do you keep writing when you feel unencouraged? A. In those times (and they are legion), I find it very helpful to read a book or two, and to remind myself that the books I'm reading--no matter how brilliant and wonderful they may be--were written by people.
Q. MJ's Suite Scarlett appeared in stores before its release date. Will that be the case for Paper Towns? A. Probably not. But you never know these things for sure.
Q. If you could be any fictional literary character, who would you be? A. Huck Finn.
Q. Have you ever considered writing in a different genre, like mystery or fantasy? A. Paper Towns is supposed to be kind of a mystery novel.
Q. Why is it so hard to find Katherines in a bookstore right now? A. As a commenter later pointed out, the paperback for Katherines is (finally) going to come out in August. To prepare for the paperback, stores often pull the hardcover. If you can't wait for the paperback (which by the way will only cost $3.99, thanks to a promotion Penguin is doing that I'm very excited about), you can always order it online.
Q. Do you have dates and cities for your Paper Towns tour? A. I have dates: October 16th to November 1st. I should have cities in about a month.
Q. While you were writing Looking for Alaska, did you have a movie script in mind? A. No. (In fact, at the time, I had never read a movie script.) I think it's a huge mistake for authors to make novels that they think will become good movies. If people in Hollywood like my books, that's great. But I write them to be books.
Q. What breed is your puppy Willy? A. He's a West Highland Terrier.
Q. How many words is Alaska, and how many words should a YA novel manuscript be? A. Alaska is like 68,000 words or so, but there's no rule. (The Book Thief is, I would imagine, at least 200,000 words--and it's done okay.)
Q. Why is Their Eyes Were Watching God a good book? A. Well, it has one of the best first lines ever, for starters. (Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board.) Also, I don't know of another book that explores with such emotional power the question of finding one's voice--not just in the sense of one's authentic self, but literally finding a language of one's own, and using that language as a tool of empowerment despite all attempts to silence the voices of the oppressed. Also, I just think the sentences are beautiful. Beautiful sentences are subjective, I guess. Are there any other books I like that other people hate?
Q. what is the *one* thing you would say to someone who trying to break into YA writing? A. Editors are almost always right.
And lastly, congrats to Brotherhood 2.0 Resident Mathematician Daniel Biss on the birth of Elliot Austin Biss.
As you can tell from the above photograph, I am in the airport in Los Angeles, seated on the ground next to some recycling containers because this airport has cleverly placed all of its working electrical sockets right next to waste containers. Also, it is a well-known fact that the two things I like about airports are soft pretzels and video games arcades. LAX is supposed to be a world-class airport, but I ask you: WHERE IS THE AUNTIE ANNIE'S?!!?! WHERE IS THE 1994 VERSION OF DAYTONA USA? OR SUPERTENNIS STARRING JIM COURIER?
And now, belatedly, answers to your questions. I'll be doing this again soon, so leave your questions in comments.
Q. Will you be attending AASL in October?
A. Probably not, but life is full of surprises, and I really enjoyed the AASL conference the last time I did it.
Q. What was your favorite book as a child?
A. My favorite book when I was four was called Gus Is a Bug. (The title is somewhat misleading: By the end of the book, Gus is no longer a bug; he is—surprise!—a butterfly*.) Eventually, my appreciation for the subtler entertainments offered by literature began to grow. Which is to say that by the age of nine, I was very very keen on The Babysitters’ Club.
Q. What is your favorite kids’ book now?
A. Depends on how broadly you define “kid.” But I’ll say Wemberley Worried, by Kevin Henkes.
Q. What’s your favorite book you read in high school?
A. Well, there were several books I read in high school that are favorites now but weren’t then (Gatsby, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Huck Finn). When I was in high school, I probably would have said that my favorite books were Slaughterhouse Five, Song of Solomon, and Absalom, Absalom. (I still love all those books.) I was also very fond of Jeffrey Euginedes’ first novel, The Virgin Suicides.
Q. What’s your favorite bad reality show to be addicted to even though you really hate it?
A. A few months ago, I decided to stop watching all the reality TV shows I really hate, which is all of them. It feels great, and I recommend it heartily.
One could argue, however, that professional sports is a kind of reality show (sports leagues have the same basic structure as reality shows, and reel you in basically the same way). I like sports a lot; I am particularly fond of the Chicago Cubs and Liverpool FC.
Q. Do you lend out books?
A. Yes, of course.
Q. Will Paper Towns be published in other countries on October 16th?
A. Sadly, it will not. We know so far that Paper Towns will be published in German, Italian, and Dutch. But in some countries that will publish Paper Towns, Katherines hasn’t even come out yet. So it will take awhile. I’m sorry about that! International publishing is a complicated and time-consuming business, unfortunately. If you read in English, though, you can always order the book online.
Q. Any hilariously bad book tour experiences?
A. Well, a number of my book tour experiences have involved zero or one or two people attending, which is not quite hilarious, but is certainly not, you know, ideal.
Q. Do you read any postmodern stuff?
A. Sure (I mean, depending on your definition of postmodern). Not as much as I did when I was more deeply engaged in literary theory, but I still like Ulysses a lot. I am still very fond of that moment when Molly says O Jamesy let me up out of this.
Q. When are you having nerdfighter babies?
A. I don’t know. At the moment, the nerdfighting puppy seems more than adequate.
Q. What is your book with David Levithan about?
A. It’s about two guys named Will Grayson whose lives intersect in a most unusual place.
Q. Did you cry when you were writing Looking for Alaska?
A. I cried when I was writing the final version of the funeral scene. I’d written probably a dozen drafts of that scene, and I think I was just happy/sad (or, as Amy Krouse Rosenthal would say, wabi-sabi). And I cried sometimes when reading it to myself during revisions. I cried when writing Paper Towns, too. I’m not sure whether making one's self cry while writing is good or bad or neutral, for the record.
Q. Have you ever considered writing about conjoined twins, considering how much you love them?
A. Conjoined twins obviously lend themselves to metaphor better than perhaps any other kind of twin. But no. I feel like the genre of conjoined twins novels is pretty saturated, to be honest.
* I realize that butterflies are technically bugs, but the narrative in question did not explore class insecta with any kind of detail. OH AND ALSO: I just googled "Gus is a Bug" and if you search through this thread, you can see what is apparently the entire text of that book. (I haven't seen the book in at least 20 years.) It's funny, because reading that text now as a grown-up, even without the illustrations, I am still kind of moved by the end of the story. It gets at the universal hope of transformation, of reawakening: that slim but sustaining hope that even though things have always been thus, they might become different. It is Gus! Gus has no fuzz!!
A few things re. my post about Octavian Nothing that came out in emails and comments:
1. I think some people felt that I was saying Laurie Halse Anderson's book Catalyst, which I like very much, was all head and no heart. I was, in fact, only saying that people sometimes say that about the book. I think Catalyst is a good example of an extremely smart book that is also emotionally engaging.
(In fact, Catalyst gets into the whole issue of whether one must be able to directly identify with characters in order to enjoy a book. You hear this all the time, that teens in particular need to 'see themselves' in fiction in order for it to be good. I think this idea is total bullshit, and someday soon, I am going to go off on a completely ill-advised rant about it.*)
2. Phyllis (not my cousin-in-law Phyllis I don't think, although you never know) writes in comments: "John, you said Atlas Shrugged is a failure of a book. I just started reading it two days ago. ... I read The Fountainhead, and loved it. Have you read it? What did you think about it?"
Phyllis, I know that our friendship will be able to withstand this disagreement, but yes, I also think that The Fountainhead is a failure as a book. (I might be wrong, of course.) But I think both of those Rand books are very evocative about their ideas, and that the ideas are very appealing in some ways. But to me the stories and the people are paper-thin, mere vessels for ideas. Stories should be more than that, in my opinion.
3. I said in my post yesterday that my opinion of teenagers has changed a lot in the last two years, and was asked to expand upon that observation. I guess from the videoblog experience, I realized that teenagers were more or less infinitely intellectually capable as an audience, provided the work welcomes them into complexity properly. Which Octavian certainly does.
*Which is just one of several ill-advised rants I am always in danger of going on: 1. The idea that all readings of a book (and opinions on a book) are equally legitimate. 2. The universality of seeing the other, particularly the romantic other, as mysterious. 3. The whole question of whether an author is writing about herself, which is the least interesting question in the whole entire world, and yet the question that is most often asked (and the accusation that is most often leveled against books) in America, but strangely nowhere else.
I just finished the second volume of M. T. Anderson's unprecedentedly brilliant The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing. The book left me in a puddle of tears, which isn't a spoiler, because I was crying about the nature of human existence, not about any particular plot point. (This post contains no spoilers, except for the spoiler that the book is great.)
In Hamlet, Polonius tells Ophelia that a certain kind of love is like a fire that gives off "more light than heat." Extremely smart, intellectually engaged novels for teenagers are often criticized similarly--I've heard it said that Laurie Halse Anderson's novel Catalyst, for instance, is brilliant but cold. The same has been said of some of M. T. Anderson's work. And, to use a lesser book as an example, some people feel that An Abundance of Katherines gives more light than heat. (This also happens with adult books--take, for instance, Richard Powers. Because he often writes about science and math, his work is seen by many as emotionally inaccessible.)
A novel that is all light and no heat is, of course, a failure. (*Cough* Atlas Shrugged *Cough*.) But ideas ARE hot, which is WHY people still read Atlas Shrugged. Novels that challenge us to read well are not pretentious or overly stylized or ostentatious or too difficult for normal people: they are instead trying to show us the truth about ourselves and our communities. Because the truth is complicated and riddled with ambiguity and endlessly multivalent, so the books must be also.*
But it's unfair to say that Octavian is a work somehow deficient in heart just because it is hugely intellectually engaging.** Octavian is that rare work of fiction in which the heat cannot be separated from the light. You don't come across great new novels very often, books that--if they get lucky--could be read generations from now. Octavian is an accomplishment of that magnitude, although while reading the book, I was usually far too involved in it to contemplate its greatness. But now that I'm done, I can say: This is the best contemporary fiction I have read in a long time.
I know that when the book comes out in October, some readers will be intimidated by the length, or by the language. Don't be. This fire is as hot as it is bright.
* Not categorically accurate. There are of course great works of literature that are small and/or simple. (Wemberley Worried comes to mind.) But that does not negate the accomplishment of a complex book that speaks profoundly about our complex selves.
** People often said this in various forms about the first book, including me, although I didn't realize I was saying it at the time. (I said that I remained unconvinced the book would resonate with a lot of teenagers. My opinions about teenagers, needless to say, have changed a lot in the last two years, and in retrospect, saying that was both condescending to teenagers and unfair to the first book, although for the record I do think that the first book isn't and couldn't have been as good on its own, since Octavian is really one novel broken into two volumes.)
Did that just happen? Did anyone else just see that? Oh, my God. (I will embed the video when it becomes available.)
I mean, Mark Penn is one of the great political con men of our generation (which is really saying something), but Terry McAuliffe just went onto the Daily Show to say, "Hey, everybody. Just so you know, I am also terrifying. It's not just Penn! I might be less evil, but I'm much more crazy! Furthermore, I don't have a sense of humor!"
1. Secret Brother Tom wrote in to point out that I seemed to slight the Northeastern Quadrant of the U.S. in my previous post. What I meant to say was this: "Hank and I are just beginning to think about beginning to think about trying to figure out whether this is even feasible, and the extraordinarily generous librarians of the Northeastern Quadrant have made us feel that their portion of the country is, at least, potentially perhaps possible."
2. Even more distressingly, mundane4life writes: "I think you're great, but the fact that you even went to SATC you've fallen a few notches." Oh, my sweet dear Lord Jesus. I did not see the movie. I read a plot summary of the movie on a web site. (Also, I did not spoil the movie in my post. To say that they get married is the equivalent of saying that Indiana Jones survives the new Indiana Jones movie, or that the Transformers do not successfully take over the world, or that the Titanic sinks.)
Soon (today? tomorrow?), I will post a helpful guide to the Veepstakes. For now, I would just like to congratulate Senator Obama on securing the nomination of his party. (As pointed out to me in comments, Obama has not, in fact, secured the nomination and cannot technically do so until August. So congratulations to the presumptive nominee.)
And congrats also to Sen. Clinton, who is an excellent candidate, and would have made a good President. It sucks that someone has to lose a race this close.
1. Hank and I continue to recruit potential public library locations for the 2008 Hank and John Green Tour de Nerdfighting, tentatively scheduled for "most of November." We have a teen services librarian coordinating things, and it may take a bit for her to get back to you, but she will, I promise. If you're interested in hosting us (particularly if you live not-in-the-northeastern-quadrant-of-the-nation), please email work (at) sparksflyup dot com.
2. I recently met a few nerdfighters in real life, and one of them posted a picture of the occasion on facebook, and one of her friends commented on the picture: "That is so IRL." This strikes me as like the most hugely metaphorically resonant sentence ever to use the "That is so ..." structure.
3. I made a short video about Paper Towns over at amazon. I would embed it here to keep you from thinking I just want you to preorder Paper Towns (oh, btw, pleasepreorder Paper Towns), but Amazon doesn't allow video embeds, apparently because they still believe in copyright. (Am I alone in thinking that as time goes on, copyright seems dumber and dumber?)
4. Save yourself 10 bucks (and the shame!) and just go have the Sex and the City movie spoiled right now. (Hint: It's terrible. And they get married.) I realize that people like to pretend that what's at issue is something involving gender (i.e., that I would find SATC a guilty pleasure if I were a woman), but what is really at issue is vapidity and poor writing. /rant.
