Hollywood, Ending. Writing, tuberculosis and how many signed books is enough. John Green, Fault in our Stars, Paper Towns, Turtles All The Way Down.

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Any of us who've been in it for long enough, our entire career has been littered with jobs that we didn't get, projects that we thought were going to go for shore, dozens of unproduced scripts littering for the U.S.

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All of us are running into both major and minor failures in Hollywood every single day.

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This is one of the only businesses I can think of where failure is like everything.

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I wanted to stop what I've realized, but that will never wonder. There will be another time.

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As ever, I am Dan Rotstein, your non-entertainment co-host.

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And I am your still in the industry co-host, Noah Epslin. On today's Screaming Into the Hollywood Abyss, we have novelist, nonfiction writer, YouTube series creator, and podcaster John Green on the show. Currently, there are more than 50 million copies of his books in print worldwide, including The Fault in Our Stars, which is one of the best-selling novels of all time, and was also turned into a Hollywood movie of the same name. In 2014, John Green was included by Time magazine on a list of the hundred most influential people in the world. There are too many other amazing books and projects a list here, but his newest novel, Hollywood Ending, is set to be released on September 22nd, 2026. Welcome, John.

SPEAKER_00 2:08

Thank you. So great to be with you all.

SPEAKER_03 2:11

So obviously we need to talk about Hollywood Ending, and obviously you're in the middle of the sort of busy period around its release. I have to ask a question. Did you deliberately set up the timing of this so that the press tour and all that finished? Sorry, starts after the World Cup but finished.

SPEAKER_00 2:30

Was that a deliberate plan? It wasn't a completely deliberate plan, but it I there is no way I would have gone on a press tour during the World Cup. There, it's it would be a non-starter for me. Every four years, I mean I have next year's World Cup mapped out. So I mean, the one that's happening four years from now. So uh yeah, I'm not uh I'm not somebody who's gonna be doing anything during the World Cup other than watching the World Cup.

SPEAKER_03 2:54

So obviously we're gonna we're gonna talk about Hollywood ending. Okay, just one more football question. Obviously, we've met before because of our shared love of um and shared ownership of uh English football team uh AFC Wimbledon. But um the Hollywood ending that the United States team wanted during the World Cup didn't quite come true. Any as a very passionate football fan, any thoughts on uh how all that ended, without getting political, how how the World Cup ended for America?

SPEAKER_00 3:23

Well, I would say that you know, this is a podcast about failure in adversity, something that US men's national team fans know a thing or two about. I don't see the ultimate I mean, I thought the final game was a complete capitulation, but I don't see the result as a huge failure. The truth is we're about the 16th to 17th best uh country in the world in football, and we played like it. And so we played really well against teams like Australia and played really poorly against a team like Belgium. And it's frustrating not to be better. We should be better if we invested more in football and in youth sports more generally, I think that um we would have a healthier and uh more equitable country, but that's the case for lots of different areas of investment as well.

SPEAKER_03 4:12

So um you have created sort of quite a legacy of your sort of young adult novels, and this one is an adult novel. Um not an adult novel in that sense, but it it's it's for grown-ups. Um is that a reflection of the audience you've worked with have grown up, you've grown up, you wanted to try something different. What's what's this approach?

SPEAKER_00 4:39

I think some of it might be that my audience has grown up and I've grown up with them. I I know less, even less about being a teenager than I did 10 years ago when I didn't know much about it. I also think that in this particular story, I wanted to write about those problems of early adulthood, those challenges of when you're in your 20s and you're figuring out not just uh what you're gonna do with your life, but who you're going to do life with. Those are such important questions. And the time in your life before they're answered is such an unstable time in exciting ways, thrilling ways, but also in really difficult ways. And I wanted to explore that because I think that, you know, now in an era of social media, we're interacting with that time of life a little differently. And in a world where we're all trying to create content for a machine that turns private experience into public commodities, we're all participating in an economy. Even those of us who are maybe a little unwilling about it are participating in an economy that um takes those early forms of adulthood, takes those early days of adulthood, and really permanentizes them, makes them so that you're stuck with them, you're stuck with the legacy of them one way or the other. And uh, I wanted to write about that.

SPEAKER_01 6:06

Super interesting. We're we're gonna circle back to Hollywood ending uh as we progress through this podcast. But let's go to uh, well, Hollywood beginning, and or in your case, non-Hollywood beginning. Like our industry, I'm a I'm a writer in Hollywood, is is famously difficult. Uh it's just hard to navigate, it's hard to figure out how to break in. We get tons of questions on how do you break in. I think one of the, I mean, uh only industries that is far more difficult than our industry is the one you're in, or the one you started in, which is sort of book publishing. So I want to know a little bit about maybe not how you started writing, but the question that we all get you had a you're an unpublished writer at this point in your career. You have a manuscript burning a hole in your desk drawer. You know it's good. How did you get it out there? What was your process of getting anyone to pay attention to you?

SPEAKER_00 6:56

Well, I certainly didn't know it was good, um, is the first thing I'd say. But I had people in my life who told me it was good or at least good enough to make its way to a publisher who could then spend some time revising in it and invest in it. My process was a little different from most people. I didn't get an agent, which is very unusual, especially now. This was back in 2002, 2003. I submitted directly to publishers slush piles, but I'd been working with a mentor, Eileen Cooper, for years uh at that point on this novel. And Eileen felt like it was worth going out to publishers. She was a published author and so knew a couple of the publishers and you know, put in a good word, said, This is headed your way, and I think you might like it. In the end, it was really picked off the slush pile, which is very fortunate. And, you know, it was a tiny deal. It was an $8,000 book deal, but it gave me a foot in the door, gave me an opportunity to um revise with an editor who in Julie Strauss-Gable, who's still my editor today, who's very experienced and knew about story structure, knew all kinds of things that I didn't know anything about. And together between the two of us, I think that eventually the book that became Looking for Alaska could be something we were both proud of. But it was a long journey. I mean, between when I first submitted and when I was published, it was three and a half years, and about two and a half of those years were spent revising.

SPEAKER_01 8:26

Wow. I want to you mentioned mentorship, which is so fascinating because it's sort of an un the least spoken route to success, I think, in both of our industries, where the again, the common question is how do you get an agent, how do you break in? And there's a lot of different ways. But one of the probably the the best way to do it is to find somebody who's already in the industry and to have them guide you through it. Now that's way easier said than done because people who are in both of our industries successfully don't have any, don't have a lot of time to just take an unproven person and say, hey, we're gonna spend a lot of sweat equity with no return really, just because we want to hold the door open and help them, you know, navigate a system and and hone their craft. So for you, like how did you find this mentor and what how how did that relationship get created? And and are you still, you know, friends with her today?

SPEAKER_00 9:19

Yeah, we're still very close. We still talk a lot, and I still trust her opinion uh above almost anyone else's. I was working at the time at a book review magazine, and if I could give anybody advice, it would be get close to where you want to be, you know, like get as close as you can. Great art artist Agnes Martin used to say that when she was hungry, she would work at a restaurant because it made her close to food. And um, and I think if you want to work in entertainment, get close to it one way or another if you can, in any way you can, whether that's working at a comedy club in Bozeman, Montana, or uh working as an assistant in Hollywood or whatever, because that's where you get exposed to people who are interested in helping you. So I was working as an assistant just doing data entry at a book review journal, and Eileen was an editor there and also a children's book author. And I asked her if I could take her out to lunch one day, and she said yes, and I pitched her an idea for a story, and she said, It's a good idea, but the story's only as good as it's written, and I can't really help you until you write it. And so she gave me a deadline, and I met the deadline, and she read the first draft, and she said, This is really, really messy and and and has a very long way to go, but there's something in the voice of it that's compelling, and there's something here. You just need to untangle it a little bit and um and and let the voice guide you. And you know, that was that was the beginning of a very long but ultimately pretty productive process.

SPEAKER_03 10:48

So you've had uh um some of your books turned into movies, uh some of those movies we've we've all watched. The process, obviously, we have a lot of people on this show talking about how hard it is to get TV shows made, how hard it is to get movies made. Um for you, obviously the books were already written, now they're turning into uh uh to movies. How uh how involved were you in that process? And when you were involved, how did you enjoy or not enjoy the Hollywood part of making all that happen?

SPEAKER_00 11:22

Well, there is something equal parts exhilarating and terrible about watching the sausage get made. I love the sausage so much. Um, I love movies so much, and seeing how they're created was both wonderful and a little bit terrifying in the sense that you see up close how the machine kind of consumes whatever it needs to consume to you know create movie tickets. As far as my process in it, I mean, I this my none of my books became movies until my fourth book, but most of them sold one way or another to Hollywood. And so I saw a lot of failure. I saw a lot of frustration. I wrote one of the scripts, which was a pretty bad experience on the whole, I would say. I mean, I'm not a good screenwriter, so that didn't help me, but um, I wasn't, I don't think, I would say I wasn't treated particularly well. I don't have particularly good memories of that experience. But once um once we had something actually get made, my experiences have been almost universally really positive, unfortunately. Like I'd love to be able to tell you that the standard writer story of uh Hollywood ruined my books and uh took what was beautiful about them and turned it into this mere commodity. But in fact, I feel like everyone was trying really hard and has always been respectful. And I've always felt like I had a seat at the table, even when I wasn't the decision maker. And, you know, when decisions wouldn't go my way, I felt like I was hurt, even though I wasn't um, I wasn't the person who made the decision. And I think some of that is because I've been very lucky, some of it is because I've been loyal, I've worked with the same people for every movie adaptation, and so I know them well and trust them a lot. And some of it is because I understand an author's role in a movie-making process, which is not to be a director, like I don't know how to make a good movie. I I I I wrote a really bad screenplay, so I know I don't know how to write a screenplay. Um, you know, and I and I know that uh my role as an author is mostly to stand up for the book and to lead the cheering and the celebrations when people are working hard to try to make something good.

SPEAKER_03 13:43

Yeah, I mean, I think it might be fair to say that the fact that you're self-aware enough to know that what your role is in this is probably why your projects ended up turning into films. And based on what we've heard from some other people, some of the reasons they don't is because they're not necessarily sure that they're not the director. Um given that you've I think you've signed 85,000 copies of this book, Hollywood Ending, you're presumably reasonably hopeful it will be a success. Is this one where you're either secretly hoping or already in talks to turn this one into a movie in at the end of it? And I guess how how meta does that all end up being when it's about Hollywood?

SPEAKER_00 14:26

It's pretty meta to be doing a Hollywood book that's in conversations to become a Hollywood movie about Hollywood. Um it's also pretty meta to be doing a press junket for a book that's about how unpleasant press junkets are. So, you know, like I'm I'm used to the meta of it all now. Um, but I I would love to see it become a movie if it were the if I got to work with the people I love working with and if I uh got to have a really good experience. I don't have an urgent need to see it become a movie otherwise. And that's a pretty strong negotiating position to be in because you know I've had that experience. It was really lovely. It also involves lots of time away from my family, and it can be very difficult in other ways. And so it's not something I urgently need, but it is something that I would welcome in the right circumstances if we got to, you know, make a movie with people I trust. And, you know, I I love being on movie sets. I love seeing 150 people come together to make a work of art that none of them could make alone.

SPEAKER_01 15:33

Um, well, there's a lot I want to say based on all the things that you talked about just now. One of them is probably just, you know, less a question, but more empathy on how painful it must be to be, I don't want to call it a victim of adaptation, but have somebody who has been hired to adapt books and how little regard some of the producers have for the source material. Like, oh, just throw the book away. And I'm like, there's a reason why millions of people bought this book. There's a reason why people love this book, and throwing it away is not doing a service to anyone. Yes, there is it's two different mediums. And like you said, writing the screenplay version of your own uh novel proved to be immensely difficult because it's it's sort of different forms and and we're not often very good at both. Many, many people are good at screenwriting, many, many people are or selectful of people are good at novel writing, but it's hard to find the person that can actually do uh both things really, really well. And I think we all we all stumble when we do that. So I do, you know, can see why you're in a situation now where it's like, well, if they make it great, if they don't, then I still have the thing that I wrote and I loved.

SPEAKER_00 16:41

Yeah, I don't really think of I think of adaptation as both being uh an opportunity and a risk. It's a risk that, you know, what is special about the book can be lost, but it's also an opportunity in the sense that you know you have all kinds of stuff at your disposal when you're making a movie that you don't have at your disposal when you're writing something that's just language. And so you have sound and you have visuals and you have the performances of the actors, and that can enrich a work as much as it can impoverish one. And so I see it uh, I think you're right, they're fundamentally different media, they're fundamentally different ways of telling stories, and you have to know as an artist which um which ways interest you most and which ways lean into your talents the most.

SPEAKER_01 17:24

Can I ask you a little bit about something we all deal with, or most of us deal with, which is you know, the concept of imposter syndrome when we're writing? And you know, sometimes the more successful you get, the more that rears its ugly head. And in and in your case, you have a situation where very few people have ever been, which is you you wrote a book that was just a one of the you know the most published books of all time. So, like what happens next? The the fault in our stars comes out, you've written it, it's done really well. Do you have three manuscripts done already? So you're not worried about what's come next. What happened to your process when something was so well received?

SPEAKER_00 18:04

Oh, it completely blew up my process, and I did not have three finished manuscripts at all. I didn't have anything. Um, I then took, I think, five years to write my book, Turtles All the Way Down. And it was really, really hard. As much fun as that success was, I do not yearn for the days when like Kim Kardashian was tweeting about me. That was not um pleasant for me, to be completely honest with you. Uh, I'm a suburban dad living in Indianapolis. I I have a pretty quiet life day to day, and and I I like the quiet in my life and and didn't particularly uh wasn't particularly looking for that level of attention. Now, on some level I sought it, and why I sought something I didn't want is a very interesting question and one that is at the heart of Hollywood ending. But I um it it really blew up my process, to be honest with you. And I I I didn't feel like less of an imposter, I felt like more of an imposter. I felt like, well, I'll never write a book like that, that's for sure. You know, nothing uh is ever going to do that well, nothing is ever gonna even approach that. And, you know, I'll always be a one-hit wonder. That's how I felt at the time. And I think ultimately that's part of why the last 10 years, I mean, it's been nine years since I published a novel. And I think part of the part of the reason is that I pivoted to nonfiction wanting to write more as myself for a variety of reasons, but one of them was just feeling like there was no way that I was ever gonna be measured as success according to the marketplace again, um, you know, in in the face of the success of that book. And so I just had to do something radically different. And, you know, that's why I wrote a history of tuberculosis instead of another novel.

SPEAKER_01 19:48

The the uh you know, and I'm only, you know, I haven't read Turtles All the Way Down. I've I've heard about it. And and is that a Steve? This is a side question. Is that a Stephen King?

SPEAKER_00 19:57

I remember Turtles All the Way Down in one Stephen King novel, he references Yeah, we're using we're referencing the same old uh 19th century story um about uh the the nature of the universe, yeah. Um he and I both uh like that story, so we both have used the reference. A few other people have used the reference. Sturgil Simpson, great country music writer, uh has a song called Turtles All the Way Down. That's a great song. So yeah, we're few people looking at the same problem differently.

SPEAKER_01 20:24

But you you write in that book and and in other places, I think, about you know, uh obsessive compulsive disorder. Can I ask that? I mean, obviously the psychological effect of that is super challenging, but like what is the effect on this is another process question. And I think we're all, you know, not all of us are clinically have clinically, you know, diagnosed excessive compulsive disorder, but when you're when you're writing, you you become obsessive and compulsive in your own way to get the words correct, at least most of us do. Is does that change a process internally? Like, like does that does that help? Does it hurt? Like what happens again, just straight words on a page process for you, question for you.

SPEAKER_00 21:01

Yeah, when I'm really unwell, I can't do anything. I can't write, I can't read a menu, I can't read a book, I am too caught in my thought web to be able to emerge from it, and it's just miserable. So I don't really see a huge amount of like creative upside to it. What I what I do see is it gives me an ability to empathize with and and believe, I think, other people's difficulties. Um, and and that has some upside creatively. It has some upside when it comes to getting words down on the page because and ultimately when you're writing fiction, you're trying to imagine what it's like to be someone else. You're trying to escape the one consciousness you'll ever inhabit and imagine what it would be like with some clarity to be a different person. And I think, you know, my struggles with mental health have hopefully given me some empathy that that has been. Beneficial to me. I do think that we're all, you know, when we write stories, we're thinking about everything that might happen. And we're thinking about, you know, we're cycling through all the things that we might do and all the choices we might make. And that's not entirely dissimilar from an obsessive thought spiral for me. It's just a much more creatively productive one.

SPEAKER_03 22:20

So when I started this podcast with Noah, you know, we've interviewed 140 or so writers and people related to the industry. One thing that never would be a question I thought I'd ask people, um, but quite a lot of them have have answered in ways that surprise me. John, do you actually like writing?

SPEAKER_00 22:43

Yeah, that's a great question. Um I have often not liked writing. Uh I I always like, uh, as the old saying goes, having written. It feels like having worked out. You know, like I feel like the rest of the day is kind of a bonus if I've if I've written something that I'm that I'm happy with. I feel I sort of walk around uh in lighter air than I otherwise would. I do not always enjoy the process of writing. I have to say, and and I have to say that I had kind of fallen out of love with it. I think part of the reason I didn't write fiction for the last decade is because I'd fallen out of love with it. I didn't really understand what my stories were for or what they were supposed to be doing. And then I really fell back in love with it. And writing this book has been pretty much purely joyful. It's been difficult at times. It's been, you know, it some of the themes are difficult and some of it was hard to explore, but it was really, really lovely. I I really enjoyed being at the computer typing, which I have not always enjoyed. So that was a nice change of pace for me. It reminded me that this is something I've done for fun since I was eight years old. And even though now there's all this commercial pressure on it and other pressure on it, like it is ultimately something I still can do for fun.

SPEAKER_03 24:06

So obviously, I know this obviously gets explored in the book in terms of sort of fame and social media and so on. But you you're a very interesting character in the sense of there are people who know exactly who you are because they followed the project with your brother for so long, and I assume read the books as well, but maybe some didn't. And there'll be some people who have read your books and didn't even realise that you were a social media star. I imagine there are some people who know you as a tuberculosis campaigner who might not actually realise the other things. And there's definitely in South West London a corner of people who know you as a lover of football and a supporter of football, who also I'd be amazed at how many people at you know who go to a game at Plough Lane have read the Fortin Our Stars or Paper Towns. So how how how do you sort of, in terms of sort of where you sit and how you think about things, knowing that you're sort of not saying fame is the right word, but you're you're you're well known for about five different things, potentially independently, as well as some crossover, how does that sort of sit with you? And how did that maybe help inform some of the aspects of this book?

SPEAKER_00 25:21

Well, I think you've identified something really important about celebrity in our current moment that I wanted to write about in Hollywood Ending, which is that it's become hugely fractured. And so, you know, the people who are famous to tuberculosis researchers are very different from the people who are famous to AFC Wimbledon fans. And there's going to be some crossover. I'm sure there's a few tuberculosis researchers who are also AFC Wimbledon supporters, but not many. And so we end up with this highly fractured sense of the landscape in an attention economy where everybody's competing for the limited amount of human attention that's available to us all the time. And tuberculosis activists have to compete alongside Mr. Beast, and Mr. Beast has to compete alongside Netflix, and Netflix has to compete alongside Fortnite, and so on, literally at infinitum. And how I think about my own role in that space is that I try not to think about it at all. I try to follow my creative curiosity and my passion and my interests rather than thinking strategically about like what would be good for the next book or the next project. I just don't find other people can think strategically very effectively. When I try to think strategically, I think it comes off as inauthentic and also it tends to not be very effective because I'm not a great strategist. And so I think instead I try to follow my own curiosity. I mean, I'm incredibly fortunate to be in a position where I can do that, you know, where I can write uh and do other things in accordance with my own curiosity rather than in accordance with the needs of the marketplace. And I try to take advantage of that luxury.

SPEAKER_03 27:05

And if you're looking for an idea for your next novel, an AFC Wimbledon fan who gets tuberculosis tells his father about it in a blog while drinking whiskey and going to the Indy 500 might be might be something to consider.

SPEAKER_00 27:20

There's something there. There's something there for sure. Um, I would love to write about football someday. I love, I mean, I I love soccer so much. It brings so much meaning and orientation to my life. And the world of footballers is such an interesting, rarefied world, but especially like lower league footballers like the ones that we follow. Um, you know, these aren't guys making millions of dollars. And that's another thing about celebrity these days, is that it used to be that fame was very closely associated with wealth. And now they've been decoupled. Uh, Warhol, who's at the center of Hollywood Ending because the movie that the book is about is a movie about the last year of Andy Warhol's life. Warhol saw that coming. Warhol saw that there were these superstars, as he called them, who um were not going to be wealthy, were not like well compensated for their superstardom. Um, but now I think that's the case for millions of influencers.

SPEAKER_01 28:20

By the way, I love your as someone who's who occasionally gets hired to consult in social media. I love the phrase attention economy and how much it informs what everybody's doing today for good, but mostly probably for bad. Uh because it's just, you know, everyone's clamoring for noise. And I think it created the current situation that we're in right now. But um, okay, I love wordplay. I I and I'm looking at your title uh as we're talking through this podcast today, Hollywood Ending, right? And it's not just Hollywood ending, it's Hollywood comma ending. So I I see that there's you know, Hollywood ending, that's a happy thought, right? That's that's that's a famous like trope, or let's give them the Hollywood ending, let's give them them the feel-good ending to their story. So that's one you know version of your title. Hollywood ending, which is what we're all facing right now, which is the you know, maybe collapse of our industry, also feels like another maybe apt title of your book. But you I'm guessing there's a third uh uh maybe word play in there as well, if I'm not mistaken.

SPEAKER_00 29:23

Yeah, so I wanted, I definitely wanted to put the comma there. It was important to me both to complicate the idea of a Hollywood ending and to talk about the fact that yes, uh, a Hollywood is ending. Um, I don't know if the Hollywood is ending, but certainly a Hollywood that I grew up with is ending. And I wanted to explore what that means for young actors, but also what it means for us as people who love movies. If there's a third meaning, I almost thought of it as a place name, like Lincoln, Nebraska or Indianapolis, Indiana, um, that Hollywood has always been headed toward a place of ending, like Hollywood has always been um, you know, it's at the end of America, literally, you know, in the sense of if you travel east to west, it's kind of at the end. But it's also um it's also a a me a world that is is in perpetual crisis. Like I remember when my first book came out, someone bought the movie rights, and it was a huge, it was a life-changing thing for me because I'd never made more than a couple thousand dollars a year writing, and and then somebody bought these movie rights and suddenly I had the ability to write a second novel. And I remember thinking, like, this is amazing. And all all the people, all the agents and everything telling me, like, well, books are dying, like books, book adaptations are dying. And so you're so lucky to have got in, gotten in under the wire. And something's always dying in Hollywood, something's always ending in Hollywood.

SPEAKER_01 30:56

Oh, the the uh thank you. Yeah, now I'm very much looking at it as a place name. And and and for you know, lovers of Hollywood history, look into, look up why Hollywood is where it is and why it's as far away from New York as it possibly can be. It's a really interesting story about Alexander Grambell and the start of uh Alexander Grambell? Uh yeah, yeah, and the start of our industry. But um uh uh using another Hollywood phrase, because this is a podcast about rejection, failure, and adversity and how people overcame that to create the success they have today. Uh in where in your process would you where in your story would you call your sort of dark night of the soul, career-wise?

SPEAKER_00 31:38

Um, I mean, there have been a few. Uh after my third novel came out, Paper Towns, I was not making a living writing, but I was close-ish with my my wife's support. So my spouse is a curator of contemporary art, and she had a job that had health insurance and a fairly good salary, and so we were sort of making it work, but it was difficult and it was stressful. And then I got hired to write the screenplay adaptation of the book, Paper Towns, and I thought this is really gonna, this is what's gonna be the rocket ship. And a few things happened. I mean, one, as I've as I've hinted at or maybe said, the screenplay wasn't very good. I tried really, really hard. It turns out that if you try hard at something you're not good at, you're still not good at it. It's like my relationship with skateboarding when I was a kid. Like I loved it, but I wasn't good at it. And uh it felt very similar. I just don't have the gift for structure, um, you know, the ability to do something in such a tight uh economic way that you need to in a screenplay. And also the people who were paying me were challenging to actually like get the money from. And I lost a year of my life trying to write that screenplay and not getting any of the money, and it was just kind of a disaster. I would say that was my dark night of the soul because it was four years, you know, it was four, four long years between when that book came out and when the Fault in Our Stars came out, and those four years were full of indecision and worry and fear and less and less money every year. And you know, you don't want to be somebody who judges your success based on how much money you're making, but I did want to make a living, and I was it was getting harder, not easier. And you know, I know that for I was highly conscious of the fact that for many writers, you know, past success is no guarantee of future success. And that was a real, real difficult time. Um, the other Dark Knight of the Soul, I would say, was actually amid success. So I think you can have it before without success, but I think you can have it amid success. So when the Fault in Our Stars movie came out, as wonderful as it was to have so many people responding so generously to the story and to have the story reaching millions of people, more people than I could have ever imagined uh one of my stories reaching. It was also really difficult. It was really destabilizing, it was really confusing. I was overwhelmed. I remember um, you know, not not feeling grounded in in those core relationships that had carried me through everything else, just feeling like I was in a whirlwind. I remember one of my agents said to me, I was like, when does this end? And she said, You don't understand, like you're on a train and the train stops when it stops.

SPEAKER_03 34:44

And this is there are some people uh who we've interviewed on here who obviously they're they're writers and they've worked in writers, but then you become a showrunner and there's a lot of media and you're managing a team of 150 people and you don't mind doing uh red carpet stuff and so on. Um and obviously you're in an interesting place, particularly given the answer that you've just given, where you're as you said, you're a suburban father, um, you know, living in uh in the Midwest, you know, you haven't moved to one of the big the big exciting cities. You try and you know, from what I know about you, you know, you do sort of normal father things of people of our age, and you're sort of uh not high profile. But then in this other corner of the world, you know, you are you know, I'm not sure if you're friends with Ryan Reynolds, but you're certainly on talking with Ryan Reynolds about football and advising him on things, and you know, you've got real, I guess, in a very real way, sort of celebrity friends and contacts, and obviously you're incredibly uh well known because uh you've got literally millions of followers. You know, how does that sort of sit with you? And obviously, you know, you've just you're doing a press tour. Is this sort of the thing you really hate doing the most? And I know that your press people are probably listening, but no, no.

SPEAKER_00 36:08

Um I don't, I don't, I don't hate it. Um, hate's a very strong word. Um you know, 99% of my life is like I at the middle school volleyball games, nobody cares what your job is in Indianapolis, you know? Nobody's like coming up to me and saying, like, I can't wait for your new book or anything like that. We're just watching volleyball. And that's what I like most about my life. I think is what most people like about their lives, which is being close to your family and getting to root for people you love and feeling connected to your community. That's what most of us need. Um, outside affirmation is nice, there's never enough of it. And so I've learned over the years that like if I look to outside affirmation for my overall sense of wellness, there's never going to be enough of it. And all I'll see anyway is the negative stuff. Like you can see 10 positive comments and you see one negative one, and that's the one you remember. That's the one that sticks with you. Because to go back to the imposter syndrome issue, that's the one that confirms what you secretly know about yourself, which is that you're fake and worthless and stupid and uh terrible. And so when I'm defining myself by that stuff, I'm always going to be pretty unhappy. And when I'm defining myself by, you know, the middle school volleyball game, I'm always gonna be pretty happy. And I haven't totally sorted that out in my mind. Like I haven't totally accepted that the way that I need to, but um, I've made a little progress, I think, in the last decade or so.

SPEAKER_03 37:46

So um, you know, you you post on social media, you I I mean, I think you're you're people are quite fascinated by your book signing. Um, because obviously I know you've signed 85,000 of these things and you've you know at times complained, I think, about your wrist hurting, but also I know that you like to do these and have joked about the fact that actually oddly some of them are worth less than the non-signed books, um I saw. But um just in a sort of uh where you are career-wise and the success that is obviously uh you know, this isn't your first novel. The fact that you know you're doing this uh tour where you'll be going around talking about the book, you know, you're doing this in very much a way where everyone expecting to succeed. You've signed 85,000, which is a reasonable number to have signed. Is there a part of you when you were sort of signing them that are you still at the point in your life where you're like, I wonder if there's going to be 70,000 of these just left in a warehouse somewhere? Or while signing, you're like, well, this won't be enough because this is definitely going to be a success. Like, where have you got to in sort of confidence around whether this thing everyone else believes in, whether you believe in it as well?

SPEAKER_00 38:54

So, Dan, it's much worse than them sitting in a warehouse. Um I I was just at the warehouse, actually. It's in Crawfordsville, Indiana, about an hour away from me. And I spent three days at the warehouse signing books for um for folks who I'm going to meet on tour. And uh they gave me a tour of the warehouse and and they showed me the the the conveyor belt that your book goes down when it's returned from a bookstore, and it either gets shcked one way to go back to be in the warehouse and be stored in the warehouse, or it gets shcked the other way and it goes into the machine that eats the books so that they can be recycled into literal toilet paper. And so, do I think that some number of these signed copies will be recycled into literal toilet paper? Absolutely. Like while I was signing them, I kept thinking, God, I hope none of these get pulped. I just hope none of these get pulped. That's my only goal for this book is that none of these signatures get pulped. And I will be delighted if none of them get pulped.

SPEAKER_01 39:50

So fascinating. So there's a difference, I guess, and I've never thought about it between pulp fiction and pulped.

SPEAKER_00 39:56

Yes. Pulped fiction is now toilet paper. Pulp fiction is um, you know, uh what I aspire to write when I grow up.

SPEAKER_01 40:05

Well, I just maybe gave you a title for a future book.

SPEAKER_00 40:08

Either pulp pulp fiction's obviously been famously taken.

SPEAKER_01 40:13

Uh okay, so uh sadly, and thank you for joining us on this and this journey with us today. We are at our last question, and it's the question that we ask everybody who comes onto our show. And it's if you can give one piece of advice to somebody joining your industry, in this case, as a well, I mean, you do a lot of things, but let's just say as a writer, what would that advice be?

SPEAKER_00 40:36

Well, you're not only going to write uh when you are a writer, and so you know, most of most of us are gonna have other jobs. Those of us who don't have other jobs are still gonna have other jobs in the sense that we're gonna have lots of admin work and lots of you know, dealing with booking, travel, and everything else in that goes goes with any profession, right? Like there's always gonna be parts of your job you don't like. And so I think the biggest thing is to remember that you're not only gonna be a writer, like this this dream that I had that I was only gonna be a writer uh wasn't a uh a realistic dream, but it also wasn't really a good dream because so much of my life that doesn't involve writing is so fulfilling. Like being a tuberculosis activist is so fulfilling, like working with AFC Wimbledon is so fulfilling. And so I think finding richness in your life also feeds your creativity. So, you know, if you work in a warehouse, think about the relationships in the warehouse. If you work as a security guard, think about the things that happen at night that nobody else knows about. Think about the ways that your particular life intersects with uh the worlds that people want to know and don't know. And I that's where I like to start.

SPEAKER_03 41:57

Excellent. So look, um John Green, middle school volleyball fan, uh tuberculosis activist, minority owner in both AFC Wimbledon and Orange County Soccer Club, and part-time author. Thank you very much indeed for coming on our show. Very much.

SPEAKER_00 42:14

Oh, it's been it's been a joy. Thank you. It's great to be with you again, Dan.

SPEAKER_03 42:17

And uh the very best of luck. I think I'm gonna come to your book signing next month when you're in Beverly Hills. So I look forward to seeing you then.

SPEAKER_00 42:25

Oh, great. Well, text me or email me before, and I'd love to see you.

SPEAKER_03 42:29

Great, excellent. Thank you very much indeed. Thanks, John.

SPEAKER_00 42:31

Yeah, this is a joy. Thanks, Noah. Great to meet you.

SPEAKER_01 42:34

Thank you so much for listening, and thank you, Game Flash, for the music. And our wives without comment. As always, each episode is brought to you by Scriptation, my favorite screenwriting annotation software. If you want to support the show, please download a copy at www.scriptation.com backslash.

SPEAKER_03 42:54

Or perhaps even better, www.scriptation.com backslash Dan.

SPEAKER_01 43:00

Dan is publicly. If you want to find me on social media, I'm at Twitter at NEpslin and more recently on threads at no epsilon.

SPEAKER_03 43:13

Don't worry about me on social media, because all you people seem to care about is not really.