John Green by Caitlyn and Mariam

Biography:

• John Green was born on on August 24, 1977 in Indianapolis, Indiana.
• Spent most of his childhood in Orlando, California.
• He started writing at a young age and never stopped. He initially believed he would not make a career out of it.
• He took creative writing classes in high
• school and useful fiction writing classes with the American novelist P.F. Kluge. Without these classes John Green believed that he would have never written a novel.
• He went to a boarding school outside of Birmingham, Alabama called Indian Springs school. Graduating there in 1995. In one of his famous works, Looking for Alaska, John Green based an Alabama boarding school off of the one that he went to.
• Green attended Kenyon College in Ohio. A college known for its robust creative writing program. He graduated in the year 2000 with a double major in English and religious studies.
• His first novel ever written was Looking for Alaska.
• He got his inspiration to write The Fault in Our Stars by working at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus for 5 months after graduating college.
• The first one of his books that was made into a movie was The Fault in Our Stars and was released in 2014.
• The company Fox 2000 has confirmed with Green that they will be making a film adaptation for Turtles All the Way Down.

Genres:

• Young adult fiction
• Coming of age / psychological growing (Bildungsroman)
• Romance
• Mystery

Works:

• Looking for Alaska
• An Abundance of Katherines
• Paper Towns
• The Fault in Our Stars
• Turtles All the Way Down

Awards:

• Michael L. Printz Award-Looking for Alaska
• Edgar Award for Best Young Adult-Paper Towns
• Goodreads Choice Awards for Best Young Adult Fiction-The Fault in Our Stars
• Audie Award for Teens-The Fault in Our Stars
• Goodreads Choice Awards Best Memoir & Autobiography- This Star Won’t Go Out: The Life and Words of Esther Grace Earl
• Shorty Award for Best Author

Writing style:

• Shares feelings of real people in real situations.
• Contains deep messages, intellectual language and concepts, humour and compassion.
• Finishes off in a way to make it accessible and enjoyable for teens and young adult readers.
• Extensive vocabulary: Challenging the reader to think and focus on various topics.
• Novels can appear to be emotional but honest at the same time.
• This makes his writing more interesting and stronger. It highlights the difference between each character. Making each character’s personality stand out.

Common themes in writing:

• Love
• Adventure, travel or journey
• Death
• Fear
• Identity
• Psychological growth / growth as a person
• Honesty

Inspirations:

His writing is mostly based off of experiences and what he has seen and gone through throughout his life.

He also gets his inspirations from other stories. In The Fault in Our Stars when he was working at a hospital he would hear the patients stories and these ideas evolved even more into his own writing.

The people who inspired him were:

• F.Scott Fitzgerald
• J.D. Salinger
• Walt Whitman

Advice for writers:

• “Whenever I’m asked what advice I have for young writers, 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.”
• “Writing is a profession that requires a long apprenticeship of reading and practice.”
• “Every single day, I get emails from aspiring writers asking my advice about how to become a writer, and here is the only advice I can give: Don’t make stuff because you want to make money — it will never make you enough money. And don’t make stuff because you want to get famous — because you will never feel famous enough. Make gifts for people — and work hard on making those gifts in the hope that those people will notice and like the gifts. Maybe they will notice how hard you worked, and maybe they won’t — and if they don’t notice, I know it’s frustrating. But, ultimately, that doesn’t change anything — because your responsibility is not to the people you’re making the gift for, but to the gift itself.”

 

Emulation quote:

“Perhaps, then, Colin ought to have grown accustomed to it, to the rise and fall of relationships. Dating, after all, only ends one way: poorly. If you think about it, and Colin often did, all romantic relationships end in either (1) breakup, (2) divorce, or (3) death.” -John Green, An Abundance of Katherines

Analysis:

“Perhaps, then, Colin ought to have grown accustomed to it, to the rise and fall of relationships. Dating, after all, only ends one way: poorly. If you think about it, and Colin often did, all romantic relationships end in either (1) breakup, (2) divorce, or (3) death.”

Emulation:

Dating, after all, only ends in one way: poorly. That’s how we’re told to see dating. From the media, from our friends, from so many stories. People breaking up with their “true love” repeatedly, getting their hearts broken and feeling crushed every time. Yet, there’s something there, something that keeps bringing us back and encouraging us to keep looking for that one special person no matter how hard it is.

Significance:

Caitlyn – He was one of the authors I read a lot of books by in middle school and his books really inspired me to read more and start writing small pieces of my own, especially in grade 7 and 8. I first read Paper Towns around grade 6, and I really liked his writing style.

Mariam – John Green’s books have allowed me to branch out among other young adult fiction novels especially for the relaxation of it. I connect with the character’s thoughts and feel like I’m actually living and experiencing what is in that novel. I rarely come across any humorous books(which appear often in his novels) and when I did when reading An Abundance of Katherines it allowed me to put that form of writing into my own.