IAmA #1 New York Times bestselling author named John Green. AMAA

Not a question, but I work at Kiva.org and I just wanted to say THANK YOU for all the amazing work you've done with Nerdfighters. I don't think you realize what a big deal you guys are, how much publicity you've given us, and (most importantly, duh) what a change you've made in the world. Thank you, thank you, thank you for using your influence to turn your audience outward, and for inspiring so many people to lend a helping hand to others around the world. As far as I'm concerned, no matter how wonderful your books are, the Nerdfighters lending team is your real legacy. :)

I'm just responding to this in the hopes it will go toward the top and more people will join the nerdfighter lending team so we can overtake Belgium on the all-time loans chart.

WE ARE COMING FOR YOU, BELGIUM.

Who the eff is Hank?

(This is an inside joke in the nerdfighter community. I honestly don't even get it myself at this point.) Hank is a mass of incandescent gas.

Dear John,

I am composing this message in the aim to try and explain to you how much reading all of your work and meeting you in Munich meant to me.

You were really tired, thus your memories of this remarkable evening might be a little fuzzy and you probably will not remember me. My name is Anna and I, using every chance I got to finally actually meet you, attended both the early and the late reading; I was also the last one whose books you so generously signed, despite you being extremely exhausted and in a terrible hurry. Thank you very much for doing so, we all are so thankful that you did this for us.

As I told you that night when you signed my four copies, you got absolutely everything right in TFiOS, and I mean everything. For people - young adults - like me who have quite some experience in the field of Suffering, reading a book like yours is an experience so rare that we cannot help but develop the same kind of "evangelical zeal" as Hazel does with AIA. Frankly (and I am trying to be completely honest with you), to me, you are like Peter van Houten, except that you are not being absolute twat to your fans and a drunk who treats people very nasty. Meeting you left me feeling like Hazel should have felt when she met him: happy, yet stunned, and excited and really, really grateful.

So there you go. That was completely honest.

And when you left, even though I might sound pretty silly saying this right now, it felt like you did not only leave Munich and Germany and Europe, but also the real, physical world and returned to the world of pixels and bits and bytes, utterly unreachable for people unable of international travel - I mean, not like I would STALK you or your family or anything. I am just saying that the slut that is Time stroke once again and made this wonderful, awesome evening way too short. (But then again I guess you had already reached a level of tiredness which made you feel pretty damm relieved to finally be aloud to go home and sleep.)

Due to several reasons I probably will not be able to go anywhere in the following months; therefore, seeing you yesterday - your actual, breathing, talking, gesturing, brilliantly thinking self - made me kind of freak out and kept me from telling you all my aforementioned thoughts and feelings in person.

I needed to try and get these words to you - because I and so many others want you to know that we all admire and respect you and your work, and the community you and Hank built up for all of us.

Thank you so much.

With kindest regards, Anna (18 years old)

Thanks, Anna. I will try to live up to this.

Have you made any fishing boat proceeds yet?

(This is an inside joke involving a complaint I made in 2007 that I had to fill out every single tax form in the United States except for the one you get to fill out if you make fishing boat proceeds, which is now the name of my tumblr.)

No, I have not made any fishing boat proceeds yet. I am still waiting for my ship to come in.

Things have been going swimmingly for me!

Redditor for 8 months. I'll allow it.

Firstly, I just wanted to say that you stand out as one of the most prolific and influential authors of my young adulthood, and I wanted to thank you for the amazing things you've written.

What would you say is the most influential novel or author you've ever read, and how have they had an impact on your own work?

Thanks for reading my books. I was going to write them anyway, but they sort of don't become real until you read them, so thanks.

It's hard to isolate a single influence. I guess J. D. Salinger's CitR is probably the most influential book in my life, because in many way it invented the market for the kind of books I write, and also because everyone who writes about intelligent adolescents does so in Salinger's shadow.

Is Henry Green destined to be the most influential, groundbreaking author of his generation?

(Henry is my 2-year-old son.)

I hope not. I hope Henry does whatever he finds fulfilling in life and does not feel any obligation to follow in my footsteps or in his mom's footsteps. It's important to me that Henry have his own life. In the end, you try to raise a kid with good values and hope for the best, but I certainly don't want undue pressure placed on Henry to achieve x or y.

I mean, he's two. He's a great kid, but I want him to have his own life, and hopefully at least the option of a private life.

My name's Henry. I really enjoy finding out about other people under the age of 60 named Henry.

Are you also two years old? Because:

1. If so, my kid is really behind you in terms of typing skills and 2. There are actually a shitton of two-year-olds named Henry. They're coming for you, Henry. YOU MUST PREPARE.

would you rather fight 12 duck sized horses or 1 horse sized duck?

I'm going to need you to be very specific about both the kind of duck and the kind of horse we're talking about.

A mallard and, say, a thoroughbred horse.

So that would be 1 thoroughbred-sized mallard, and 12 mallard-sized thoroughbreds.

1 thoroughbred-sized mallard. That's easy.

What is the biggest regret of your life?

That's a tough question. I wish I'd been a more attentive and engaged student, because I think I missed a lot of learning opportunities that are tough to get back.

If you could speak any other language fluently and write in it too, what would it be?

Spanish, no question. I'm a capitalist, man, and there are like 362 million people who read in Spanish, and royalties are much better in the Spanish speaking world than in China, so it's really no contest.

How do you feel about quotes being attributed to you when they are actually quotes that are said by your characters?

It doesn't really bother me. Quotes say much more about the people who are quoting them than the person who is being quoted. My novels are written from the perspectives of characters I sometimes disagree with personally, but I'm not really in the business of trying to define someone else's reading experience, you know? Books belong to their readers, and if they find anything useful or interesting in my work, then I'm grateful.

I haven't read any of your books, but this excellent answer has piqued my interest. What would you recommend as a good book of yours for a new reader to begin with?

The Fault in Our Stars is the most popular. (...by a lot.)

As a 26 year old man, I cried at the end. tFIOS is a great book. DFTBA

Wuss.

How do you balance writing your books and making content for both vlogbrothers and crashcourse? Also DFTBA i'm a huge nerdfighter

Thanks. Ideally, I write in the morning (from 8 to noon or so) and then work on other stuff--videos, booking travel, correspondence, interviews, whatever--from noon to 4:15, when I go home to take care of Henry.

This balance has worked very well for me in the past, but in the 9 months since The Fault in Our Stars came out, it's been very difficult to find time to write because there has been so much to do in support of the book.

/r/firstworldproblems, I know.

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(This is a reference to something about the city of Indianapolis as portrayed in my novel The Fault in Our Stars.) Yeah, I wanted them to go to Anthropologie for stupid metaphorical reasons, but I didn't want them to be at Keystone, because I wanted them to be Castleton-type people, so I moved Anthropologie to Castleton.

One of the (many) pleasures of writing fiction is that if I want Anthropologie to be at one mall rather than another, then I can just move it.

Woah there, don't let all that power go to your head, scooter.

Watch it Dubbed_Video_Dub, or I WILL PUT AN ANTHROPOLOGIE INSIDE YOUR BRAIN.

I've always wondered- why do ALL of your characters name their cars?

Who doesn't name their car?

Right, that's basically why. We name our cars in the US because cars are a huge part of our lives, and also because when you get your first car, you suddenly have a kind of sovereignty and access to the world that you never had before. Naturally, you are going to love the vehicle that makes this possible, and we often name the things we love. So it's a way of acknowledging the centrality of the cars to the characters' lives.

Have you named your car?

Sure, when I was a teenager. These days I don't have that kind of attachment to my car. If anything, I resent its omnipresence in my life.

I need a new book to read. Any suggestions?

Well, first, let's establish something important: Have you read mine?

I also need a new book to read and yes, I have read yours. I'm 19, read TFIOS, Looking for Alaska and An Abundance of Katherines. Looking for Alaska was my favorite.
Edit: Ough, forgot to mention. I've also read Paper Towns.

Read The Virgin Suicides and The Mysteries of Pittsburgh.

My Shakespeare professor wants to know why none of your protagonists have siblings. dftba

So does my brother...

I'm a freshman in college. Do you have any advice about how to decide what the hell to do with my life?

Well, you're imagining that this is just one decision, which can never be unmade, that the die will be cast in college and you'll just live our your destiny.

Adulthood, for better and for worse, is not quite so simple in my experience. You are always figuring out what the hell to do with your life, and then the decisions you've made are always be changed by circumstance: Your wife gets a job in Kuala Lumpur or there's no one to take over your dead uncle's junkyard or in your mid-30s you develop an intense love of astrophysics that sends you back to school.

So don't put quite so much pressure on yourself. Study as broadly as you can; think practically but with the understanding that what you do as a job need not be the only thing you do (or even the only thing you do to make money).

In the end, a lot of what the hell you do with your life isn't even about what you do for a job but whom you love, whom you marry, whether you have kids, and whether you find passions and have the ability to pursue them. College is part of that process, for sure, but it's not the end of the line.

Would you rather own a flying whale or a talking rock?

Can I choose to own neither of these things? The one seems dangerous and the other potentially annoying. (I can't imagine what a rock would have to talk about.)

rocks are old and have seen the world and have maybe travelled across the seas and oceans and I bet they've seen some crazy stuff in their lifetime.

Like the same scenery for nearly centuries upon centuries.

Riveting.

what about the rocks that have been around since the dinosaurs or maybe the ice age froze them and then when they were thawed they ended up in a totally different part of the world?

what about the rocks deep in the oceans?

What about... SPACE ROCKS?

Yeah I guess we need to define the exact history and personal disposition of the talking rock in question.

How do cancer patients feel about their portrayal in A Fault In Our Stars?

Well, everyone who's talked to me about it has been very generous about it and have told me about the stuff that resonated with them or that they felt I got right.

But I'm sure I got a lot wrong, too. That's the nature of imagining, even if you spend a lot of time researching and talking to people. But so far the response from cancer survivors have been very positive.

Can it be sometimes stressful knowing that so many youth treat you as a role model? Do you find yourself being careful of what you say?

I mean, I don't want to get arrested, but I think most people probably don't want to get arrested.

I do sometimes feel a distance between the way I think of myself and the way other people--particularly young nerdfighters--think of me. But that's pretty common, and ultimately, I want to be a good role model, not so much because I want to model good behavior to my fans, but because I want to model good behavior to my son.

At what moment did you truly comprehend how big (in every sense of the word) Nerdfighteria, and your influence in it, had become?

I still don't comprehend it. I just returned from the National Book Festival, where there were 1,800 people in line to get their books signed by me. That's very difficult to get my head around.

My main concern is that we find ways as the nerdfighter community grows to remain a community, and to continue to work together to make interesting and beautiful stuff with each other.

In this sense, actually, reddit is a very good model. Reddit has grown exponentially in the last couple years, but there are still many subreddits that feel very community-focused and friendly.

What is your next book about?

For years, I thought the book after Paper Towns was going to be about six kids stranded on a desert island, and then I thought it would be a zombie apocalypse novel, and by promising my readers these books, I was totally lying to them, and now that makes me reluctant to talk about what I'm working on for fear that I will be a teasy teasy liar.

I'm working on a few different stories at the moment. It's hard to tell which of them, if any, will turn into a book. If I understood more about how to write books, I wouldn't have to travel down so many roads to nowhere, and I wouldn't go three or four years between novels.

I just wanted to say thank you for doing Crashcourse World History, I think it's the best series on Youtube at the moment and you've helped reignite my passion for history. Thanks :)

Thanks; I've never had so much fun making something. It's a great collaborative environment, and for many years, Hank and I have dreamed of being able to use YouTube to release really educational content that is free to all.

I need to know, how many episodes of World History are there and what are they about? I'm fairly hooked.

Also, I think you should ask Canadian nerdfighters to start a letter writing campaign to the Queen (or Stephen Harper, I guess) to get you off of that dumb list.

There will be about 42 episodes of Crash Course World History. After that we'll do a short series on how to read and why, possibly including some videos with writing tips.

After the first year, that's a big mystery at the moment. Crash Course is extremely expensive to produce; how and whether we'll continue to do it is an open question.

Could we do a kickstarter to help fund Crash Course?

It's possible, but I think you guys might underestimate how much educational video actually costs to make. But yes, it's definitely possible.

What fiction do you read?

I read pretty broadly. I love crime novels, spy thrillers, YA fiction, sf, so-called "literary fiction," even romance novels. Like, in the past few weeks I've read a Babysitters' Club book (held up pretty well), Scalzi's OLD MAN'S WAR, the new Michael Chabon book, Tayari Jones's SILVER SPARROW, D. T. Max's biography of David Foster Wallace, and a couple really good YA novels (one of which was super-hard sf of the old school: LOSERS IN SPACE by John Barnes).

Who's your favourite babysitter? I myself was quite the Dawn fan.

Claudia, no contest. BSC #26, Claudia and the Sad Goodbye, is one of the great achievements in American letters.

Do the people who edit and direct crashcourse come up with the ideas for the shows, or it it a mixture of yourself and them?

Also, congrats on being the only author to ever make this 19 year old man with a beard break down in tears in Birmingham airport after finishing TFIOS. DFTBA, I demand more peanutbutterface.

We work pretty closely with the educators and curriculum development folks who advise and write for the show when it comes to shaping the content for each episode of crashcourse. But ultimately the world history decisions are mine, and the biology decisions are Hank's, and any mistakes are ours alone.

I'm glad I made you cry, even if your tears brought shame and disgrace to your beard.

This is a question about KIVA. I am a Muslim Nerdfighter and I've been wanting to give loans with the Nerdfighter's group on KIVA for a long time. However, I have a problem with Interest because I am a muslim (I am not sure if I need to go into more specifics or if you are aware of this).

Would I have a problem with interest if I gave loans through KIVA?

There are a bunch of "loans" on kiva that are in line with Islamic banking practices (so they aren't really loans; they're essentially shared endeavors). There's actually a button you can click to only see Islamic banking style ventures.

Has anyone ever told you that you're ridiculously handsome?

Oh, go on.

Seriously, though, no. All my YouTube friends are always getting unsolicited naked pictures and marriage offers, but I think I am too old and/or too, like, uncle-ish for that kind of thing.

How have you felt the videos you make has affected the popularity of your books?

What is your favorite book?

Will Miss. State go 10-2 this year?

Have you ever been to a Liverpool game?

Fan of any MLS teams?

Favorite soccer player?

1. Most people who read my books have no idea that I make YouTube videos, but the popularity of the videos has been a hugely positive influence on book sales, because our community of viewers are extremely supportive and provide incredible activation energy for my books. (This is also true for things other than my books, like our kiva group..

2. I don't have a single favorite book.

3. No.

4. Yes.

5. I like Liverpool too deeply to care much about the MLS. I'm glad we have professional soccer in the US, and the quality of play is improving dramatically, but none of the teams currently playing in the MLS seem to be Liverpool FC, which really limits the league's appeal for me.

6. Steven Gerrard.

Not a liverpool fan at all (nufc all day), but i just wanted to say Justice for the 96. I am happy the truth is out.

Great to see the world of football come together to stand up for the Hillsborough victims. Thank you.

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Well, in The Fault in Our Stars I wanted to write about the Netherlands because most of it should technically be underwater. This is sort of the situation that Hazel finds herself in, also: Her lungs are constantly filling with fluid that must be drained by tubes, just as the Netherlands relies upon its dykes and canals to survive.

I wanted throughout the novel to provide all kinds of ways into thinking about our weird relationship with water, this compound that both makes life possible and also often makes lives end. The Netherlands seems a much better example of that tension than, for instance, a town like Venice, which is already pretty much abandoned.

Can you tell us a little bit about your early days as a writer? What was your first published material?

I wrote a lot--fiction, little humor pieces--in college, and then for a while I thought I was going to become an Episcopal minister.

I ended up not going to divinity school and instead got a temp job at a magazine called Booklist, the review journal of the American Library Association. Booklist punishes hundreds of book reviews every two weeks, and so I was surrounded both by books and people who loved them.

I started writing reviews for Booklist, mostly about early Islamic history and young adult novels. Then a few things happened more or less at once: I told my editor at Booklist that I wanted to write a novel (the book that became Looking for Alaska); Amy Krouse Rosenthal invited me to write a few short pieces for the NPR station in Chicago; and through old friends I was offered the chance to write for mental_floss magazine.

I tried to make the most of all these opportunities. At the same time, I was writing at night and on the weekends, sometimes stories about a children's hospital (parts of which ended up in The Fault in Our Stars 10 years later) and also stories about this kid at a boarding school in Alabama, which eventually became Looking for Alaska.

After I finished Alaska and spent about a year revising it with my mentor Ilene Cooper, we submitted it to publishers and it was eventually picked up (for a very, very low advance) by Penguin, who is still my publisher.

it was eventually picked up

Stephen King wrote about receiving the news that Carrie had been picked up in his book On Writing. He was so delirious with excitement that he went out and bought his wife a hair dryer.

Can you remember what you did when you got the news that Alaska was going to be published by a big-time literary force like Penguin?

I cried a lot. I sat in my office at Booklist and closed the door and cried for a long time. I don't know why.

Wuss.

touche.

What is the root of the term Nerdfighters? I only recently stumbled onto your channels (also, I hate StumbleUpon for making it IMPOSSIBLE to use the phrase "stumble (up)on" without people saying, "Oh! I didn't know you used StumbleUpon--" at which point I have to quickly respond, "I DON'T. I actually stumbled onto the information the old-fashioned way - by accident) and I have yet to watch through the vast backlog of videos searching for the day the term Nerdfighter was coined. So... That's my question. Where did your term Nerdfighter originate?

We didn't coin the term; nerdfighters did. It has its origins in this video from 2007.

So many questions!

When will the next Swindon Town video be?

Will you look at this picture and tell me what you think? http://i.imgur.com/3x8Nj.jpg

That is a pretty picture.

The Swindon Town Swoodilypoopers will begin their final season in FIFA 11 on Monday.

(I am a semi-professional FIFA player. I play with a fictional team I have created featuring two strikers, both named John Green, who are married to one another. I am notable for being the very worst semi-professional FIFA player in the entire world.)

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Your question. But also THE BOOK OF BLOOD AND SHADOW by Robin Wasserman. (Very good!)

John, what's your advice for people with social anxiety? Obviously there's therapy, medication, and other options for the long term. But I know that at least personally I have some days in which nothing seems to help. How do you get through the rough spots, even in general?

I have many days in which nothing seems to help. It is frustrating. At times it can feel absolutely claustrophobic, like these walls have been built around you and you can't think about anything except what's inside the walls, which is this endless cycle of fear and worry and terror. DFW, talking about depression not anxiety, wrote once that it feels like you're falling into a hole and then you BECOME the hole. That's my experience with anxiety, more or less: I fall into the anxiety, and then it overwhelms me, and then I just become the thing.

That isn't fun.

But what's worth remembering is that people emerge, all the time, from these periods and have much better days, days where they are able for instance to sit in an airport full of people for five or six hours at a time typing without freaking out.

I really do think you have to treat it like any other chronic illness: it's frustrating not to feel well, and it's frustrating having to work extremely hard to function, but it's just the way of things. So yes, therapy and medication. Treatment, just as you would treat a chronic disease like diabetes. That said, dealing with anxiety or any mental illness is hard work.

I wish you way more than luck.

What's one scene that you're most proud of writing?

That's a tough question. I like the set pieces in my books--the road trip in Paper Towns; the hog hunt in Katherines; things like that. But it's hard to know if those are scenes, really, and also I think in general an author's opinion of his or her work should not be trusted, because authors have terrible, terrible judgement. (Mark Twain, after all, thought his best book was Joan of Arc.)

How would you best characterize the influence of irony and detachment on current literature and culture/media?

Well, I think my work--both online and in print--stands in pretty aggressive opposition to ironic detachment.

How do you think your books would have faired without the promotion vlogbrothers gave you?

This is not to insinuate that your books aren't good or anything, i personally love LFA, but the boost from an audience the size of nerfightaria must be massive.

Well, my first two novels were published before I started making videos online. They both did well (Alaska did particularly well in part because it won the most important award in YA books, the Printz), and I was making a living as a writer. I think I'd probably still be making a living as a writer if I hadn't started vlogging with Hank. (And for the first eight months, almost every single person who watched a vlogbrothers video was a reader of my books.)

But there's no question that the videos (and now twitter and tumblr and so on) have given a tremendous boost to my books and allowed them to read a far broader audience than most so-called literary YA novels get. I'm very grateful for that.

Hi John Green!

I just wanted to let you know that you're my biggest inspiration to start writing creatively.

As for questions, what's the one thing you look forward to in the writing process? Or rather, what's your favourite part about writing?

I really enjoy revision. A lot of what I'm looking for when I write is that "click" feeling, as David Foster Wallace called it, that feeling that things are clicking into place and the puzzle is starting to look like a thing and not just a random collection of pieces.

That click feeling is more satisfying and exhilarating than anything else that happens to me in my daily life, and I'm always chasing it. I find that I experience it most when I'm revising, although when writing TFiOS there were many days in a row that just felt like click click click click click, which was so fun and exciting that it's difficult to describe.

I can't think of anything to ask you really, I just love your books and nerdfighters and all that jazz... well actually:

spoilers for TFIOS I remeber you answering a question about how someone didn't like Hazel and Augustus stooping in the book as they wanted the characters to be 'pure'. You rightly said there's nothing intrinsically good about dying a virgin or something to that effect. I was just wondering if you thought this kind of thinking was really problematic when it comes to broader ideas about young sexuality and how people get all antsy about it when dealing with young adult literature.

I think the whole idea of virginity is pretty crazy, when you think about it. And traditionally there's been a focus on adolescence and virginity; if adolescence is seen as the journey from innocence to experience, then a big part of the way that journey is traditionally constructed involves losing one's virginity.

But what the hell IS virginity, anyway? I think this is an outdated way of thinking about adolescence. It's an attempt to define a very complicated process (adolescence) with an event (the losing of virginity). Those attempts to turn processes into events usually fail, in my experience, and that's why I think virginity is kind of bullshit, both as a thing and as a way of marking adulthood.

Delayed flights suck. Heading anywhere special?

The most special place of all: home.

Are you optimistic or pessimistic about the future of humanity?

I'm optimistic that we have a future.