Part of John Green's Printz Award Acceptance Speech
...And one day I mentioned to Ilene [Cooper] that I wanted to write a book. She said the idea sounded promising, although I doubt she figured she’d one day have to excuse herself from a committee over it. Ilene gave me a deadline: April 15, 2001.
When that deadline passed, I’d written ten horrible pages. I’d read you a selection from those pages, except various members of the Printz Committee might rush the stage and take back this award. The central problem was that I couldn’t find a structure to tell the story. And then September 11th happened, and that night I was alone again, this time in my apartment. Everyone on TV kept talking about how we’d see the world in terms of before 9/11 and after it. And I thought about how all time is measured that way-before and after the birth of Christ for Christians; before and after the hijrah for Muslims. Before and after is not the true nature of time, of course, but it's the only way we have of living through time. This, I realized, is how I would tell my story. Before and after. A year later, the manuscript was sent to Dutton...
I am often asked whether I wrote Looking for Alaska for teenagers, or whether I intended it to be a novel for adults and was just steered to a YA publisher. The answer is that I wrote it for teenagers, and my next novel is written for teenagers, and that I intend to write novels for teenagers as long as I am allowed to do so-although, to steal a line from Laurie Halse Anderson, I am really happy that the 12 adults sitting over there liked it, too. Writing for kids is the only kind of writing I know how to do that I feel is halfway noble. In his Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech, William Faulkner said, “The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, one of the pillars that help him to endure and prevail.” This is precisely why I write for young adults, and I think it’s why most people in the business do what they do. When you are a teenager, you discover that life is messy. Life is defined by ambiguity and confusion and unfairness and a pervasive randomness. It is in adolescence that you realize you are not safe, not in any sense the word, and that you never will be.
When I was a teenager, I remember reading a book by the sociologist Peter Berger in which he said, “The difference between dogs and people is that dogs know how to be dogs.” This is what we do as teenagers, and forever after: We try to figure out how to be people. I like writing for teenagers because they are still trying to figure out how to be people in unselfconscious, forthright ways-because they are still open to the idea that a single book might change their understanding of how to be a person. It is my fervent hope that, at least for some teenagers, books can play a role in helping them navigate the labyrinth-that books can help show us how to choose the awful pain of love over the strange comfort of destruction, that books can be a pillar to help us endure and prevail.
Source
When that deadline passed, I’d written ten horrible pages. I’d read you a selection from those pages, except various members of the Printz Committee might rush the stage and take back this award. The central problem was that I couldn’t find a structure to tell the story. And then September 11th happened, and that night I was alone again, this time in my apartment. Everyone on TV kept talking about how we’d see the world in terms of before 9/11 and after it. And I thought about how all time is measured that way-before and after the birth of Christ for Christians; before and after the hijrah for Muslims. Before and after is not the true nature of time, of course, but it's the only way we have of living through time. This, I realized, is how I would tell my story. Before and after. A year later, the manuscript was sent to Dutton...
I am often asked whether I wrote Looking for Alaska for teenagers, or whether I intended it to be a novel for adults and was just steered to a YA publisher. The answer is that I wrote it for teenagers, and my next novel is written for teenagers, and that I intend to write novels for teenagers as long as I am allowed to do so-although, to steal a line from Laurie Halse Anderson, I am really happy that the 12 adults sitting over there liked it, too. Writing for kids is the only kind of writing I know how to do that I feel is halfway noble. In his Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech, William Faulkner said, “The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, one of the pillars that help him to endure and prevail.” This is precisely why I write for young adults, and I think it’s why most people in the business do what they do. When you are a teenager, you discover that life is messy. Life is defined by ambiguity and confusion and unfairness and a pervasive randomness. It is in adolescence that you realize you are not safe, not in any sense the word, and that you never will be.
When I was a teenager, I remember reading a book by the sociologist Peter Berger in which he said, “The difference between dogs and people is that dogs know how to be dogs.” This is what we do as teenagers, and forever after: We try to figure out how to be people. I like writing for teenagers because they are still trying to figure out how to be people in unselfconscious, forthright ways-because they are still open to the idea that a single book might change their understanding of how to be a person. It is my fervent hope that, at least for some teenagers, books can play a role in helping them navigate the labyrinth-that books can help show us how to choose the awful pain of love over the strange comfort of destruction, that books can be a pillar to help us endure and prevail.
Source