Author John Green Warms Up ‘Looking for Alaska’

From the depths of the La-Z-Boy recliner in his New York City apartment, author John Green spends much of his time writing, and not chewing Nicorette gum by the cheek-full.

“The five-year love affair was long enough,” he says, “I’ve got no interest in it now.”

There are plenty of other thoughts filling his mind, so the Nicorette is easy enough to forget about. His debut novel, Looking for Alaska (Dutton Books, 2005), has been attracting readers and critics everywhere. School Library Journal has compared it to the classic, A Separate Peace, by John Knowles. The ALA ranked Green’s novel at number three on their Teen’s Top Ten List of 2005.

That’s not all that Looking for Alaska has to claim for itself. Here’s something worth kicking all your bad habits: Paramount Pictures has already bought the screenplay rights. Mark Waters, producer of Mean Girls, will be producing the film, and has handed over the writing and directing to none other than Josh Schwartz, whom Green jokingly calls, “the kid who created and directed the O.C.”

“It was a wonderfully unexpected turn of events,” Green says, with his usual modesty. “I remember when I got my book contract, I was so psyched. [Having Alaska] turned into a movie never crossed my mind.”

Today’s entertainment industry discovered this 28-year-old author frighteningly fast, and swung its money-hungry, hypnotically-bright lights towards him. On his last visit to L.A., Green recalls, “Henry Winkler was having lunch two tables down from me. I’m a sucker for that stuff.”

However, Green shows more backbone than most when struggling to fight against “the lure of Hollywood.” He has a fascinating reason for his resistance to the L.A. life: A strange, morbid similarity between himself and his Uncle Tom. Green was originally named after this uncle, John Thomas Goodrich. They are both southerners (Green is originally from Orlando, Fla.) who moved to Chicago and wrote for the radio (Green was on WBEZ-NPR.) And, yes, this chain of coincidences extends to include them both publishing their first novel at the age of 27.

Here’s where things get even weirder: Uncle Tom left Chicago for Hollywood, hoping to increase his income, and then promptly picked up the bottle, put down the pen, and ended up bankrupt. While Green admits to being “oddly drawn” to L.A., he currently resides in New York, with his fiancé, Sarah, and is looking forward to his second novel, An Abundance of Katherines, being out in stores by September of this year.

While Green admits the paychecks of sitcom writers in L.A. are astoundingly large, he chooses to stick with his soul, and his soul lies with those dusty things on your parent’s shelves.

“I really like writing books — I can’t imagine wanting to do anything else,” Green says. “I do almost all of my writing inside of a large, brown La-Z-Boy, from which I’m speaking to you this moment.”

While that last quote might make you inclined to peg writers as “lazy,” some of them actually have the mental gusto to pull a spectacular feat like publishing two novels in two years. Even in a reclining chair.

“With Alaska, it took four years to finish. So much of writing is discipline,” Green says. “When you’re writing your first novel, you don’t have deadlines; no one cares if you finish it. With Alaska, I didn’t want to do anything else. I was hyper-focused on doing it.”

Of course, back then Green also had a full-time job he had to schedule his writing around. He read and reviewed books about the Islamic world for Booklist Magazine. Green had studied Religion and English at Kenyon College, Ohio, and for some time thought he would go to Divinity School and become an Episcopal Priest.

“I was interested in facilitating inter-religious dialogue between Christians and Muslims,” Green says, all in one smooth sentence. “I was pretty serious about the idea for about a year after college, but then I realized I wanted to write.”

Surprisingly enough, Green’s fiction is not about heavy-duty religious conflicts, or “facilitating inter-religious dialogue.” In fact, Looking For Alaska is so relevant and interesting that it’s beating out PlayStations and the Internet for many teenager’s attention. That — in itself — is quite a feat.

“My fiction is concerned with questions of existence, the important questions we ask ourselves about what it means to be a person,” says Green.

There’s more to that description, for the existentialist-wary. Looking For Alaska takes place at a small boarding school in Alabama. The main character, Miles Halter, is a guy who has a strange fascination with famous last words, and falls in love with a loud-mouthed, beautiful girl named Alaska.

“You can learn a lot about life from what people say when they’re dying,” Green says. “It’s amazing how they find it possible to be funny.”

He goes on to quote Oscar Wilde’s last words; “Either that wallpaper goes, or I do.”

Like the main character in Alaska, Green also went to a small boarding school in Alabama, after a rocky performance in public school.

“I was a terrible student. I had always wanted to go to boarding school. I’d heard stories about how much fun it was,” Green says. “In Florida, I didn’t really have that many friends, and I also hoped that if I had a fresh start at boarding school, people wouldn’t know what a huge nerd I was.”

Green’s fiancé, who went to the same school as him, says that their fellow peers viewed him as a future lung-cancer patient, because he smoked so much. And so it went that this “huge nerd” became a chain-smoking badass, once free from the stifling public school domain.

“I was actively rebellious,” Green says, “I took great pride in not following rules and not ‘living up to my potential.’”

However, this transition was necessary to shape his future. “[Going to boarding school] saved my life,” Green says. “Everything I’ve done since is directly because of boarding school.”

Green still remains part-nerd to this day, boasting an obsession for anagrams. This fetish is also incorporated in An Abundance of Katherines, among other wild-and-crazy quirks to keep you addicted to his writing.

“I try to write books that are fun to read; as entertaining as they are thought provoking,” Green says.

The perks of being a writer continue to surprise Green. “I got to quit my job, that was pretty exciting,” he says. “The other day I got recognized on the subway, which was a little crazy, but pretty exciting.”

There’s a pause.

“Being able to see readers respond to the book, that means more than anything else — you know, the cheesy, dream-come-true shit,” Green says.

As sarcastic as it sounds, he’s really quite sincere when he says this.

Green is amazingly humorous for a guy whose passions include famous quotes and anagrams. For a quick glimpse of his wit, you can check out his “On the Radio” section of his Web site, sparksflyup.com. He attacks everything from communal tables at McDonalds to the price of Gatorade being higher than gas. Brilliant. Or you could buy Alaska, which will have you laughing out loud in the first chapter.

But Green is not completely cynical and jaded:

“I definitely believe hope is absolute. There’s always hope for the enterprise. There’s not always hope for you,” he says, and laughs, “But for human enterprise. Also, if we all fight like hell, we can keep things from getting worse. If we work really hard, if we’re committed to saving ourselves, we can — perhaps — keep things from getting worse.”

“Well, maybe leave that last one out,” he says, jokingly. It is a bit dreary, but nevertheless — a very real statement worth sharing. Green certainly has a strong hold on reality for a fiction writer.

“I definitely agree with W.H. Alden,” Green concludes. “He says, ‘We must love each other, or die.’ I live my life by that quote.”

Be sure to visit the official website of John Green — JohnGreenBooks.com