Most of these questions where taken from johngreenbooks.com
Questions about Writing and InspirationQ. Did the themes and ideas from stories you had abandoned in the past help shape TFIOS?
A. Yes, in a lot of ways. There are so many lines from the sequel and the desert island book that ended up in TFiOS in different ways. (“It was kind of a beautiful day,” which occurs at the end of TFiOS, was the first line of one of the drafts of the desert island book.)
The desert island book was primarily about how we behave around each other when we are scared, how fear makes us both more and less human. I don’t know what the sequel was about aside from trying to prove that I, too, could write fancy metafiction, but then I ended up including a lot of metafiction in TFiOS, so it found its way in as well.
I was thinking a lot about the relationship between books and their readers, and how the author of the book can get in the way of that relationship just as much as s/he can facilitate it, so I think that had a lot to do with shaping my thoughts onTFiOS.
Also, all three projects are about deprivation and how people respond to it. So basically I took so many spare parts from those other stories that there’s no way I’ll ever be able to finish them.
Q. Did you consider ending TFIOS midsentence?
A. I agree with Augustus that there is a contract between reader and writer and that not ending a book violates that contract. Also, I try really hard in my work generally not to do ostentatious things like ending books midsentence.
Q. Can you elaborate on this idea of a contract between author and reader?
A. I think the writer’s responsibility is to tell an honest story (which is also, I would argue, definitionally a hopeful story) and to make it as a gift to the reader.
The reader violates the contract when s/he reads poorly or distractedly or ungenerously. (It seems to me that mutual generosity is kind of the key to the reader-writer relationship. We are basically trying to give each other a gift, but it doesn’t work unless both of us are really trying.)
Q. How do you put so much meaning into a book meant for young adults?
A. Teenagers are plenty smart. I don’t sit around and worry whether teenagers are smart. I mean, most of the people currently reading The Scarlet Letter and The Great Gatsby…are teenagers.
Q. Are TFIOS references in early Vlogbrothers videos (such as talking about hurdles and the title “An Imperial Affliction”) intentional?
A. Those aren’t intentional easter eggs. If anything, I find them unfortunate, because any moment when you’re reading The Fault in Our Stars and get drawn out of the narrative and become conscious of the fact that it’s a story constructed by an author. But inevitably there’s a lot of overlap between my thoughts when I’m writing and my thoughts when I’m making videos, and sometimes the one shapes the other.
Q. Did any philosophers inspire your writing about the universe and oblivion?
A. Well, sure, definitely. Kierkegaard, etc. But the thinker who most deeply influenced my thoughts on the topic, and who gave me a vocabulary for talking about it, is Vi Hart.
Q. Did you intentionally draw a connection between Augustus and Hazel watching kids play on the bones and the reader getting enjoyment from a book about kids who will inevitably die young?
A. hahahaha no there’s nothing wrong at all with playing on bones. We’re all doing it all the time. I was struck by this in Vienna when I saw those kids breakdancing on top of the catacombs. To dance on the dead is not to dishonor them.
Q. Stephanie Meyer has said that her characters were real and that they decided where the plot would go. Is it like that for you?
A. So far as I can tell, if you say that, you’re saying one of two things:
1. I have this unconscious mind to which I have no access that can write books, and I just have to shut off my conscious mind and let my unconscious mind work.
or
2. A supernatural force came to me and whispered the words into my ear and I wrote them down.
Saying the second thing seems really presumptuous to me (like, saying that God wrote your book is a very, very bold thing to say). The first seems more plausible to me—I know that for many people the writing experience does not feel like it involves effort or consciousness—but for me that is not the case. I wrote the book. I was conscious of the fact that I was writing a book while I was writing it. I was conscious of the fact that I was using words to try to tell a story that would find life in your mind.
Q. By answering so many questions about your book, aren’t you kind of teaching it in a way? Or creating sparknotes of reflections?
A. Legit question. My only defense is that this is for people who’ve already read the book, which is rather different from sparknotes. :)
Q. Due to the success of TFIOS, will your books now be marketed to all age groups?
A. I am not interested in publishing books for adults. I like my job. I like my editor. I like my publisher. I am very grateful that so many adults are reading The Fault in Our Stars, but I really like writing and publishing books for teenagers, and it’s difficult for me to imagine wanting to do anything else as a writer.
Q. Did you ever consider having another character tell the story?
A. Yes, Isaac, because it would have fit in nicely with how epics usually work, complete with being told by a blind guy. But in the end I wanted to give Hazel the voice of her own story, particularly since that is so often denied the dying. (We read about them a lot more than we read them.)
Q. In TFIOS, you say that there are fourteen dead people for every living person. However, in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, it is stated that there are more people alive than have ever died. Who is right, Augustus or Oskar?
A. Oh, Oskar is overwhelmingly wrong. (In his defense, I think he is like nine years old.) It’s a nice moment in that book, when he imagines that there aren’t enough skulls for everyone alive to play Hamlet, but yeah, that’s just total horseshit. There are plenty of skulls. We could all have freaking juggling acts with all the skulls.
Q. Does answering all of these questions annoy or offend you? Do you ever want your readers to take the book as it is without asking a bunch of questions about metaphors and deeper meanings?
A. I feel bad that I can’t answer more of them, but I never feel anything except lucky to have readers who read my books with such care and thoughtfulness.
That said, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with what Salinger called reading and running—like, I don’t think that critical analysis or whatever is the only reason we read fiction or the only enjoyable thing about reading (or writing) fiction.
There are plenty of ways to read a book, and I’m grateful to anyone who finds my work encouraging or useful.
Q. What did you do with previous drafts of the novel?
A. I save every draft of the novel as a different file name (there are several hundred file names related to TFiOS). So it’s possible to chart the edits and rewrites of the novel over time, but the book I published is the only one I want to publish and I’m not inclined to show off all the terrible sentences I wrote before writing the (hopefully not terrible) sentences that ended up in the book.
However, all this stuff will go to a university library when I die, so if you are really inclined, and you outlive me, you can view it eventually.
Q. When writing TFIOS, were you more focused on telling the story at first or the metaphorical meaning and the symbols in the book?
A. I don’t think of story and symbols as separate, really. They emerge from the same place, a desire to go on a journey with the reader that will be interesting (and hopefully helpful) to both of us. So I don’t sit down and say, like, “Green will be the color of all the dreams we were foolish to dream,” or anything like that, because then I think it usually ends up seeming clunky and obvious and inauthentic.
The truth is that metaphor and symbol are all around us, and that we are constantly reading our lives and the world symbolically. I want figurative language and symbols to be as deeply integrated into the story as they are into our lives.
Q. Peter says that the Dutch Tulip Man represents God. Have you ever put in a character that represents an idea like this or something similar?
A. Sure.
The Dutch Tulip Man. :)
Q. TFIOS seems to connect intelligence with atheism as opposed to a willingness and openness to ideas. Why is this?
Well, I think Augustus is pretty smart, and he does not present an atheistic worldview (or at least an inherently atheistic worldview), nor does Hazel’s pretty smart dad, whose argument about the universe wanting to be noticed perpetually is a very theistic/faith-based/spiritual kind of thing to say. (Like, embracing even the possibility of concepts like forever or consciousness that survives death is impossible in a rigidly atheistic worldview.)
Augustus’s parents, who I think are also pretty smart but perhaps not in the ostentatious way that Hazel and Augustus are, are clearly religious people.
And the last words of the book represent a moment where the author himself perhaps interjects his own let-us-not-deem-consciousness-temporary-just-quite-yet with the present tense marriage vows that could be read as a statement about celestial marriage or a marriage that survives death or etc. if you wanted to read it that way.
Q. When you were writing TFIOS, did you also switch from calling him Augustus to calling him Gus? Do you see him now as the boy he was at the end rather than the manic pixie dream boy he was at the beginning?
A. Well, you have to remember that I am 34, so the bravura performances of teenagers do not impress me in quite the same way that they did when I was 16.
(Also, I was writing a novel, and I was very conscious that I was writing a novel. I am not one of those writers who believes that, like, the book is writing itself or that God is telling me which words to write down or whatever.)
So I always saw Gus as fragile and frail, even at the beginning of the book, when he (for example) misuses big words and is clearly not quite the guy he’s trying to play. And obviously I like that boy more.
Q. Have you ever had a similar experience to Van Houten’s in terms of meeting a fan, like Hazel, who was frustrated that you couldn’t give her the answers she was looking for?
A. Yes, this happens all the time. It happens a lot with Looking for Alaska, and now it is happening even more with TFiOS, which surprises me, because I did not think the ending of TFiOS was particularly ambiguous. (To be fair, I have a pretty high tolerance for ambiguity, I guess.)
I understand the impulse, I guess, particularly since many contemporary readers have read a lot of book series, which leave cliffhanger after cliffhanger before wrapping things up with some marriages and crazily named children.
But I genuinely feel unqualified to tell you what happens after the end of the book, and to make something up—as Van Houten briefly attempts to—feels really disingenuous.
In general, I personally agree with a lot of what Van Houten says in the novel. He’s like a drunk, dickish version of myself, basically.
Q. Who is Esther?
A. Esther was a nerdfighter who died of cancer in August of 2010. She and I were friends for a couple years before that, and I am friends with her friends and with her family.
You can watch her YouTube videos here and learn about the organization her family set up in her memory here.
Q. How much of Esther went into the novel? What parts were specifically inspired by her? Did she ever get to see parts of it before she died?
A. Esther did not see any of the book before she died. (It did not feature a character named Hazel with thyroid cancer when she died, either. It was a vastly different story.)
So much of the story was inspired by her and my friendship with her and my affection for her family and friends, but I didn’t take very many specific things (except for superficial stuff like the oxygen and whatnot).
What inspired me most was Esther’s unusual mix of teenagerness and empathy: She was a very outwardly focused person, very conscious of and attentive to her friends and family. But she was also silly and funny and totally normal. And in our conversations about heroism and strength or whatever, she was very conscious of cliches (many of which I threw at her) but mostly unconvinced by them.
I just really liked Esther. That was maybe the biggest thing. I really liked her, and I was really pissed off after she died, and I had to write my way through it, because I was desperately looking for some hope in it. (I am still pretty pissed off about it, for the record.)
All that said, I really don’t want to seem to be appropriating Esther’s story, which belongs to her and to her family and not to me. Hazel is a fictional character, and she is in many important ways very different from the person Esther was.
Q. In Augutus’s first heroic death in pixel form, he covers the grenade to prevent the blast from harming the school children. Later, Hazel refers to herself as a grenade. Was this a coincidence?
A. I was conscious of that connection when writing, yes. I wrote the video game scene in a very early draft of the novel, years and years ago, and then the first time Hazel imagines herself as a grenade appeared in revisions (probably in early 2011? I think before we went to Amsterdam), and I got the idea from the earlier scene.
Whether it’s a coincidence in the story is up to the reader to decide, I guess?
Q. What portion of the novel did you enjoy writing the most?
A. The beginning was really fun to write—Hazel making fun of Patrick and all that. I’m kind of a Patrick in real life, and I’m very conscious of it: Like, it’s super easy to make fun of me for being this hugely earnest Internet persona, and I guess I am really narcissistic because I really enjoy making fun of myself in fiction. (See also, Peter Van Houten.)
Q. You said in a Tumblr post that some of your favorite parts of your desert island story ended up in TFIOS. What are these parts?
A. I wrote like 40,000 words of the desert island story and the only things I really liked were:
1. The sentence, “It was kind of a beautiful day.”
and
2. This rant about Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and its weird, paternalistic, imperialist insistence that humans cannot be fully human when they are sick or deprived of necessities, when in fact the truth is that humanness is always transformed by whatever we are in want of, and we are always in want of something.
and
3. A shoe-shopping flashback.
All three of these things ended up in TFiOS in one form or another.
Q. You said that TFIOS was once a very different book. What was it like? Was it always about two kids with cancer?
A. It was about like a dozen kids with cancer who created a club called the Dead Person’s Society in a cave (ridiculous) near the children’s hospital (doubly ridiculous) and they’d sneak out of the hospital together and visit the cave and convene the DPS (triply ridiculous).
It was basically a very flimsy, high-concept way of allowing me to think through my own thoughts and angers about death and suffering and so on. It was not good.
Q. How much of TFIOS came from Sarah? Did she help you a lot in writing?
A. Sarah, did you submit a question anon?
Sarah helped in every possible way; it is impossible to list or even verbalize all the ways she shaped the book through her readings of it, our conversations, our life together, etc.
Q. Does Sarah like the book?
A. She does like it, yeah. It’s her favorite of my books, I think.
Q. What did Hank say when he first read TFIOS?
A. Honestly, I think he said that he thought it was going to change my life a lot and that I didn’t really know what I was getting into. (That proved prophetic, as Hank usually does.)
And then he told me that I had to keep making vlogbrothers videos no matter what.
Q. Why do you refer to TFIOS as a “problem” that you’re glad to be done with? Why were you so ready to be done with it?
A. I mean, for ten years of my life, I tried to write this book and it taunted me and it sucked and it kept sucking and nothing I could do for years and years made it suck less, and then finally I was given a way into it and I worked very hard to make it the best book that I could possibly make it, but books will always be a collaboration between reader and writer, and at some point I have to stop doing my job so I can start letting you do your job.
I mean that a book is a problem in that it is composed out of meaningless scratches on a page that must be translated into ideas that live inside your head, and you use a set of skills (literacy, critical thinking, etc.) to make that happen. I don’t mean that it is an UNFORTUNATE problem; I just mean that it is a thing that has to be created by both of us, like a crossword puzzle or something.
Q. Is it hard for you to kill a character? How do you go about doing that and how do you know it’s the right thing to do as opposed to gratuitous hurt for the characters?
A. 1. I don’t feel like I’m killing anyone. The person is dying, and that sucks, but I don’t feel responsible for it any more than I feel responsible when a friend in real life dies.
2. With TFiOS, for me, there is no book without death. You cannot meaningfully confront the universe’s indifference to us without seeing the horrific suffering and injustice and awfulness of what really happens to real people who do not deserve to suffer and die. When writing the novel (and really throughout my writing career), I was very angry about this, very angry that people die for no good reason, and very dissatisfied with all the flimsy, Encouragement-y things that people say in the wake of such tragedies. So honestly, I wasn’t trying to make you feel anything gratuitous; I just could think of no other way to lay bare the absolute hideousness of living in a world where parents have to bury their children. And we live in that world, Humans have always lived in that world, and always will.
3. The challenge—and this is not just a challenge when writing a novel but also when, like, trying to get out of bed every day—is to acknowledge these truth and still live a hopeful, productive life. Are the only options 1. lying to yourself or 2. nihilism? I believe not. I believe there is great beauty and meaning to be found and constructed in this life, but we must find and construct that meaning in this world, and to do that, we must be honest about this world.
Q. Did you have any second thoughts about the way in which you described the degeneration of Augustus’s health in his final days?
A. Well, I didn’t want to bullshit the reader, but I also didn’t want to be gratuitous about it. I left the worst of it off the page, I guess, but I don’t really regret that. You might be asking whether I regret being so explicit, in which case the answer is definitely not. Our literature has enough novels that glorify suffering as transcendently beautiful.
Q. Was TFIOS edited from the content you created from NaNoWriMo a few years back?
A. No. Everything I wrote for NaNoWriMo was about a zombie apocalypse caused by corn monoculture.
Q. Where do you see yourself in the story? Do you see youself as Patrick?
A. I do see myself as Patrick-like in a lot of ways, yes. Also PVH. Also Hazel’s dad, I guess. I identify personally closer with the (male) adults in the novel than the teenagers, I guess.
Q. Did your time as a chaplain and your interactions with Esther contribute to your honest portrayal of the mindset associated with illness? What were the other sources? What about the medical details?
A. The time I spent as a chaplain was very helpful, because I got to know a lot of different people with many different kinds of cancer. But for the first several years after my months as a chaplain, all the writing I tried to do about illness was terrible.
So I do think knowing and caring about Esther was probably the most important thing in terms of thinking about the mindsets and emotional realities of chronic illness. I also talked a lot to families of people with cancer and I read a lot of books about cancer, which were extremely helpful. But if I hadn’t known Esther, I never would have written The Fault in Our Stars. I might’ve eventually finished a book about adolescent illness of some kind, but it wouldn’t have been this one.
Q. How did the birth of Henry during the writing process affect TFiOS regarding your worldview of parents/children/humanity?
A. I couldn’t write the book until I understood that the love between a parent and child (like many other kinds of love) is literally stronger than death: As long as either person survives, the relationship survives.
So my grandmother may be dead, but she is still my grandmother. Augustus may be dead, but he is still the great star-crossed love of Hazel’s life.
I didn’t really understand that until I got to know Henry.
Q. It seems like there’s a symbolic reason behind most things in this book. Is that just the way you write or did you specifically choose to write TFiOS in this way? Why?
A. Well, I always want to write books that stand up to re-reading, but to be clear, there’s more than one good way to read a book. The great thing about figurative language and symbols and the like in novels is that you don’t have to be conscious of them for them to work.
Like, let’s say you read The Catcher in the Rye and somehow your English teacher doesn’t tell you about the red hunting cap, and so you read the whole damn novel without ever thinking much one way or the other about this hat Holden keeps putting on and taking off.
Even if you haven’t thought about any of this consciously at all, there’s still a pretty good chance that something inside you will break open when Phoebe puts the hat on Holden at the end of the book, because it’s such a small and kind and humane gesture. And maybe if you’re heavily invested in the red hunting cap, that moment will hit you harder, but it will hit you regardless.
But the red hunting cap isn’t what makes Catcher good, and if TFiOS is good, it isn’t because of any symbols or metaphors in isolation. Catcher is a great book because it lets you see the world out of someone else’s eyes; it gives you the rare opportunity to escape the prison of your consciousness and imagine in a big and complex and generous way what it would be like to be Holden Caulfield. All the language in the novel exists to make your experience of Holden’s life richer and more compelling and more real.
Questions about Why I Wrote What I WroteQ. Why America’s Next Top Model?
A. It just seemed to me—and I say this respectfully—like both the most reprehensible and the both formatted (i.e., functionally scripted) of the competitive reality shows I’d seen.
Q. What made you decide to make Hazel’s father the weaker one?
A. Well, I wanted to ignore traditional gender roles whenever possible in the novel, because I was kind of working in the Romantic Epic genre, which tends to have very narrowly defined gender roles (the man is the protector; the woman suffers beautifully; etc) and I wanted to write a different kind of Romantic Epic. (A much smaller one, for starters, about disease instead of war/politics/royal families/etc.)
Q. Why did you give the characters the cancers you gave them in the book?
A. 1. I did quite a lot of research on cancer, probably more than a hypochondriac should. I am particularly indebted to the books I cite in the acknowledgements, both of which I read more than once. (Also, my father-in-law is a cancer surgeon.)
2. I’ve talked about this elsewhere, but I think cancer is to the contemporary world what tuberculosis was to the 19th century: It’s this seemingly random, capricious disease that strikes old and young alike, that sometimes kills you and other times doesn’t, and that we don’t understand very well. And this randomness/indifference was really important to me, because I wanted to think about how/whether we can be hopeful in a universe that is (apparently) entirely indifferent toward its inhabitants.
3. I gave Gus osteosarcoma because it’s a common adolescent cancer and can go quiet for a long while before roaring back, and I gave Hazel thyroid cancer with mets in her lungs because A. i was fairly familiar with it (it’s similar to what Esther had), and B. I wanted her to have some kind of tumors in her lungs because it allowed me to have the water metaphor.
It sounds so weird and cold and calculating to talk about it that way, but…yeah. Hopefully that answers your questions, and good luck on your path to oncology, a great and noble profession.
Q. In TFIOS there’s minimal jargon-y terms (such as the specific subdivisions and motorways referenced in Looking for Alaska and Paper Towns), did you do this consciously with your international readers in mind?
A. That’s a really interesting question, because it makes me wonder to what extent I’m writing with an eye toward the international readers of my novels. (Some relatively high percentage of my readers are not American.) Certainly, I was not aware of doing that: I didn’t think, and never think, “Oh, I need to write it this way so that it will play in Austria” or whatever. When I’m writing, consciously at least, I only think about what will in my opinion best serve the story.
But it’s impossible to say for sure if/whether/how commercial concerns factor into creative decisions, because you can say all day that you turn that stuff off when you’re writing, and I hope that I do, but I have no actual way of proving whether I do.
Anyway, in general I did want TFiOS to feel more, like, out of time and place than any of my previous novels, because that’s how romantic epics tend to feel, and I was very much trying to write a little epic.
Q. Why did you have Hazel and Augustus do “adult” activities (i.e. traveling the world, getting drunk, having sex, etc.) while they were still young? I thought that one of the small blessings of dying young would be never losing innocence. What was your thinking behind this?
A. Let me assure you that it is no blessing to die without having had sex.
Hazel and Augustus, like all very sick teenagers, are caught in an in-between space: They are similar to other teenagers, but they’re also similar to old people in an important way (i.e., they are not allowed the luxury of feeling that life is a thing that will just go on forever). I wanted to try to capture that in the plot of the story (and I also wanted to acknowledge that sick and disabled people are still sexual people, and that there’s nothing wrong with their sexuality, which I guess was a little preachy of me, but so it goes.)
Also, they don’t get drunk. They have two glasses of champagne!
Q. Why did you put Kaitlyn in the book? Why would Hazel be friends with someone like her?
A. Oh I quite like Kaitlyn. I mean, one of the things you can’t see very well because the novel is written from Hazel’s perspective is that Hazel is 1. very beautiful, and 2. was pretty popular when she attended school. She just hasn’t attended school for a long time.
We have this idea that the opposite of “popular” is “smart.” (We nerds are particularly found of this idea.) But in fact there are many popular people who are also brilliant and deeply intellectually engaged. (Kaitlyn is maybe not such a person, but Hazel certainly is.)
As for why I put Kaitlyn in the book: I wanted the reader to be able to have a few moments of glimpsing Hazel’s life before illness, which was so radically different from the live she lives in the book, and I wanted the reader to feel the distance between A Regular Life in High School and The Life That Hazel Has Now.
Q. Why did you decide to name the hamster Sisyphus?
A. Well, Sisyphus is always pushing a rock up a hill without ever getting anywhere, and hamsters are always running around on a wheel without ever getting anywhere. That’s all I was thinking about, although again, books belong to their readers, and if there’s a better/more evocative/more useful metaphor to be drawn from it, then yay!
Q. Is there a reason you chose to not write Gus’s death in a more dramatic way?
A. Well, the actual moment of people’s deaths tend 1. not to be peaceful, and 2. not to be romantic or poignant or anything other than violent and horrible. Plus 3. Hazel and Gus are in love, but they’ve only known each other for a few months, and it seemed most likely to me that his immediate family would be alone with him at the end of his life.
I also felt like I’d put the reader (and the characters) through enough.
Q. Where did you get the name “The Price of Dawn”?
A. Honestly someone suggested it on twitter and I loved it, but it became in the midst of so many @replies that I could never find the person who suggested it so as to properly thank/acknowledge them. If anyone can find The Price of Dawn person, let me know!
Q. Did you say “Genies” instead of “Make-a-Wish” because of legal reasons?
A. I said Genies instead of Make-a-Wish because there are important differences between the way the Genies work in the book and the way the Make-a-Wish Foundation works in real life. (Also, there are many organizations similar to Make-a-Wish in their mission, although M-a-W is by far the most famous.)
It was important to me that the readers feel like the Genies have basically endless resources so you wouldn’t think about whether H & A could do this or that, when the truth of such organizations—like all nonprofits—is that there’s a lot they can’t do.
Q. Why did you choose “okay” and “always”?
A. Well, always is just an inherently ridiculous concept, but of course you want to say it to people you love, right? You want to promise them that you will always love them, that you will always take care of them, that they needn’t worry because you’re always going to be there. You won’t always be there, because at some point you’ll be dead or stuck in traffic or in love with someone else or whatever.
Most of us (me included) don’t think about the ridiculousness of what we’re actually saying when we say, “I’ll love you forever*,” or “”I will always remember this day,” or, “I’ll never forget** you” or whatever. Like, I say those things all the time, like most people do. But Hazel and Augustus are both a lot more measured in the way they imagine themselves and their love for/responsibilities to other people, hence them adopting “okay” as the word that serves as an expression of their love for each other.
* It’s important to note that forever is not a long time just as infinity is not a large number. Forever is infinite, and it’s a very bold to make declarative sentences about infinities.
** This seems to me a very fate-tempting thing to say. Like, what if you develop dementia?
Q. Why did you pick the title and how does it relate to the novel?
A. First off, thanks to nerdfighter Rosi for contextualizing the quote for me in a way that made me want to use it as a title in the first place.
So there’s this moment in the play Julius Caesar where one Roman nobelman says to another, “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars but in ourselves, that we are underlings.” And in the context of the play, that quotation makes perfect sense—these two guys did not suffer some unjust destiny; they made decisions that led them to their fates.
However, that quote has since been decontextualized over and over and used universally as a way of saying that the fault is not in the stars (i.e., fate/luck/whatever) but in individual people.
Well, that’s of course ridiculous. There is plenty of fault in our stars. The world is a profoundly unjust place in which suffering is unfairly distributed, and in all of my novels but especially this one, I am trying to find ways to live honestly and hopefully in the worldwithout ignoring/denying the universe’s cold and painful indifference to us.*
The whole problem of reconciling ourselves to the fault in our stars seems like a really big problem to me—and not just an abstract, philosophical problem but a problem that has to be solved in order for us to get up every day and get dressed and brush our teeth and try to live full, productive lives.
* Well, I can’t say categorically that the universe is indifferent to us. But I think the way the universe looks and the way it would look if it were totally indifferent to us are disconcertingly similar, if that makes any sense.
Q. Why do you use past tense?
A. Well, the last sentence is not in the past tense, just to be clear.
I wrote the book in the past tense so the reader would know that Hazel is telling the story of something that happened to her in the past—at least until the last sentence.
Q. Why didn’t anyone see Monica after she broke up with Isaac?
A. Well, she is a voiceless character. (You never directly hear her speak, except for the word “always.”) I wanted Hazel to be aware of this voicelessness in a way that Gus and Isaac weren’t, and to stand up for her even when it was very difficult to do so. (Throughout the novel, she repeatedly defends Monica and seeks to understand her, while the boys just want to put her into the easy category of Enemy.)
Hazel does this quite a bit—she’s a very empathetic person and repeatedly defends and seeks to understand people and be generous to them. (See also when she doesn’t get mad at Augustus for hiding his diagnosis from her, or when she delivers the eulogy full of Encouragements).
This compassion breaks down only once, I think—when she sees all the posts on Gus’s wall about how he’ll live forever in the memory of his acquaintances.
I wanted her to break there so the reader really felt Hazel falling apart—even the core ideas of humility and compassion that make her up abandon her in the crush of loss and grief.
Q. Why do you make your characters physically beautiful?
A. The characters in the novel who are romantically interested in each other often describe each other as beautiful not because the’re objectively beautiful but because they find each other attractive. (I do think Hazel is really objectively good-looking, probably, but didn’t I give her enough problems?!) But in books like LfA and Paper Towns, part of what I was trying to do was explore the weird and worship-ey relationship contemporary American boys in high school often have with the girls they admire from afar, an attraction that is usually seen pretty positively even though I think it is kind of sick and crazy to treat a person like a precious object.
Q. Why did you make Augustus and Hazel perfect? They seem too flawless.
A. I don’t know how you can say that Hazel does not have one huge terrible flaw when it is repeatedly stated throughout the novel that she regularly watches America’s Next Top Model.
Q. Why was Caroline Mathers included? Why was she portrayed the way she was?
A. I didn’t want to sentimentalize or romanticize anything in the book. And one of the most common ways that we sentimentalize death and dying is by talking about the dead or dying person’s “beautiful soul,” or just generally by talking about the soul and its imperishability and resilience and so on.
But when I worked at the hospital, I saw several young men and women with brain tumors whose personalities and spirits were utterly transformed by their disease, which calls into question the whole idea of a soul.
I was so tired of the idea that suffering is transcendent, and that cancer suffering in particular strengthens you and makes you better. That can be true for many people, but it’s an oversimplification, because there are cancers that attack parts of the brain and turn kind, generous people into selfish, impulsive, cruel people.
I wanted to make that clear, to make it clear that when we talk about the human soul we had better do so carefully and thoughtfully, because otherwise we dehumanize people like Caroline Mathers whose diseases attack and transform their personalities.
Also, I didn’t want Gus and Hazel to be this Pure As The Driven Snow, Never Loved Before couple, because I also dislike the convention of the epic romance genre wherein the doomed lovers are somehow more innocent and golden than the rest of us. I wanted Gus and Hazel to be people, just regular nice smart people, who also happen to have a chronic illness.
Q. Why did Gus die?
A. Every single human being alive on the entire planet is going to die, including you. The question for me is not why we die; the question is what constitutes a full and well-lived life.
I wanted to argue that a good life need not be a long one.
Q. Why did you choose to have Van Houten be a Swedish rap fan? Was it simply a way to make Van Houten quirkier than he already was or do you listen to Swedish rap yourself?
A. Well, for starters I really like Swedish hip hop, and especially Afasi och Filthy. But yeah, I wanted Van Houten to be the kind of guy who cultivates his own eccentricity, which is basically the most narcissistic and self-indulgent variety of human being I’ve ever come across.
Q. Why did you choose not to address hell in TFIOS?
A. I really haven’t known any terminally ill people who lived in fear of hell. Maybe that’s just my personal biased experience, but yeah.
(Also this is definitely a personal bias: I just don’t find hell very interesting theologically.)
Questions about Writing and InspirationQ. Did the themes and ideas from stories you had abandoned in the past help shape TFIOS?
A. Yes, in a lot of ways. There are so many lines from the sequel and the desert island book that ended up in TFiOS in different ways. (“It was kind of a beautiful day,” which occurs at the end of TFiOS, was the first line of one of the drafts of the desert island book.)
The desert island book was primarily about how we behave around each other when we are scared, how fear makes us both more and less human. I don’t know what the sequel was about aside from trying to prove that I, too, could write fancy metafiction, but then I ended up including a lot of metafiction in TFiOS, so it found its way in as well.
I was thinking a lot about the relationship between books and their readers, and how the author of the book can get in the way of that relationship just as much as s/he can facilitate it, so I think that had a lot to do with shaping my thoughts onTFiOS.
Also, all three projects are about deprivation and how people respond to it. So basically I took so many spare parts from those other stories that there’s no way I’ll ever be able to finish them.
Q. Did you consider ending TFIOS midsentence?
A. I agree with Augustus that there is a contract between reader and writer and that not ending a book violates that contract. Also, I try really hard in my work generally not to do ostentatious things like ending books midsentence.
Q. Can you elaborate on this idea of a contract between author and reader?
A. I think the writer’s responsibility is to tell an honest story (which is also, I would argue, definitionally a hopeful story) and to make it as a gift to the reader.
The reader violates the contract when s/he reads poorly or distractedly or ungenerously. (It seems to me that mutual generosity is kind of the key to the reader-writer relationship. We are basically trying to give each other a gift, but it doesn’t work unless both of us are really trying.)
Q. How do you put so much meaning into a book meant for young adults?
A. Teenagers are plenty smart. I don’t sit around and worry whether teenagers are smart. I mean, most of the people currently reading The Scarlet Letter and The Great Gatsby…are teenagers.
Q. Are TFIOS references in early Vlogbrothers videos (such as talking about hurdles and the title “An Imperial Affliction”) intentional?
A. Those aren’t intentional easter eggs. If anything, I find them unfortunate, because any moment when you’re reading The Fault in Our Stars and get drawn out of the narrative and become conscious of the fact that it’s a story constructed by an author. But inevitably there’s a lot of overlap between my thoughts when I’m writing and my thoughts when I’m making videos, and sometimes the one shapes the other.
Q. Did any philosophers inspire your writing about the universe and oblivion?
A. Well, sure, definitely. Kierkegaard, etc. But the thinker who most deeply influenced my thoughts on the topic, and who gave me a vocabulary for talking about it, is Vi Hart.
Q. Did you intentionally draw a connection between Augustus and Hazel watching kids play on the bones and the reader getting enjoyment from a book about kids who will inevitably die young?
A. hahahaha no there’s nothing wrong at all with playing on bones. We’re all doing it all the time. I was struck by this in Vienna when I saw those kids breakdancing on top of the catacombs. To dance on the dead is not to dishonor them.
Q. Stephanie Meyer has said that her characters were real and that they decided where the plot would go. Is it like that for you?
A. So far as I can tell, if you say that, you’re saying one of two things:
1. I have this unconscious mind to which I have no access that can write books, and I just have to shut off my conscious mind and let my unconscious mind work.
or
2. A supernatural force came to me and whispered the words into my ear and I wrote them down.
Saying the second thing seems really presumptuous to me (like, saying that God wrote your book is a very, very bold thing to say). The first seems more plausible to me—I know that for many people the writing experience does not feel like it involves effort or consciousness—but for me that is not the case. I wrote the book. I was conscious of the fact that I was writing a book while I was writing it. I was conscious of the fact that I was using words to try to tell a story that would find life in your mind.
Q. By answering so many questions about your book, aren’t you kind of teaching it in a way? Or creating sparknotes of reflections?
A. Legit question. My only defense is that this is for people who’ve already read the book, which is rather different from sparknotes. :)
Q. Due to the success of TFIOS, will your books now be marketed to all age groups?
A. I am not interested in publishing books for adults. I like my job. I like my editor. I like my publisher. I am very grateful that so many adults are reading The Fault in Our Stars, but I really like writing and publishing books for teenagers, and it’s difficult for me to imagine wanting to do anything else as a writer.
Q. Did you ever consider having another character tell the story?
A. Yes, Isaac, because it would have fit in nicely with how epics usually work, complete with being told by a blind guy. But in the end I wanted to give Hazel the voice of her own story, particularly since that is so often denied the dying. (We read about them a lot more than we read them.)
Q. In TFIOS, you say that there are fourteen dead people for every living person. However, in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, it is stated that there are more people alive than have ever died. Who is right, Augustus or Oskar?
A. Oh, Oskar is overwhelmingly wrong. (In his defense, I think he is like nine years old.) It’s a nice moment in that book, when he imagines that there aren’t enough skulls for everyone alive to play Hamlet, but yeah, that’s just total horseshit. There are plenty of skulls. We could all have freaking juggling acts with all the skulls.
Q. Does answering all of these questions annoy or offend you? Do you ever want your readers to take the book as it is without asking a bunch of questions about metaphors and deeper meanings?
A. I feel bad that I can’t answer more of them, but I never feel anything except lucky to have readers who read my books with such care and thoughtfulness.
That said, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with what Salinger called reading and running—like, I don’t think that critical analysis or whatever is the only reason we read fiction or the only enjoyable thing about reading (or writing) fiction.
There are plenty of ways to read a book, and I’m grateful to anyone who finds my work encouraging or useful.
Q. What did you do with previous drafts of the novel?
A. I save every draft of the novel as a different file name (there are several hundred file names related to TFiOS). So it’s possible to chart the edits and rewrites of the novel over time, but the book I published is the only one I want to publish and I’m not inclined to show off all the terrible sentences I wrote before writing the (hopefully not terrible) sentences that ended up in the book.
However, all this stuff will go to a university library when I die, so if you are really inclined, and you outlive me, you can view it eventually.
Q. When writing TFIOS, were you more focused on telling the story at first or the metaphorical meaning and the symbols in the book?
A. I don’t think of story and symbols as separate, really. They emerge from the same place, a desire to go on a journey with the reader that will be interesting (and hopefully helpful) to both of us. So I don’t sit down and say, like, “Green will be the color of all the dreams we were foolish to dream,” or anything like that, because then I think it usually ends up seeming clunky and obvious and inauthentic.
The truth is that metaphor and symbol are all around us, and that we are constantly reading our lives and the world symbolically. I want figurative language and symbols to be as deeply integrated into the story as they are into our lives.
Q. Peter says that the Dutch Tulip Man represents God. Have you ever put in a character that represents an idea like this or something similar?
A. Sure.
The Dutch Tulip Man. :)
Q. TFIOS seems to connect intelligence with atheism as opposed to a willingness and openness to ideas. Why is this?
Well, I think Augustus is pretty smart, and he does not present an atheistic worldview (or at least an inherently atheistic worldview), nor does Hazel’s pretty smart dad, whose argument about the universe wanting to be noticed perpetually is a very theistic/faith-based/spiritual kind of thing to say. (Like, embracing even the possibility of concepts like forever or consciousness that survives death is impossible in a rigidly atheistic worldview.)
Augustus’s parents, who I think are also pretty smart but perhaps not in the ostentatious way that Hazel and Augustus are, are clearly religious people.
And the last words of the book represent a moment where the author himself perhaps interjects his own let-us-not-deem-consciousness-temporary-just-quite-yet with the present tense marriage vows that could be read as a statement about celestial marriage or a marriage that survives death or etc. if you wanted to read it that way.
Q. When you were writing TFIOS, did you also switch from calling him Augustus to calling him Gus? Do you see him now as the boy he was at the end rather than the manic pixie dream boy he was at the beginning?
A. Well, you have to remember that I am 34, so the bravura performances of teenagers do not impress me in quite the same way that they did when I was 16.
(Also, I was writing a novel, and I was very conscious that I was writing a novel. I am not one of those writers who believes that, like, the book is writing itself or that God is telling me which words to write down or whatever.)
So I always saw Gus as fragile and frail, even at the beginning of the book, when he (for example) misuses big words and is clearly not quite the guy he’s trying to play. And obviously I like that boy more.
Q. Have you ever had a similar experience to Van Houten’s in terms of meeting a fan, like Hazel, who was frustrated that you couldn’t give her the answers she was looking for?
A. Yes, this happens all the time. It happens a lot with Looking for Alaska, and now it is happening even more with TFiOS, which surprises me, because I did not think the ending of TFiOS was particularly ambiguous. (To be fair, I have a pretty high tolerance for ambiguity, I guess.)
I understand the impulse, I guess, particularly since many contemporary readers have read a lot of book series, which leave cliffhanger after cliffhanger before wrapping things up with some marriages and crazily named children.
But I genuinely feel unqualified to tell you what happens after the end of the book, and to make something up—as Van Houten briefly attempts to—feels really disingenuous.
In general, I personally agree with a lot of what Van Houten says in the novel. He’s like a drunk, dickish version of myself, basically.
Q. Who is Esther?
A. Esther was a nerdfighter who died of cancer in August of 2010. She and I were friends for a couple years before that, and I am friends with her friends and with her family.
You can watch her YouTube videos here and learn about the organization her family set up in her memory here.
Q. How much of Esther went into the novel? What parts were specifically inspired by her? Did she ever get to see parts of it before she died?
A. Esther did not see any of the book before she died. (It did not feature a character named Hazel with thyroid cancer when she died, either. It was a vastly different story.)
So much of the story was inspired by her and my friendship with her and my affection for her family and friends, but I didn’t take very many specific things (except for superficial stuff like the oxygen and whatnot).
What inspired me most was Esther’s unusual mix of teenagerness and empathy: She was a very outwardly focused person, very conscious of and attentive to her friends and family. But she was also silly and funny and totally normal. And in our conversations about heroism and strength or whatever, she was very conscious of cliches (many of which I threw at her) but mostly unconvinced by them.
I just really liked Esther. That was maybe the biggest thing. I really liked her, and I was really pissed off after she died, and I had to write my way through it, because I was desperately looking for some hope in it. (I am still pretty pissed off about it, for the record.)
All that said, I really don’t want to seem to be appropriating Esther’s story, which belongs to her and to her family and not to me. Hazel is a fictional character, and she is in many important ways very different from the person Esther was.
Q. In Augutus’s first heroic death in pixel form, he covers the grenade to prevent the blast from harming the school children. Later, Hazel refers to herself as a grenade. Was this a coincidence?
A. I was conscious of that connection when writing, yes. I wrote the video game scene in a very early draft of the novel, years and years ago, and then the first time Hazel imagines herself as a grenade appeared in revisions (probably in early 2011? I think before we went to Amsterdam), and I got the idea from the earlier scene.
Whether it’s a coincidence in the story is up to the reader to decide, I guess?
Q. What portion of the novel did you enjoy writing the most?
A. The beginning was really fun to write—Hazel making fun of Patrick and all that. I’m kind of a Patrick in real life, and I’m very conscious of it: Like, it’s super easy to make fun of me for being this hugely earnest Internet persona, and I guess I am really narcissistic because I really enjoy making fun of myself in fiction. (See also, Peter Van Houten.)
Q. You said in a Tumblr post that some of your favorite parts of your desert island story ended up in TFIOS. What are these parts?
A. I wrote like 40,000 words of the desert island story and the only things I really liked were:
1. The sentence, “It was kind of a beautiful day.”
and
2. This rant about Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and its weird, paternalistic, imperialist insistence that humans cannot be fully human when they are sick or deprived of necessities, when in fact the truth is that humanness is always transformed by whatever we are in want of, and we are always in want of something.
and
3. A shoe-shopping flashback.
All three of these things ended up in TFiOS in one form or another.
Q. You said that TFIOS was once a very different book. What was it like? Was it always about two kids with cancer?
A. It was about like a dozen kids with cancer who created a club called the Dead Person’s Society in a cave (ridiculous) near the children’s hospital (doubly ridiculous) and they’d sneak out of the hospital together and visit the cave and convene the DPS (triply ridiculous).
It was basically a very flimsy, high-concept way of allowing me to think through my own thoughts and angers about death and suffering and so on. It was not good.
Q. How much of TFIOS came from Sarah? Did she help you a lot in writing?
A. Sarah, did you submit a question anon?
Sarah helped in every possible way; it is impossible to list or even verbalize all the ways she shaped the book through her readings of it, our conversations, our life together, etc.
Q. Does Sarah like the book?
A. She does like it, yeah. It’s her favorite of my books, I think.
Q. What did Hank say when he first read TFIOS?
A. Honestly, I think he said that he thought it was going to change my life a lot and that I didn’t really know what I was getting into. (That proved prophetic, as Hank usually does.)
And then he told me that I had to keep making vlogbrothers videos no matter what.
Q. Why do you refer to TFIOS as a “problem” that you’re glad to be done with? Why were you so ready to be done with it?
A. I mean, for ten years of my life, I tried to write this book and it taunted me and it sucked and it kept sucking and nothing I could do for years and years made it suck less, and then finally I was given a way into it and I worked very hard to make it the best book that I could possibly make it, but books will always be a collaboration between reader and writer, and at some point I have to stop doing my job so I can start letting you do your job.
I mean that a book is a problem in that it is composed out of meaningless scratches on a page that must be translated into ideas that live inside your head, and you use a set of skills (literacy, critical thinking, etc.) to make that happen. I don’t mean that it is an UNFORTUNATE problem; I just mean that it is a thing that has to be created by both of us, like a crossword puzzle or something.
Q. Is it hard for you to kill a character? How do you go about doing that and how do you know it’s the right thing to do as opposed to gratuitous hurt for the characters?
A. 1. I don’t feel like I’m killing anyone. The person is dying, and that sucks, but I don’t feel responsible for it any more than I feel responsible when a friend in real life dies.
2. With TFiOS, for me, there is no book without death. You cannot meaningfully confront the universe’s indifference to us without seeing the horrific suffering and injustice and awfulness of what really happens to real people who do not deserve to suffer and die. When writing the novel (and really throughout my writing career), I was very angry about this, very angry that people die for no good reason, and very dissatisfied with all the flimsy, Encouragement-y things that people say in the wake of such tragedies. So honestly, I wasn’t trying to make you feel anything gratuitous; I just could think of no other way to lay bare the absolute hideousness of living in a world where parents have to bury their children. And we live in that world, Humans have always lived in that world, and always will.
3. The challenge—and this is not just a challenge when writing a novel but also when, like, trying to get out of bed every day—is to acknowledge these truth and still live a hopeful, productive life. Are the only options 1. lying to yourself or 2. nihilism? I believe not. I believe there is great beauty and meaning to be found and constructed in this life, but we must find and construct that meaning in this world, and to do that, we must be honest about this world.
Q. Did you have any second thoughts about the way in which you described the degeneration of Augustus’s health in his final days?
A. Well, I didn’t want to bullshit the reader, but I also didn’t want to be gratuitous about it. I left the worst of it off the page, I guess, but I don’t really regret that. You might be asking whether I regret being so explicit, in which case the answer is definitely not. Our literature has enough novels that glorify suffering as transcendently beautiful.
Q. Was TFIOS edited from the content you created from NaNoWriMo a few years back?
A. No. Everything I wrote for NaNoWriMo was about a zombie apocalypse caused by corn monoculture.
Q. Where do you see yourself in the story? Do you see youself as Patrick?
A. I do see myself as Patrick-like in a lot of ways, yes. Also PVH. Also Hazel’s dad, I guess. I identify personally closer with the (male) adults in the novel than the teenagers, I guess.
Q. Did your time as a chaplain and your interactions with Esther contribute to your honest portrayal of the mindset associated with illness? What were the other sources? What about the medical details?
A. The time I spent as a chaplain was very helpful, because I got to know a lot of different people with many different kinds of cancer. But for the first several years after my months as a chaplain, all the writing I tried to do about illness was terrible.
So I do think knowing and caring about Esther was probably the most important thing in terms of thinking about the mindsets and emotional realities of chronic illness. I also talked a lot to families of people with cancer and I read a lot of books about cancer, which were extremely helpful. But if I hadn’t known Esther, I never would have written The Fault in Our Stars. I might’ve eventually finished a book about adolescent illness of some kind, but it wouldn’t have been this one.
Q. How did the birth of Henry during the writing process affect TFiOS regarding your worldview of parents/children/humanity?
A. I couldn’t write the book until I understood that the love between a parent and child (like many other kinds of love) is literally stronger than death: As long as either person survives, the relationship survives.
So my grandmother may be dead, but she is still my grandmother. Augustus may be dead, but he is still the great star-crossed love of Hazel’s life.
I didn’t really understand that until I got to know Henry.
Q. It seems like there’s a symbolic reason behind most things in this book. Is that just the way you write or did you specifically choose to write TFiOS in this way? Why?
A. Well, I always want to write books that stand up to re-reading, but to be clear, there’s more than one good way to read a book. The great thing about figurative language and symbols and the like in novels is that you don’t have to be conscious of them for them to work.
Like, let’s say you read The Catcher in the Rye and somehow your English teacher doesn’t tell you about the red hunting cap, and so you read the whole damn novel without ever thinking much one way or the other about this hat Holden keeps putting on and taking off.
Even if you haven’t thought about any of this consciously at all, there’s still a pretty good chance that something inside you will break open when Phoebe puts the hat on Holden at the end of the book, because it’s such a small and kind and humane gesture. And maybe if you’re heavily invested in the red hunting cap, that moment will hit you harder, but it will hit you regardless.
But the red hunting cap isn’t what makes Catcher good, and if TFiOS is good, it isn’t because of any symbols or metaphors in isolation. Catcher is a great book because it lets you see the world out of someone else’s eyes; it gives you the rare opportunity to escape the prison of your consciousness and imagine in a big and complex and generous way what it would be like to be Holden Caulfield. All the language in the novel exists to make your experience of Holden’s life richer and more compelling and more real.
Questions about Why I Wrote What I WroteQ. Why America’s Next Top Model?
A. It just seemed to me—and I say this respectfully—like both the most reprehensible and the both formatted (i.e., functionally scripted) of the competitive reality shows I’d seen.
Q. What made you decide to make Hazel’s father the weaker one?
A. Well, I wanted to ignore traditional gender roles whenever possible in the novel, because I was kind of working in the Romantic Epic genre, which tends to have very narrowly defined gender roles (the man is the protector; the woman suffers beautifully; etc) and I wanted to write a different kind of Romantic Epic. (A much smaller one, for starters, about disease instead of war/politics/royal families/etc.)
Q. Why did you give the characters the cancers you gave them in the book?
A. 1. I did quite a lot of research on cancer, probably more than a hypochondriac should. I am particularly indebted to the books I cite in the acknowledgements, both of which I read more than once. (Also, my father-in-law is a cancer surgeon.)
2. I’ve talked about this elsewhere, but I think cancer is to the contemporary world what tuberculosis was to the 19th century: It’s this seemingly random, capricious disease that strikes old and young alike, that sometimes kills you and other times doesn’t, and that we don’t understand very well. And this randomness/indifference was really important to me, because I wanted to think about how/whether we can be hopeful in a universe that is (apparently) entirely indifferent toward its inhabitants.
3. I gave Gus osteosarcoma because it’s a common adolescent cancer and can go quiet for a long while before roaring back, and I gave Hazel thyroid cancer with mets in her lungs because A. i was fairly familiar with it (it’s similar to what Esther had), and B. I wanted her to have some kind of tumors in her lungs because it allowed me to have the water metaphor.
It sounds so weird and cold and calculating to talk about it that way, but…yeah. Hopefully that answers your questions, and good luck on your path to oncology, a great and noble profession.
Q. In TFIOS there’s minimal jargon-y terms (such as the specific subdivisions and motorways referenced in Looking for Alaska and Paper Towns), did you do this consciously with your international readers in mind?
A. That’s a really interesting question, because it makes me wonder to what extent I’m writing with an eye toward the international readers of my novels. (Some relatively high percentage of my readers are not American.) Certainly, I was not aware of doing that: I didn’t think, and never think, “Oh, I need to write it this way so that it will play in Austria” or whatever. When I’m writing, consciously at least, I only think about what will in my opinion best serve the story.
But it’s impossible to say for sure if/whether/how commercial concerns factor into creative decisions, because you can say all day that you turn that stuff off when you’re writing, and I hope that I do, but I have no actual way of proving whether I do.
Anyway, in general I did want TFiOS to feel more, like, out of time and place than any of my previous novels, because that’s how romantic epics tend to feel, and I was very much trying to write a little epic.
Q. Why did you have Hazel and Augustus do “adult” activities (i.e. traveling the world, getting drunk, having sex, etc.) while they were still young? I thought that one of the small blessings of dying young would be never losing innocence. What was your thinking behind this?
A. Let me assure you that it is no blessing to die without having had sex.
Hazel and Augustus, like all very sick teenagers, are caught in an in-between space: They are similar to other teenagers, but they’re also similar to old people in an important way (i.e., they are not allowed the luxury of feeling that life is a thing that will just go on forever). I wanted to try to capture that in the plot of the story (and I also wanted to acknowledge that sick and disabled people are still sexual people, and that there’s nothing wrong with their sexuality, which I guess was a little preachy of me, but so it goes.)
Also, they don’t get drunk. They have two glasses of champagne!
Q. Why did you put Kaitlyn in the book? Why would Hazel be friends with someone like her?
A. Oh I quite like Kaitlyn. I mean, one of the things you can’t see very well because the novel is written from Hazel’s perspective is that Hazel is 1. very beautiful, and 2. was pretty popular when she attended school. She just hasn’t attended school for a long time.
We have this idea that the opposite of “popular” is “smart.” (We nerds are particularly found of this idea.) But in fact there are many popular people who are also brilliant and deeply intellectually engaged. (Kaitlyn is maybe not such a person, but Hazel certainly is.)
As for why I put Kaitlyn in the book: I wanted the reader to be able to have a few moments of glimpsing Hazel’s life before illness, which was so radically different from the live she lives in the book, and I wanted the reader to feel the distance between A Regular Life in High School and The Life That Hazel Has Now.
Q. Why did you decide to name the hamster Sisyphus?
A. Well, Sisyphus is always pushing a rock up a hill without ever getting anywhere, and hamsters are always running around on a wheel without ever getting anywhere. That’s all I was thinking about, although again, books belong to their readers, and if there’s a better/more evocative/more useful metaphor to be drawn from it, then yay!
Q. Is there a reason you chose to not write Gus’s death in a more dramatic way?
A. Well, the actual moment of people’s deaths tend 1. not to be peaceful, and 2. not to be romantic or poignant or anything other than violent and horrible. Plus 3. Hazel and Gus are in love, but they’ve only known each other for a few months, and it seemed most likely to me that his immediate family would be alone with him at the end of his life.
I also felt like I’d put the reader (and the characters) through enough.
Q. Where did you get the name “The Price of Dawn”?
A. Honestly someone suggested it on twitter and I loved it, but it became in the midst of so many @replies that I could never find the person who suggested it so as to properly thank/acknowledge them. If anyone can find The Price of Dawn person, let me know!
Q. Did you say “Genies” instead of “Make-a-Wish” because of legal reasons?
A. I said Genies instead of Make-a-Wish because there are important differences between the way the Genies work in the book and the way the Make-a-Wish Foundation works in real life. (Also, there are many organizations similar to Make-a-Wish in their mission, although M-a-W is by far the most famous.)
It was important to me that the readers feel like the Genies have basically endless resources so you wouldn’t think about whether H & A could do this or that, when the truth of such organizations—like all nonprofits—is that there’s a lot they can’t do.
Q. Why did you choose “okay” and “always”?
A. Well, always is just an inherently ridiculous concept, but of course you want to say it to people you love, right? You want to promise them that you will always love them, that you will always take care of them, that they needn’t worry because you’re always going to be there. You won’t always be there, because at some point you’ll be dead or stuck in traffic or in love with someone else or whatever.
Most of us (me included) don’t think about the ridiculousness of what we’re actually saying when we say, “I’ll love you forever*,” or “”I will always remember this day,” or, “I’ll never forget** you” or whatever. Like, I say those things all the time, like most people do. But Hazel and Augustus are both a lot more measured in the way they imagine themselves and their love for/responsibilities to other people, hence them adopting “okay” as the word that serves as an expression of their love for each other.
* It’s important to note that forever is not a long time just as infinity is not a large number. Forever is infinite, and it’s a very bold to make declarative sentences about infinities.
** This seems to me a very fate-tempting thing to say. Like, what if you develop dementia?
Q. Why did you pick the title and how does it relate to the novel?
A. First off, thanks to nerdfighter Rosi for contextualizing the quote for me in a way that made me want to use it as a title in the first place.
So there’s this moment in the play Julius Caesar where one Roman nobelman says to another, “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars but in ourselves, that we are underlings.” And in the context of the play, that quotation makes perfect sense—these two guys did not suffer some unjust destiny; they made decisions that led them to their fates.
However, that quote has since been decontextualized over and over and used universally as a way of saying that the fault is not in the stars (i.e., fate/luck/whatever) but in individual people.
Well, that’s of course ridiculous. There is plenty of fault in our stars. The world is a profoundly unjust place in which suffering is unfairly distributed, and in all of my novels but especially this one, I am trying to find ways to live honestly and hopefully in the worldwithout ignoring/denying the universe’s cold and painful indifference to us.*
The whole problem of reconciling ourselves to the fault in our stars seems like a really big problem to me—and not just an abstract, philosophical problem but a problem that has to be solved in order for us to get up every day and get dressed and brush our teeth and try to live full, productive lives.
* Well, I can’t say categorically that the universe is indifferent to us. But I think the way the universe looks and the way it would look if it were totally indifferent to us are disconcertingly similar, if that makes any sense.
Q. Why do you use past tense?
A. Well, the last sentence is not in the past tense, just to be clear.
I wrote the book in the past tense so the reader would know that Hazel is telling the story of something that happened to her in the past—at least until the last sentence.
Q. Why didn’t anyone see Monica after she broke up with Isaac?
A. Well, she is a voiceless character. (You never directly hear her speak, except for the word “always.”) I wanted Hazel to be aware of this voicelessness in a way that Gus and Isaac weren’t, and to stand up for her even when it was very difficult to do so. (Throughout the novel, she repeatedly defends Monica and seeks to understand her, while the boys just want to put her into the easy category of Enemy.)
Hazel does this quite a bit—she’s a very empathetic person and repeatedly defends and seeks to understand people and be generous to them. (See also when she doesn’t get mad at Augustus for hiding his diagnosis from her, or when she delivers the eulogy full of Encouragements).
This compassion breaks down only once, I think—when she sees all the posts on Gus’s wall about how he’ll live forever in the memory of his acquaintances.
I wanted her to break there so the reader really felt Hazel falling apart—even the core ideas of humility and compassion that make her up abandon her in the crush of loss and grief.
Q. Why do you make your characters physically beautiful?
A. The characters in the novel who are romantically interested in each other often describe each other as beautiful not because the’re objectively beautiful but because they find each other attractive. (I do think Hazel is really objectively good-looking, probably, but didn’t I give her enough problems?!) But in books like LfA and Paper Towns, part of what I was trying to do was explore the weird and worship-ey relationship contemporary American boys in high school often have with the girls they admire from afar, an attraction that is usually seen pretty positively even though I think it is kind of sick and crazy to treat a person like a precious object.
Q. Why did you make Augustus and Hazel perfect? They seem too flawless.
A. I don’t know how you can say that Hazel does not have one huge terrible flaw when it is repeatedly stated throughout the novel that she regularly watches America’s Next Top Model.
Q. Why was Caroline Mathers included? Why was she portrayed the way she was?
A. I didn’t want to sentimentalize or romanticize anything in the book. And one of the most common ways that we sentimentalize death and dying is by talking about the dead or dying person’s “beautiful soul,” or just generally by talking about the soul and its imperishability and resilience and so on.
But when I worked at the hospital, I saw several young men and women with brain tumors whose personalities and spirits were utterly transformed by their disease, which calls into question the whole idea of a soul.
I was so tired of the idea that suffering is transcendent, and that cancer suffering in particular strengthens you and makes you better. That can be true for many people, but it’s an oversimplification, because there are cancers that attack parts of the brain and turn kind, generous people into selfish, impulsive, cruel people.
I wanted to make that clear, to make it clear that when we talk about the human soul we had better do so carefully and thoughtfully, because otherwise we dehumanize people like Caroline Mathers whose diseases attack and transform their personalities.
Also, I didn’t want Gus and Hazel to be this Pure As The Driven Snow, Never Loved Before couple, because I also dislike the convention of the epic romance genre wherein the doomed lovers are somehow more innocent and golden than the rest of us. I wanted Gus and Hazel to be people, just regular nice smart people, who also happen to have a chronic illness.
Q. Why did Gus die?
A. Every single human being alive on the entire planet is going to die, including you. The question for me is not why we die; the question is what constitutes a full and well-lived life.
I wanted to argue that a good life need not be a long one.
Q. Why did you choose to have Van Houten be a Swedish rap fan? Was it simply a way to make Van Houten quirkier than he already was or do you listen to Swedish rap yourself?
A. Well, for starters I really like Swedish hip hop, and especially Afasi och Filthy. But yeah, I wanted Van Houten to be the kind of guy who cultivates his own eccentricity, which is basically the most narcissistic and self-indulgent variety of human being I’ve ever come across.
Q. Why did you choose not to address hell in TFIOS?
A. I really haven’t known any terminally ill people who lived in fear of hell. Maybe that’s just my personal biased experience, but yeah.
(Also this is definitely a personal bias: I just don’t find hell very interesting theologically.)