John Green, weirdos, and the stories we tell

I have a friend who calls me up and reads bad sentences from books by good writers. I’ll pick up to hear him laughing and he’ll say you gotta hear this and then he’ll read it. Whaaat, I laugh, who is that? and he’ll say it’s Margaret Atwood, or John Irving or maybe Cormac McCarthy and I laugh and say oh my god, that’s so hilarious.

Good writers sometimes make clunky sentences but we don’t care if the story is good, you know? So then I write those clunky sentences in a notebook filled with random thoughts on writing and one day we’ll do something with all the thoughts and sentences I’ve written down in that book, but here’s the thing —

Do you know how rare and delightful it is to find someone who shares your weird?

Here’s another thing I wrote in the book. Dialogue that sounds real isn’t how we really talk. Omg, we talk for hours about dialogue and why writing dialogue is so hard and omg, I love people who share my fascination with how we weave words into story.

Too often we hide the strange bits of us away like they aren’t how we find our people but we’re so worried about fitting in or being normal or good, whatever that means, and now we even have people letting a machine put words on the page for them because they think it’s somehow better than their own imperfect words.

I can’t even imagine that, but I won’t go there today.

Here’s a strange little story.

When John Green published The Fault In Our Stars, it sold 57,898 copies the first week, and shot to #1 on the New York Times bestseller list and then went on to sell something like twenty three million copies, can you even imagine?

It’s about Hazel, a sixteen year old girl with terminal cancer, and Augustus, who is in remission but lost a leg to cancer. They meet in a cancer patient support group that Hazel didn’t even want to go to but her mom kind of bullied her into going.

This is not a book review, so you understand.

It’s about writing and telling our stories.

It’s about me poking your tender writer’s heart in hopes of showing you things tucked away that maybe you hadn’t seen yet. Or maybe you did, but from a different angle because we’re all the blind men and the elephant and sometimes sharing a strange thought can make us see from another perspective and we are forever changed.

Does that sound lofty? It sounds lofty, but that doesn’t mean it’s not true. A reader told me that, one day. Said I’m being lofty and I laughed but what else influences us besides thoughts? Sometimes our own, sometimes thoughts from someone else.

Like a friend calling to read a particularly clunky sentence because we’re all just imperfect humans and we all make mistakes and maybe I can be a real writer.

Here’s how John Green starts the book:

Late in the winter of my seventeenth year, my mother decided I was depressed, presumably because I rarely left the house, spent quite a lot of time in bed, read the same book over and over, ate infrequently and devoted quite a bit of my abundant free time to thinking about death.

Whenever you read a cancer booklet or website or whatever, they always list depression among the side effects of cancer. But, in fact, depression is not a side effect of cancer. Depression is a side effect of dying. (The Fault In Our Stars)

God, that sentence. Depression is a side effect of dying.

But we’re all dying and every day is a gift but we don’t think about it that way until life turns on a light, like the day I realized the most popular Note I ever published was three words that said Biopsy was negative and the hearts damn near gutted me.

When Hazel and Augustus meet, there’s an instant bond and they agreed to read each other’s favorite book and afterwards, Augustus is angry because Hazel’s favorite book is about a girl dying of cancer and it doesn’t have an ending, it just stops unfinished, and by the time he gets to the end he knows he loves Hazel.

Like a broken record, I keep repeating that Kate DiCamillo quote (writing is seeing) because it doesn’t mean ice blue eyes or blond hair blowing in a summer breeze, it means Hazel knowing why Augustus is mad about how the book ends, and why she loves that book so much, which is because it’s how her own story is going to end.

Here’s another one. This line was highlighted 40,107 times by Kindle readers.

I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once.

I think Kate DiCamillo would be proud of that sentence.

It sees.

When you sell twenty million books, the strangest thing happens. You’d think people would ask him where the story came from, what motivated him to write this, but no. They ask for tips on becoming a writer. Here’s what he always says:

“Whenever I’m asked what advice I have…I always say that the first thing is to read, and to read a lot. The second thing is to write. And the third thing, which I think is absolutely vital, is to tell stories and listen closely to the stories you’re being told.”

Seeing. Listening. Those are the things writers are made of, aren’t they?

Maybe not if you’re writing how to make five thousand on the internet, how to double your subscribers in thirty days or five simple steps, or self help posts, but if you’re trying to write fiction, personal essays or anything deeply meaningful, then yes.

Sometimes we only listen to the stories that work for us and we should watch for that.

Every writer worth their salt has made some comment about living before writing and sometimes those statements come across a little condescending and smelling of superiority, because haven’t we all lived, and don’t we all have experiences?

But here, let me show you what I think they’re trying to say…

When John Green graduated from college, he spent five months working as a student chaplain at Nationwide Children's Hospital in Columbus, Ohio. That’s when he first got the idea for the book that eventually became The Fault in Our Stars. A book about children with terminal diagnoses because those kids, they hurt his heart.

He said it was embarrassingly bad.

I tried to write that book for almost 10 years. Ever since I worked as a chaplain, I would go back, I was trying to work on what I called the Children's Hospital Story, although in its previous incarnations, it starred this 22-year-old hospital chaplain, who was, like, surprisingly handsome and, like, hooking up with doctors.

It was very embarrassing... it was just terrible. But you know, I would go back to that story and go back to it and go back to it.

No one tells writers this. That sometimes you want to write something, but it’s not time yet. Colson Whitehead told the same story about Underground Railroad. Said he wanted to write that book five whole books before he did, but he wasn’t ready yet.

So we go back to it and go back to it, and this is part of writing and sometimes essays work that way too. I’ve had an essay take months. We know it’s not coming out the way we intend it to and that’s a discretion we don’t get from a machine.

Especially not a machine that likes to praise us. Even if we tell it not to.

This is something I think people using AI don’t even realize and maybe even people not using AI. I suspect the best stories aren’t the ones we tell on command but the ones that show up one day and demand to be told so you shut up and write.

That’s what happened to John Green in 2010.

I’ll let him tell you:

In 2010 a good friend of mine died of cancer, a young friend, and I went back to the story, and I went back to it angry and needing to work.

Her name was Esther Earl, and he named her in the dedication of the book. She was sixteen years old and filled with life and was diagnosed with metastasized papillary thyroid cancer, much like Hazel. When Esther died, he sat down, angry, to write.

He said it’s very important to him to say the book is not a biography. It’s not Ether’s story. Hazel isn’t Esther.

I’m writing this on August 3. Esther would have turned 32 today, had cancer not taken her at 16. She loved words and wanted to be a writer more than anything in the world and when she died, her father published her writing and her art in a biography called This Star Won’t Go Out because it was a promise they’d made before cancer came calling. A promise that whoever outlived the other would write their story so he did and John Green wrote a ridiculously long and utterly beautiful introduction.

Last week I wrote about AI companies buying every ISBN ever published because they don’t have enough human words to feed the next generation of AI.

And what kind of guts me is that I’m sure AI ate both of those books, and it can eat every book in the world but what it can never do is know when a story is ready to be told, or weep at the death of a child, but people use it because it never writes a sentence so clunky that my friend will call laughing and say listen to this.

But the thing is when he’s done reading the clunky sentence he’ll say you have to read this book and I’ll say I will (and then I do) and I honestly don’t think AI can ever write anything that humans will remember ten years later but maybe I’m wrong.

Because writing, real human writing, isn’t about the odd clunky sentence, it’s about the heart, the humanity and a story that needs to be told. And I guess what I’m trying to say is please keep writing your stories even if they have clunky sentences. Don’t ask a machine to fix them, time will do that for you as you write more. And don’t be afraid to show your weird a little or even a lot, because the reality is that the things that make you exactly who you are is how your people will find you. You know? :)

Here’s my AI policy. I don’t use it for writing. At all. That would be like asking it to eat cake for me. I’ve been writing for over 30 years, why would I outsource what I love doing? When AI can clean my damn kitchen, maybe we’ll talk.