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>> From the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. 
>> Good morning, we're going to start a little bit early.  I'm Ned Martel.  I'm a writer at the Washington Post.  I'm so--how many of you know lovers?  I don't know maybe those two.  Well, John Green writes books for sure.  We know that, complicated stories with word play and heartbreak and mysterious deaths but he also creates communities.  So many writers have the social media tool at their fingertips to promote their next offering but Green seizes them to promote connections.  So the feelings and problems that surface in the book can be explored more fully, it helps that readers talk about he raises whether it's a missing person or a lost love, a bout with alcoholism or even a prank war between day student and Borders that dangerously escalates.  Today he's talk background his latest offering, ""The Fault in Our Stars"." Now what could stir more emotion and connection than kids with cancer finding friendship and love among each other.  In his hands we see possibilities rather than the limits.  How confronting death speaks choices of how each want to live.  Jodi Picoult, I bet you all are familiar with, called it an electric portrait of young people who learned to live with one foot in the grave.  I'm intrigued by all the aliases in Green's book.  I'll bet you guys have noticed them too.  Miles becomes Pudge, Chip becomes the Colonel, Mr. Starnes becomes The Eagle.  Marcus becomes Radar.  There are two Will Graysons, a pair of Collins and many, many Katherines.  Feel free to ask him about his box set that's about to come out.  We'll get to find it online next month and whether he had any nicknames when he was growing up.  And please join me now in welcoming John Green.
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[ Cheers ]
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A long wind up. I can see him.  Wave to him and tell him to come. 
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[ Cheers ]
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One more time, let's welcome John Green. 
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[ Cheers ]
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>> John Green:  Hi.  Hi.  So my camcorder is broken.  First off, I need to acknowledge something that there are a lot of people who thought that they were coming to like just a regular book signing.  And so for those people, particularly the adults who have just started reading my books I can't explain to you everything that's involved in this but I can, I can explain to you that I have a video blog with my brother and all those videos start out "Good morning, Hank. It's Tuesday" or whatever day it is but it's usually Tuesday.  So I'm going to ask you to say, good morning Hank. It's Tuesday because it's Tuesday and [inaudible].   We're both experiencing anxiety from the screaming.  So on three, one, yeah, you say, good morning Hank, it's Tuesday on three.  Hold on. Let me make sure this is working. Okay, it is one, two, three, 
>> Good morning, Hank.  It's Tuesday.  
>> John Green:  That you guys very much.  Thank you.  So now we have to be reasonably quiet just for the benefit of rest of the National Book Festival.  I want to read you just a little bit from my new book "The Fault in Our Stars" talk a little bit about the book.  But mostly I just want to answer your questions.  I'm more interested in what you're interested in than what I'm interested in and I generally think that what I love about books both reading them and writing them is that it's a conversation between a reader and a writer and this is a chance for us to have that conversation IRL which is very exciting to me so.  Does anybody have a copy of my book that I can borrow? 
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[ Laughter ]
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 Sorry, I'm very unprepared.  I already signed this for you Julia and I'm not signing it again.  Thank you for coming to the event in--was it in Maryland?  It was at LeakyCon.  Okay, it's nice to see you again regardless.  So I'm just going to read, I'm just going to read a little bit of the book to try to give a sense of the voice, I guess.  But I'm going to begin by reading the author's note which is the only time in the book when I am directly speaking to you, so it feels like something that I can read to you and still sound like myself maybe.  "This is not so much an author's note as an author's reminder of what was printed in small type a few pages ago.  This book is a work of fiction.  I made it up.  Neither novels nor their readers--" I can this is a first printing because it says neither novels or their readers but that's been fixed.  "Neither novels nor their readers benefit from an attempts to divine whether any facts hide inside a story.  Such efforts attack the very idea that made-up stories can matter which is sort of the foundational assumption of our species.  I appreciate your cooperation in this matter."  And this is the beginning of Chapter 1.  "Late in the winter of my 17th year, my mother decided I was depressed, presumably because I rarely left the house, spent quite an a lot of time in bed, read the same book over and over, ate infrequently, and devoted quite a bit of my abundant free time to thinking of about death.  Whenever you read a cancer booklet or website or whatever they also list depression among the side effects of cancer.  But in fact depression is not a side effect of cancer.  Depression is a side effect of dying.  Cancer is also a side effect of dying, almost everything is, really.  But my mom believed I required treatment, so she took me to see my regular Dr. Jim who agreed that I was veritably swimming in a paralyzing and totally clinical depression and that therefore my medicines should be adjusted and also I should attend a weekly support group." So that's what I'm going to read.  I'm going to return this to Julia.  So I get a lot of questions about that very beginning of the novel.  I wanted to answer that question while also saying something else about the book and why I wrote it.  The question that I get most often is that cancer is not a side effect of dying.  Dying is a side effect of cancer which is true in like a very narrow sense but in the broader sense cancer is a side effect of dying because cancer is a disease that is born of mutation.  The reason cancer happens is because cells inside of our bodies mutate and then whatever is supposed to turn off their replication ceases to turn it off and there's out-of-control growth of this tumor.  That is a side effect of dying.  Because the whole reason that mutation happens is because cells are always in the business of dying.  Every cell in our body is constantly, well, with very few exceptions, and even those are dying in the broadest sense, all cells are dying.  More generally, all organic matter at all times is dying, is in this process of sort of falling apart in the broadest sense but it's also often in the process of coming together.  So I have a two and a half year-old son and I've watched his body go from this thing I could hold in my forearm to being this like squiggly thing capable of talking and asking me questions and making unreasonable requests of my time and all sorts of stuff.
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That process of coming from nothing into something and then slowly falling apart is the process of life.  And I wanted to write about that as well as I could and as honestly as I could and in a way that reflected the experience of the people I've known and loved who'd lived with chronic illness and in many cases had died of it.  And in my experience was that all of these things are a side effect of dying and that our sort of cultural inability to acknowledge the reality and omnipresence of this falling apart represented a real sort of failure on our part to grapple with one of the most interesting parts of life.  So I had that idea initially in like in 2000.  I was working as a student chaplain at a children's hospital and I really wanted to write this story that was set in a children's hospital and it starred this like super-handsome hospital chaplain, kind of an alcoholic, and had an a lot of troubles but he was really cool and all these like bad qualities like made up for his chiseled good looks and everything.  And there were all these like hot lady doctors.  Which hot lady doctor will he choose?  Sort of the central question of this original manuscript.  And I worked on that book in one form or another for eight years, just kept going back to it over and over again.  I'd write it, sort of fail at writing it and then I'd write a different book and then I'd fail.  I'd try and fail again and then I'd write a different book and this continued but this was always the book I wanted to write and in some ways "The Fault in Our Stars" is my first novel.  This is the novel that I wanted to write first.  I just didn't figure it out.  I figured it out in 2009 or 2010, I guess.  I had all this stuff I'd written you know, a hundred thousand, two hundred thousand words which is maybe like 600 pages but it was all crap.  It was all about this mostly about this chaplain and so I finally found a way into it through my friendship with a young woman who was a fan of our videos and a fan of my books named Esther, really more a fan of our videos I have to say.  I was reading Esther's diaries recently and I always say she was a fan of my books but that's not really true.  And Esther had cancer from the time that I knew her and she died in August of 2010 when she is just 16.  And knowing Esther and knowing her family and being friends with a lot of her friends it pulled me out of the story.  You know, it took me out of the story and it allowed me to center myself in this question of why are we falling apart and why do we fall apart at different rates?  So why is it that like my grandfather who was a very nice guy lived to be 93 years old and spent you know, saw all seven continents and had this great full life and Esther, who was also a very nice person, only lived to be 16 and for much of her life her life was circumscribed by this illness, by this chronic illness?  And can we make sense of that world?  Can we find a way to be hopeful in that world?  Or are we best off just ignoring the reality?  Because I think ultimately that's why we ignore this process of death that is constantly occurring inside of not just us but in the planet itself.  The planet itself is a kind of organism that is constantly being born and falling apart and experiencing this same cycle.  Do we ignore that because it is so the reality of it, the reality of illness in children, the reality that not all lives are along lives is so unacceptable to us that we just can't even look at it?  And was there a way for me to write a story that made it okay to look at?  Because my experience with being friends, not just with Esther but with the other young sick people I've known is that it is not hard to look at them and it is not hard to love them.  It is not to love that reality.  And that was--but you have to be brought into the place where it's okay and not scary to love and to look at the world as it is.  And the sentimental, maudlin cancer stories that I have read when I was a young person and like make fun of a lot in this book don't do that for me.  Like, they don't take me into that place of love and respect.  They take me--they're really about the well people in the novels not the sick ones because really what they're about is they're about that attempt to try to, that whole idea that like people with cancer, particularly young people with cancer exist so that the rest of us can learn important life lessons, right?  So like the rest of us can be like grateful for like every day.  No, that is not why sick people exist and that dehumanizes them and depersonalizes them and makes the story not about them but about the well.  And I didn't want to do that.  I wanted to argue that a short life can also be a full life and can also be a good life and a rich life and that the definition of a rich full life is not about whether it's long, although certainly it's easier and better if it is long, but it's about different kinds of good.  And so I wanted to present in Hazel and Augustus different kinds of good, different kinds of good lives, different ways of imagining what constitutes a good life?  What constitutes a heroic life?  And now nine months after the book has come out I haven't read it.  But lots of people have been very nice about it and the main thing that I want to say is that all the time that I was writing that story I was terrified that I wasn't doing justice to a story that was in many ways not mine.  I was terrified that I wasn't being--that you weren't going to like it.  I was terrified that people would say, "Oh, a book about cancer that sounds horrible." Because that's what I say when people say, "Oh, a book about cancer." I'm not the kind of person who's like "Oooh, really can I read a book about cancer?  How lucky am I now?"  And you know there are a lot of people in this room who read the book very early and recommended it to their friends and to their family and in many cases to their parents and that means a lot to me and that has brought, in the end like writing the book did not bring me the peace I was after.  But living with the book today has in many ways brought me that sense of peace and that conviction that there are many kinds of good and full lives, so I want to thank you.  And I think I'll take some questions, if that's all right.  And then, yeah, I can just call on you and you can shout that's fine.  I'm going to call on people who are standing because they're standing.  They have it hard.  Yes, ma'am?  
>> [Inaudible] 
>> John Green: What?  Obviously if that is--if you're about to say a spoiler do not say it.  Okay.  
>> [Inaudible] 
>> John Green:  The question is about the middle of "Looking for Alaska" and if it came from personal experience.  I don't like to answer that question because--I wish I had a copy of the book "The Fault in Our Stars" so I could read to you the part about allow I don't want people to look for facts inside my books.  But only because only in the interest of protecting people I know in real life who would maybe rather not be personally connected in their own lives with my work.  I didn't think about that much when I was writing ""Looking for Alaska"" which is a very autobiographical novel many ways.  I mean the book is about a kid who memorizes last words, who goes to a boarding school in Alabama, and I memorize last words and went to a boarding school in Alabama.  It's a very autobiographical book in an a lot of ways but when I was writing it you know, on some level you never think anybody outside of your family is going to read your books like or at least I didn't and I think because of that I wasn't at least initially, I maybe wasn't as respectful of people's privacy as I should have been.  And so yeah, I feel like I can't answer it directly because it would not be respectful of the people.
>> [Inaudible] 
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Yes.  
>> How do you feel about that giraffe behind you staring at you?  
>> John Green:  How do I feel about the giraffe behind me staring at me?  I guess neutral.  Yes, Holden Caulfield thinks you're a phony.  
>> [Inaudible].  
>> You actually can use the microphone--
>> John Green:  Oh, you'll want to walk over to the microphone and then everyone can here you.  
>> If you could change anything about "The Fault in Our Stars" would you and what would it be?  
>> John Green:  That's an interesting question because writers, the reason I don't reread my books after they come out is because of course there are many insufficiency in my work and I am keenly aware of them and I don't particularly enjoy being reminded of them.  So there are two kinds of like negative reviews, right?  There are the negative reviews that you disagree with and you think are stupid.  Like for instance, when people say, "I don't believe that teen-agers are that smart." Well that doesn't bother me because I just disagree, you know like.  It's always adults who say that too.  It's funny if you go through the Amazon reviews and you read which people said like teen-agers don't actually talk like that it's a lot of people who then go on to be like not that I read all of the reviews of my books.  Not that there's 24 thousand good reads reviews of "The Fault in Our Stars" and I've read every one of them, but it's always people who are like I mean I'm in my 20s and I don't talk like that.  And I'm like well, that's not my fault.  Like, I shouldn't be held accountable for your failure to like grapple with the interesting questions of the human species.  But of course there are lots of things that I would change in "The Fault in Our Stars" but there are things that I don't though change or I would have changed them.  You know there are lots of places, look, all I can see when I read one of my books is the things that don't work or the things that I think will make readers stop for a second or the things that I think will make them conscious that the book is written and not like a story that's alive in their minds.  And all that stuff is difficult.  And if I tortured myself with it, as I could for the next, you know, however many years I would never write another book.  I would just sit around and try to rewrite "The Fault in Our Stars" over and over and over again and in the end like he had to give you guys the book and I did the best I could and I have to trust that you'll read it generously.  I think like the relationship between reader and writer ultimately is one of mutual generosity and it's me giving you gift and you giving me a gift back.  And the gift that I give you is that I try very hard at the write to best thing I can possibly make and then you give me sort of two gifts, one is money which I appreciate.  I mean even if you get the book out of the library on some level somebody paid for that book.  And I encourage you to get the book out of the library.  But the reason libraries work so well and that they encourage our entire civic well-being is because there is some level of financial connection between the reader and the library which is why it's very different--I'm asked this all the time, why is it, why is it--I could check your book out of the library but instead I just stole it on the Internet why is that different?  And I'm like well, I control the means of distribution and I don't want you to steal it.  So it stops there really but there are lots of other reasons too.  So we can talk about that if anyone's interested.  But so in my opinion, there's like that gift obviously but that's sort of obvious gift.  The bigger and more important gift is the gift of your attention and you're generous reading.  Like there are lots of ways to read a novel and we've all had this experience of going into a novel and being like I'm going to hate this and then hating it and then being like I did it.  I hated it.  In fact,  I think a lot of people like who read this sort of read whatever the big phenomenon book of the time is whether it's "Fifty Shades of Grey," or "Twilight" or whatever, you go into that book reading it, frankly, with a lack of generosity and like maybe it was also written with a lack of generosity or maybe it wasn't but like our responsibility as readers is to try to give the stories the best chance that we can give them, the best life that we can give them because each story is going to be different for each reader.  Yes.  Yeah, that would be great thank you.  
>> Once you have an idea for a story how do you take it from there?  What's your next step?  
>> John Green:  How do I go from an idea to like a book?  How much time do you have?  I'm obviously not very good at it because I only publish a book every three or four years.  I don't get big ideas to be honest with you.  I've never had a big idea.  I've never an idea like wizard school.  I never had, I want that idea.  Like, I'm ready for it but I haven't had it yet.  I have little ideas like why do we suffer?  Or what if my friend John had been a girl?  That was sort of the initial idea for ""Paper Towns"."  I was thinking a lot about my friend John Mauldin and I was like, man, if John Mauldin would have been a girl he would have been much more interesting.  So he would have had a whole different set of problems than he would have had, all these sort of gender expectations and it would have been really cool and interesting.  So I mean that's how "Paper Towns" began for me, "Looking for Alaska" began for me by thinking about my own high school experiences I think and wanting to process them, but as for how you go from those little ideas to the business of actually writing a book like to me it's more about the interconnection of very small ideas linking them together into a chain.  There's a lot of ways to imagine shapes of novels, so one of the first ways I imagined a book is usually as a spiral.  Like there's this point for Hazel in "The Fault in Our Stars" the point is Hazel has to go to a support group and this point leads to another point.  Hazel meets Augustus which leads to another point which leads to this ever-widening circle until whoa they have this crazy life together and whoa they're in love and whoa this happens and like it spirals out from that point.  So if you think about the novel or your story as a spiral then you can think you can sort of think about what should happen in order for it to keep that shape, and I find had that quite useful.  There is very abstract and I apologize to people who aren't interested in writing but there are lots of other ways to imagine shapes of stories too so, in "Will Grayson, Will Grayson" which I wrote with my friend David leave than we imagined the novel as an X.  Don't cheer for David.  David's new book, by the way, I have to say I never, I never promote to work of other authors because it's very bad for me but, no, I do.  But David's new book is just beautiful.  It's just really brilliant.  It's called "Every Day" and it's about a kid who wakes up every day in someone else's body, every day a different body and in love with the same girl.  So every day this person who doesn't have a gender or a physical body of any kind wakes up in a new body within about four hour drive of wherever he or she woke up yesterday and he's all or she I'm trying, see I'm trying as we do I'm trying to gender binary it when of the a brilliant novel that didn't allow for that.  This individual wakes up every day in different body and then like has to get to this girl this individual loves.  We really need a gender neutral pronoun.  So that's very hard to say in sign language, about gender neutral pronouns, isn't it?  Yeah. Well, they've solved this problem to a great extent where we haven't.  So yeah, but it's a really fascinating book.  And it's one of those books that has a brilliant premise but that's also really brilliantly executed. 
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But anyway, in "Will Grayson Will Grayson" we imagine the novel as an X.  These two character start out in very different places.  They come together.  They're lives sort of intertwine and then they go their separate ways. And in imagining that novel as an X that also sort of fuels where your ideas go because you think like well I have to put them one step closer to each other or I have to put them one step further away from each other and so that was very helpful.  So imagining these things as shapes, and as like sort of forms, not to get like all contemporary art theory on you but like thinking about the importance of forms and the centrality of the form of the novel is very helpful to me.  Pizza John.  It's always an advantage if you're wearing my face on your torso.  
>> Okay, so in one of your novels you wrote that imagining the future is a kind of nostalgia.  How often do you find yourself divulging into that nostalgia in your writing and in your personal life?  
>> John Green:  So if I start imagining the future as a kind of nostalgia how often do I find myself indulging that in my writing and in my personal life?  I didn't write that line my wife wrote it.  We were on our first date.  It's a funny story.  I'll tell the story, if that's okay.  So I really liked her.  I went to high school with Sarah but we did not know each other in high school at all.  She was a couple of years behind me and we ran in very different circles.  But we met again in Chicago and she was this like really talented artist and she was managing a really cool contemporary art gallery and she was fascinating, really intelligent.  We had brunch.  I was really impressed with her.  I heard that she was not dating anyone and so I did my due diligence and everything.  And then I, so I e-mailed like seven of my friends and I said, "Do you want to see the movie "Lost in Translation" tonight and I cc'd Sarah.  And then I e-mailed my other six friends and I said, "Not you." But no, no, but it's a terrible--actually no, this is turns out is a terrible strategy.  Never start a relationship on a lie.  It will end and indeed she broke up with me after a few dates because I was so like performed like that, because I was so, I trying so, so hard and I was so far removed from like whatever authentic self I might have somewhere inside of me that she wasn't that interested.  So, yes, so that did not work out.  However, we then got back together and got married and now we have a cute kid and everything's fine.  So she said that to me on our first date though because before "Lost in Translation" we went to this bagel deli and she said, I was talking about high school and how I imagined my life, we were talking about high school and I said I was always imagining my life after high school and thinking about what adulthood would be like and how like I can't indulge that impulse if you write the kind of novels that I write and she said imagining the future as a kind of nostalgia and I was like wow.  I try not to indulge it at all in my novels.  I try not to take my novels anywhere past the present.  I try not to like send my characters to tell you what like, I don't want to prescribe that for you.  I don't want to give you an order about where my characters end up or where the story ends up or anything like that because I want that to be yours not mine.  So it's very important to me.  Hey there, digital bookmobile.  Ah yeah.  So, right, so lots of people ask me like what happens after the end of "The Fault in Our Stars" or what happens after the end of ""Looking for Alaska?"  Well to do that would be to imagine the future which is a kind of nostalgia like right?  Like these characters aren't writing it from the future.  They aren't telling their stories from the future.  They're telling their stories from the present and to take them far into the future into adulthood or whatever to me would just be, that's sort of reverse nostalgia.  Oh geez, yes, with the scarf.  The more you scream the less likely I'm to call on you.  I have to tell you.  I'm sorry, but it's true because then I get nervous that you're going to ask just ask me who the heck is Hank or something that like will make no sense to anyone in the audience.  Yes.  
>> Hello.  
>> John Green:  Hi.  
>> From with your, if you look at your books through more of like a post-modernist perspective with autobiographical content and you said earlier how you don't feel comfortable or you feel anxious when you're speaking about a story that isn't technically yours, what is the limit that you set between your own story and someone else's?  
>> John Green:  Where do I set the limit between my own story and someone else's?  That's really an interesting question.  I mean from a post-modernist perspective, I tend to agree that the author is dead and that the author is irrelevant or to the extent that the author is a character in a novel the author is the least important and genuinely, least interesting character in the novel and should be ignored whenever possible.  Like a truly successful book is a book in which you are not frequently conscious of the author.  I don't want you to be reading "The Fault in Our Stars" and to be thinking about my biography. And I don't particularly want you to be reading Shakespeare and thinking about his biography.  I think most of what's interesting about "Hamlet" or even, I mean, "The Tempest" is a better example because in "The Tempest" it's supposed to be Shakespeare's last play and Prospero throws his wizarding books into the ocean and gives it all up and yadda, yadda, yadda.  And like this is always read from certain, more recent literary critical readings as Shakespeare throwing in his own tools of magic that he used to transform the Elizabethan stage and yeah, whatever.  Like that's fine.  I just don't think it's that interesting.  Right, like maybe that tells us something about Shakespeare and like I'm sure that Shakespeare liked putting little jokes that pleased him about his own life into his novels or into his plays as do I, as do most writers because it's a pretty self-indulgent trade.  But I don't think it's what interesting about "The Tempest." Like to me everything that's interesting about "The Tempest" is weird idea of savageness and the weird relationship between the civilized and the savage and like that's interesting.  I'm not interested that like Shakespeare was quitting.  Yeah, like that's not the biggest thing in the book for me or in the story, or I guess I should say in the story.  So I want the same to be true in my work but it's completely impossible because I have put so much of my life on the Internet and so, so many of you know so much about me that there is no way to separate it out.  Right, and like we live in this personality driven culture, particularly a personality driven literary culture and there's nothing I can do about that but I also happen to really like making stuff with you on the Internet and books are great but they are not a great way to make stuff.  Like, books are a terrible way to raise money for charity.  And books are a terrible way to like work together to do all the projects that we've done in our online community.  And so I want to do that stuff.  So I have these contradictory desires, right?  Here I am on the first page of the book I say, "Don't think about anything that might be related to me in this book or anything in my life.  Just don't think about it.  Just read the novel as a novel.  I'm ordering you to do this." And then I'm like, "Hey everybody, it's me John Green.  You know like, look at the sandwich I had for lurch." That's a completely unfair thing to ask of my readers, to be both--to both look at my sandwiches and to like disconnect me from the novel.  All of which is to say that I have absolutely no idea how to answer your question because I have absolutely, I do not have a solution to this problem.  I am conscious of the problem.  I spend like, it keeps me up at night.  I worry about it.  I just don't know how to solve it.  Like I first became conscious of this in 2008 when our community was much, much smaller but all these people would e-mail me and they would say, "I read 'Paper Towns' in your voice." Like, they would hear my voice reading it to them.  And when I read a book written by a friend, like when I read Maureen Johnson novel or a read a David Levithan novel, I often here their voices when I'm reading.  Like I actually hear them as if they were reading it to me in their, you know, Maureen's like weird little voice.  Hi, Maureen.  And I don't want that.  You know, I don't want you to read my story that way.  But I also know that there's no way around it if we're also going to do all of this fun interesting stuff together that we can do.  And furthermore, to be completely frank with you, before I told people about my like what--like I showed pictures of my sandwiches, my readings were not this well attended.  So there is that to consider as well.  It's a very interesting question that I don't have a solution to.  Yes.  Yes.  
>> What book are you reading right now?  
>> John Green:  What book am I reading right now?  I'm reading, I can't even remember the title of it but it's very long but it's D. T. Max.  Is that his name?  D. T. Max's biography of David Foster Wallace.  He's one of my favorite writers.  Does anyone remember what it's called?  No, okay.  Someone knows what it's called.  You can just shout it.  Okay.  Well, whatever, it's good, so far.  I'm like 40 pages in.  It could get worse.  Yes.  I like your shirt.  
>> Oh, is it working.  Oh.  I actually have one for you.  Can I give it to you?  
>> John Green:  Yeah, sure. 
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[ Applause  ]  
^M00:40:33
Thank you.  Thank you for guessing the right size too.  It's a large.  Yeah, sure.  
>> So I went back and I was watching some of your older videos that weren't on the Blog Brothers Channel.  There's one, I don't know what they were but there's one where you went urban exploring.  
>> John Green:  Oh yeah.  
>> And I was wondering if that was something that inspired "Paper Towns?"
>> John Green:  "Paper Towns." Probably, I was guessing but yeah.  So I went to, one time I was in Detroit with M. T. Anderson who's like probably the greatest American, young adult fiction writer.  He said resentfully.  He is really, he is the best though.  He's a true genius.  Like it's very rare in your life that you meet a true genius and he really is.  I mean if you read "The Astonishing Life of Octavia Nothing, Traitor to the Nation," it is an an actual work of genius which is a very strange thing to come across.  Then it's even stranger to meet the creator of this work and to have him be you know mostly normal.  But anyway he's not that normal and I guess, he was going to Detroit and he had heard that it was possible to break into all these abandoned buildings and so he like walked up to the Post Office which has been abandoned for like 40 years and he was like walking around the circumference trying to find a way over the fence and he saw this little head pop up and he was like "Hey, you." And this like 16 year-old kid comes out and Tobin, that's what he calls himself, not M. T. Anderson.  Tobin said, "Can you get me in?"  And the kid said, "For forty dollars." And then like he had there crazy experience exploring the ruins of Detroit with this kid.  Then he comes to Kalamazoo where we're speaking together, we speak together and then we drive back to Detroit to take an airplane home where upon there is some massive snow storm on the East Coast and we can't get home for four days.  So I ended up going urban exploring with Tobin and this 15 year-old kid who charged me as well and he was amazing.  I mean he was like this savant of Detroit architecture who also happened to have just massive courage which I don't have, so I'm a very anxious person and I really struggle with my anxiety problems and so being in large, long abandoned spaces was very nervous for me which made me think about Quentin.  I'd already written some of the urban exploring sections in "Paper Towns" but being in those places definitely affected it, definitely like reshaped my feelings about what it's like.  Yes.  
>> Okay, I'm older than a lot of the people here and I know you said you like to write for young people because old people aren't as interesting, which is true, but as a former English teacher and a current high school librarian, I'm one of your, I'm a big pusher of you.  And I just wanted to tell you that I think you're great and I push you a lot.  I'm your street pusher so, thank you for what you do.  
>> John Green:  I appreciate it.  
>> Yep.  
>> John Green:  Thank you.  You are not alone at all in your oldness.  [Inaudible] about twenty-three so.  
>> [Inaudible] 
>> John Green:  Oh wow.  Wow.  
>> I'm not stalking you and I don't know your mother sells soap.  
>> John Green:  My mother does sell goat soap from her goat farm in western North Carolina, Farmer Jane Soap.  I'm not afraid to plug her.  So yeah, there are a lot of us, adults who read young adult fiction and like it and who've read "The Fault in Our Stars" and liked it.  We aren't as loud.  You know we tend not to make as much noise but in fact, like most of my, most of the readers of "The Fault in Our Stars" now, like the new readers are adults.  That's been a very odd transition for me to go to get like you know e-mails from 82 year-old grandmothers about my book or whatever.  They're very nice usually.  But it's an interesting transition for me because I am used to both having and preferring young adult readers.  Now I have to slightly recalibrate my message, I guess, to pretend that I do like adults.  So, yes, you're my favorite.  All right, I think we have time for just one more question.  I apologize to all the people whose questions I won't be asking but yes, you sir.  
>> Mr. Green, Mr. Green.  I adore the crash course that you and Hank are doing. Are there plans to continue it and in what fashion after your weeks are up?  
>> John Green:  So my brother and I are teaching, we have this show that's funded by Google that's called Crash Course that teaches, I teach AP level World History and my brother teaches AP level Biology in a series of videos that are about ten to twelve minutes long.  Yeah, it's very, very, expensive man, to be honest with you.  It's not something that like we'll ever earn money on in advertising model because it just costs.  Educators are expensive, curriculum advisors are expensive, editors and animators are expensive and it's a very big undertaking.  I don't know that we'll have Google support again, in which case we will have to figure out what we will want to do.  We would love to keep doing it.  I've never been so passionate about anything.  I've never had as much fun making stuff, so hopefully we'll find a way to do it.  All right, this is truly the last question.  
>> Hi. I'm a big fan of your books.  
>> John Green:  Thank you.  
>> And I was just wondering, so many of them are about teen-agers and about this awkward stage of life where you're trying to figure out how to make friends and what to do with your life and what high school to go to and what career to pick.  What advice would you have for young people?  
>> John Green:  What advise do I have for young people about going through all that stuff?  I mean the great poet Robert Frost once said, "The only way out is through." People will tell you that this is like supposed to be the best years of your life or whatever but that's a dirty, dirty lie.  It's an evil, pernicious lie.  Adulthood is wonderful.  There is a, there is a stability to adulthood that may seem like lame and boring to you when you're a teen-ager but, oh, gosh, is it nice to not have to wonder like who am I going to make out with next week?  It's just it's that same person it's been for many years.  That's nice to have the background to know what it's like to have been in love, to know what it's like to experience loss, to be able to contextualize these feelings that are always welling up inside of us.  I mean adulthood doesn't stop being exciting by any stretch of the imagination but you're able to contextualize the excitement a little bit better which makes it much easier to survive.  So my advice to you would be to, I guess I would say two things.  First off, do listen to adults that you trust in your life.  They know something.  It's hard to do sometimes because you want, because sometimes they're wrong and sometimes they give advice that is also not just the exact opposite of what you want to hear.  And it's difficult to do things I don't want to do.  It's difficult to do things that just sort of seem wrong even if you know in the broadest sense that they're right.  So I would encourage you to listen to the, find adults that you trust and listen to them.  The most important thing to me is to understand this will end in both like the best ways and the worst ways.  Like things will go on and you will go on.  And you as I think Augustus says to Isaac in the middle of  "The Fault in Our Stars", "You are going to have a big and wonderful life and do all kinds of wonderful things that I can't possibly imagine now." And so trust in that.  Thank you. 
>> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress.  Visit us at loc.gov. 
^M00:49:35