John Green Quotes About Writing
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I know that books seem like the ultimate thing that's made by one person, but that's not true. Every reading of a book is a collaboration between the reader and the writer who are making the story up together.
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[This] is very important to remember when reading or writing or talking or whatever: You are never, ever choosing whether to use symbols. You are choosing which symbols to use.
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Writing fiction is an inherently political activity because people-even imaginary ones-do not live in vacuums... From Twilight to Romeo and Juliet to The Little Mermaid, no work of the imagination is truly apolitical, because the world and our hopes for it are always part of our stories.
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I write about broken people who need other people in order to go on. But those are the only kind of people I know to exist. We are all broken.
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I really think that reading is just as important as writing when you're trying to be a writer because it's the only apprenticeship we have, it's the only way of learning how to write a story.
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I never liked writing concluding paragraphs to papers - where you repeat what you've already said with phrases like 'In summation', and 'To conclude'.
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Nostalgia is inevitably a yearning for a past that never existed and when I'm writing, there are no bees to sting me out of my sentimentality. For me at least, fiction is the only way I can even begin to twist my lying memories into something true.
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I like to know the places I write about. I feel like it helps me ground the novel. My novels are 'realistic novels,' but they can also be fantastical, so it's nice to have a setting that grounds them a little bit.
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Writing does not resurrect. It buries.
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Every time I try to set something in Chicago, I get intimidated by 'Augie March.' It's easy to set something in Indianapolis - we don't have 'Augie March' here. But I love writing about Chicago, and I love being there and imagining lives in Chicago. I hope to set something there in the future, but it's intimidating.
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I don't decide where I live. My wife decides. She's a curator of contemporary art, and she works at an art museum, so we go wherever she has a job. All basements look the same, so I can write from whatever basement I happen to be living in.
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That's how writing works, at least for me: even the stuff that doesn't work out gets funneled into the stuff that does work out.
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If my public existence does anything worthwhile, hopefully it at least demystifies the author a bit, because I know when I was younger I felt like authors were like wizards or something. Turns out they're total muggles.
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The right story needs the right telling.
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I believe in hope, in what is something called ”radical hope.” I believe there is hope for all of us, even amid the suffering. And that’s why I write fiction, probaby. It’s my attempt to keep that fragile strand of radical hope, to buld a fire in the darkness.r
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We're professional worriers. You're constantly imagining things that could go wrong and then writing about them.
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I'm not interested in writing for adults. I like them as people! I don't like the way they publish books in that world. Nothing ever gets a chance.
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One of the things I like about making stuff in the age of the Internet, is that people make stuff in response to it. You can see people respond to your work visually or musically or with writing.
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This is what I love about novels - both reading them and writing them. They jump into the abyss to be with you where you are.
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One of the pitfalls about writing about illness is that it is very easy to imagine people with cancer as either these wise-beyond-their-years creatures or these sad-eyed tragic people. And the truth is, people living with cancer are very much like people who are not living with cancer. They're every bit as funny and complex and diverse as anyone else.
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But I had to kill you, because the only other possible ending was us doing it, which I wasn't really emotionally ready to write about at ten.' 'Fair enough,' I say. 'But in the revision, I want to get some action.
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I enjoy writing about people falling in love, probably because I think the first time you fall in love is the first time that you have to figure out how you're going to orient your life. What are you going to value? What's going to be most important to you? And I think that's really interesting to write about.
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You do not immortalize the lost by writing about them. Language buries, but does not resurrect.
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Writing, or at least good writing, is an outgrowth of that urge to use language to communicate complex ideas and experiences between people. And that's true whether you're reading Shakespeare or bad vampire fiction-reading is always an act of empathy. It's always an imagining of what it's like to be someone else.
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When I think about [characters], I like to think of them in their relationships to each other. In the same way, I think that's how humans are ultimately defined. We are our relationships to one another. And a lot of what's interesting about us happens in the context of other people.
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What I eventually realized is that the real business of books is not done by awards committees or people who turn trees into paper or editors or agents or even writers. We're all just facilitators. The real business is done by readers.
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In the end, what makes a book valuable is not the paper it's printed on, but the thousands of hours of work by dozens of people who are dedicated to creating the best possible reading experience for you.
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Read a lot. Read broadly... Tell stories to your friends, and pay attention to when they get bored... Write a lot.
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Go spit in the face of our inevitable obsolescence and finish your @#$&ng novel.
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The funny thing about writing is that whether you're doing well or doing it poorly, it looks the exact same. That's actually one of the main ways that writing is different from ballet dancing.
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