John Green is tall man. This is usually the first thing I notice about people, because I see the world from my five-two perspective. It’s a world full of sternums and clavicles. John’s tallness was only something I discovered well after I’d met him through the twin miracles of e-mail lists and instant messaging shortly after his debut novel, Looking for Alaska, hit the shelves. His Printz Award was a year away, but already he was enduring the mixed blessing of lots of attention and good reviews, and handling those things with charming self-deprecation. The word “charming” comes up a lot when people talk about John, but what impressed me then and impresses me still is his love of good writing and his belief that it matters, that this isn’t just a business of competing advances and big contracts or even awards. When I met him in person earlier this year, his online and on-page persona translated exactly as expected. He is passionate, generous, and possesses a good sense of humor about himself without being falsely humble. Also, as I mentioned, he is tall.

Alaska has been well-received by readers of all ages, but his popularity with young readers in particular proves that real-world teens want books for them, about them, with vocabularies as extravagant and as commonplace as any book you’d pull off the adult shelves. They want to delight in the big stories and in sentences. John’s writing gives them both.

John’s second novel, An Abundance of Katherines, has just been published, and he’s celebrating with a nationwide blog tour. It’s a treat and an honor to have him here.

SZ: I’m totally nervous. I don’t know why.

JG: That’s ridiculous. Put that out of your head!

SZ: It’s not like you’re Bono or something.

JG: Right.

SZ: I thought I’d start out with an easy question about attention, identity, and ego.

JG: Oh, great.

SZ: You’re about a little less than halfway through your blog tour so far. How has it been to read  your interviews every day and endure so much concentrated focus on yourself?

JG: Well, I don’t really feel like I’ve been unusually focused on myself, to be honest. I don’t  know if that’s because I am, generally, extremely focused on myself (I will allow as to how that is possible) or just because talking to friends about myself and my book doesn’t require me to stare deeply into the darkness of my soul or anything. I hope you don’t make me stare into the darkness of my soul. I try to do that only once or twice a year.

SZ: There’s a time and a place. How about this – you can glance sideways at the darkness of  your soul, maybe, with this question: As you know, I blog about faith, and faith and writing,  with some regularity. Do you have any thoughts, opinions, or rants about if, how, and why one’s faith and one’s art should connect?

JG: Oh, man. That’s a hard question. Well, my initial inclination is to say that they have to connect, and that they will inevitably connect. It’s interesting to me how a lot of evangelical  Christians feel that Looking for Alaska is this dirty, dirty book that corrupts the minds of  children…. when in fact I think that it is basically a Christian novel. (I mean, it’s about redemption, and forgiveness, and the afterlife, and the meaning of suffering. Is that not Christian?) I’m always writing about religion. I don’t always write from within my own religious worldview, but I always write about religion. Religion is concerned with the same big questions that I want my fiction to be concerned with. If I may end a sentence with a preposition. And then proceed to use a sentence fragment.

SZ: You may. We’re pretty loose here.

JG: The answer is that yes, one’s world view affects one’s fiction. All writing is political writing.  But it shouldn’t be all on the surface. That’s just boring and didactic. So all writing is political, but it shouldn’t be merely political. I think.

SZ: Considering how many Americans (in Time and Newsweek surveys, anyway) identify themselves as having some kind of religious faith, it’s surprising how seldom it comes up in fiction, and particularly in YA fiction (unless the book is specifically about religion). As a society, maybe we’ve forgotten how to talk about it without it being politicized or turning into a fight.

JG:  I think that’s true. That’s why the genre of Christian fiction is growing so fast. Unfortunately, most of the Christian fiction I read is of the merely political variety.

(Here John and I went off on a lengthy tangent that included paragraph-long Flannery O’Connor quotes and discussion of cultural evangelicalism before getting around to the topic of YA fiction.)

SZ: We all know that there are lots of adult fans of young adult literature, but in general most of  the reading—and sometimes publishing—world seems pretty ignorant of what YA is and how many really great YA novels there are. When books like The Secret Life of Bees (Sue Monk Kidd) or The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time (Mark Haddon), which feature young characters and (in my opinion) are written in classically YA voices, are published as adult fiction and become best sellers, it makes me think that the whole world loves YA fiction – they just don’t know it yet. Do you think there will ever come a time when YA fiction is read and appreciated by a wider adult audience? Do you think it should  be? Do you think it can happen while it’s still under the umbrella of “children’s publishingâ€? and mostly shelved over near the teddy bears and board books? (I realize this is many questions in one poorly crafted paragraph. Take it away.)

JG: I think that if good books continue to get published as YA that the adult audience for YA will grow, yes. But I don’t think it will grow that much. (Note: I might be wrong. I have been wrong before.) I like having an adult audience, and I’m flattered when anyone–teen or not–likes something I’ve written. But personally, I don’t feel this burning desire to have millions of adult readers. I don’t feel like that would confer legitimacy upon me as a writer.

SZ: It’s good that you feel that way, I think. A lot of YA authors have an inferiority complex about this, but it sounds like you don’t. You probably have other inferiority complexes to make up for it.

JG:  Oh, yeah. I am riddled with inferiority complexes. I’m not saying I feel like I’m a good writer. I’m just saying that having a huge adult readership wouldn’t make me feel like I’m a  good writer.

SZ: Can anything make a writer feel like he’s a good writer?

JG:  He? HE? Who’s sexist now?! I think writers, or the ones I’ve known anyway, have a very weird mix of insecurity and ego. Like, in a world where there are already 10 bajillion books, you have to be a bit full of yourself to think that your book is a necessary edition to the canon. But on the other hand, writers tend to have a profound sense of inadequacy. It’s a weird mix.

SZ: I haven’t read An Abundance of Katherines yet, but I see from the excerpt that it’s in third person. Contemporary YA novels are typically written in first person (there are exceptions, such as Mary Pearson’s wonderful A Room on Lorelei Street). Can you talk a little bit about  making the call to write it in third?

JG: Well, I started in third, and then I moved to first…but then I moved back to third.

SZ:  Did this happen in the editorial process with your editor, Julie Strauss-Gabel, or did you make the final decision before that part of it?

JG:  The editorial process with Julie. But you have to understand that I, like, send Julie one or two paragraphs all the time. Or 20 pages. Or 40 pages that contain a lot of notes. So it’s not like I wrote an entire draft in third person and an entire draft in first person before settling on third person.

SZ:  Wow – it sounds like there’s a lot of trust in that relationship!

JG: Well, yes. We are very close. Also, she is literally the best editor in the entire world. It took a while before I settled into the third-person point of view. The character I was writing was  ust so smart, and so incapable of telling a story, that it would have been really boring to have it in first person and still be true to the character.

SZ: “Voice” is often cited as the all-important factor in YA. It seems that writing in third person makes nailing voice a bit more challenging. Did you find that to be the case?

JG:  I do think it’s harder to write a good voice in third person. But I don’t think it’s impossible. The Book Thief (Markus Zusak) for instance, is mostly in third person, but that voice is fantastic.

SZ:  You live in New York. Every writer or aspiring writer, at some point in his or her life, has dreamed about “being a writer� in New York. I know that you found the adjustment a bit difficult, but you seem to be adapting. What are a couple things you love about NY, and a couple things you kind of hate?

JG:  Is that true? I never once dreamed about being a writer in New York. Or, for that matter, being anything else in New York. Now that I am here, I sometimes fantasize about being a hedge fund manager in New York, because then I could possibly afford to purchase a small apartment. But now that we’re here (as you know, we moved here so Sarah could go to grad school), there are a lot of things I like about the city. I like being close to my publisher. I like Central Park. I like that there is a wonderful community of writers here. The only thing I truly dislike about the city is that it is very expensive, and it is difficult to have a big backyard. I would like to have a big, wooded backyard.

SZ: Talk about a little bit, if you would, about what having a community of writers means for you. In my experience so far, the YA author community has been amazing and generous and supportive in a way I’m not sure I’ve found anywhere else among artists.

JG: Right. Well, I do think that YA writers are very welcoming and supportive of one another (in some ways, maybe even too supportive). And a lot of young adult authors live in New York. A lot. So I get to see some of these people on a regular basis. It’s really fun to spend time with writers whose books I have admired for a long time, like Blake Nelson and E. Lockhart and David Levithan and Scott Westerfeld.

SZ: In what ways do you think we’re too supportive? Because I’ve had that thought, too, that maybe there could be more room for criticism.

JG:  Well, in the world of YA fiction, we are all afraid to say what sucks. There are two parts to that, I think: First, I wish there were more room for constructive criticism of good books. But that’s hard. If, say, Meg Rosoff writes a novel, and the novel is indisputably brilliant, but you think it might have been better, no one ever would say so. When you read the letters of Fitzgerald and Hemingway and John Dos Passos, they criticized the hell out of each other. And I think it made them all better writers. I wish we had that.

SZ: Yes – I’ve found that in the letters between Walker Percy and Shelby Foote, too. They really prod each other towards more excellence.

JG:  The second thing is that a lot of YA books suck. And no one inside the community is willing to say that. No one is willing to say that the Gossip Girls books suck.

SZ: Of course, that said, on your blog you recently declared the writer of a negative Amazon review of Looking for Alaska to be a mortal enemy.

JG: Yes, but that review was dumb, and also I was kidding. There was a somewhat negative review of Katherines on Amazon that I thought was very smart and very interesting and somewhat persuasive. I do think I’m open to criticism, although obviously it hurts my feelings a little. Hurt feelings aren’t a disaster, though.

SZ: Do you think of yourself as an artist, or more a craftsperson, or just sort of a guy who writes?

JG: I’ve never known what that word (“artistâ€?) means. I always feel uncomfortable and weird  dentifying myself as a writer, let alone an artist. (When people ask what I do) I say I’m a writer, but there’s always an uncomfortable silence after that, because they figure I’m unemployed. Which I sort of am.

SZ: Okay, two easy ones and we’re done: The protagonist of Katherines is a washed-up child prodigy. If you could be a washed-up child prodigy, what sort of prodigy would you like to have been?

JG:  Math, no question. Math prodigies, at least historically, have the best chance of becoming normal adults. Also one of my best friends is a former math prodigy, and he’s great. (He wrote the appendix to An Abundance of Katherines.)

SZ:  Last—and I’m not asking this in an effort to get the upper hand in future games, really—how would you describe your poker strategy?

JG: I’m a very bad poker player. And when you’re a very bad poker player, you almost always play too many hands. So my strategy is to see a lot of flops, and then hope that my opponent won’t be able to figure out the strength of my hand.

SZ: That’s not a bad strategy for low stakes games.

JG: All of my games are low stakes games.

SZ: That could be read as a very profound statement about life and art, so I think I’ll leave it  there. Thanks so much for stopping by on your blog tour, and I wish you much success with An Abundance of Katherines.

Follow John’s blog tour and read his near-daily posts at www.sparksflyup.com
He can also be stalked friended at http://www.myspace.com/greatperhaps 
And be sure to pick up An Abundance of Katherines from your favorite book seller.