SCBWI L.A. Conference: John Green

Me and John Green
Nerdfighters!

John gave a honest and funny speech to the entire conference, and then held a breakout session on Writing the Contemporary YA Novel, which I attended. My questions for him:

ME: Your vblog is a lot of fun. (HIM: Thank you ma'am. ME: Ma'am? Ma'am? God, I hope he meant that as humor...) ME, continuing on: But how has it affected you as a writer?

HIM: (mad paraphrasing) It's given me less time to write! But it's confirmed for me that the written word is important, that you can do things with text that video will never be able to do. (He, of course, said this all much more eloquently.)

ME: (after other people asked questions about the sexual tension and male POV in Looking for Alaska and An Abundance of Katherines) Do you find it's harder to write about spiritual questioning than sex?

HIM: God, what a great question! (or something lovely like that) YES. It's much harder. It's hard not to be cheesy. So I used an academic setting (the religion professor) to talk about it in a structured way. I wrote the scene (famous toothpaste tube scene) in ten minutes. The spiritual stuff took much longer. (Again, heavily paraphrased. I do him no justice at all.)

So, I walked away with even more admiration. Not only is he honest on the page, he's honest in person and great fun to listen to.

Famous Last Words

I have a disease. It's making me tweak. Come on, some of you must have it too: the unbearable urge to fiddle with your words after they've been posted. How do the rest of you bloggers stand it? How do you leave your old posts alone?

Okay, I know I only have ten of them so far, and no doubt when there are hundreds of them (go, Sara! go, Sara!) I won't be able to afford the luxury of fussing over their collars or dabbing at their chins or smoothing their hair. It'll be Slam! Bang! Out the door with YOU and don't come back until dinner!

So far, I've only corrected a few spelling mistakes (I misspelled "librarians"--- in the label section, not in the main post--- but still, bad, very bad) and I've fixed a few links gone haywire. But I'm talking about wanting to do things like tweak my last lines.

Last words are important. Ask John Green. And if you're not careful, they can be so stupid they're funny, as in: "What does this button do?" But I'm not writing my own last words here. At least, I hope not. Still, the way a post concludes is important to me.

When I read a book, I'm persnickety about endings there, too. If the author doesn't wrap it up like I wanted him to, I'm miffed. I carry a grudge. I grumble about it to friends. Not so for beginnings. I'll give an author a bit more leeway there. Not so much leeway that she can slowly describe each sunbeam as it crawls over the horizon, but I'm willing to acknowledge that there are many, many different ways to enter the world of a story. Why then, does there seem to be only one "right way" to end one?

Maybe all of this is on my mind because I just wrote the last chapter of my second book. I don't know yet if I like it. So far, I haven't felt the urge to change anything about the ending of my first book, which is already hard cast into print. (If I do, I'm taking a little pill that says: forget you ever thought this thought, because I'm not dealing with that kind of anxiety.) But for now, the last lines of my second book are changeable. They're tweakable.

And really, so is this one.