When you're writing a novel, you spend four years sitting in your basement and a year waiting for the book to come out and then you get the feedback. When you do work online, the moment you're finished making it, people start responding to it which is really fun and allows for a kind of community development you just can't have in novels.
Interpretation
Writing a novel is a long, solitary process, while online work allows for immediate feedback and community interaction.
In this quote, John Green contrasts the experience of writing a novel, which is often a lengthy and solitary endeavor, with the instant gratification and interactive nature of creating work online. He highlights how online platforms enable immediate responses from audiences, fostering a sense of community that is typically absent in the traditional publishing process of novels. This difference underscores the evolving landscape of creative expression in the digital age.
In practice
During a writing workshop, this quote can be used to discuss the differences between traditional and modern writing processes.
Always' was a promise! How can you just break the promise?" "Sometimes people don't always understand the promises they're making when they make them," I said. Isaac shot me a look. "Right, of course. But you keep the promise anyway. That's what love is. Love is keeping the promise anyway. Don't you believe in true love?" I didn't answer. I didn't have an answer. But I thought that if true love did exist, that was a pretty good definition of it.
Augustus Waters was the great star-crossed love of my life. Ours was an epic love story, and I won’t be able to get more than a sentence into it without disappearing into a puddle of tears. Gus knew. Gus knows. I will not tell you our love story, because—like all real love stories—it will die with us, as it should.
I find it really offensive when people say that the emotional experiences of teenagers are less real or less important than those of adults. I am an adult, and I used to be a teenager, and so I can tell you with some authority that my feelings then were as real as my feelings are now.
I don't think pandemics make us afraid of death, I think they make us afraid of oblivion. They force us to grapple with the futility of effort. Also they make us barf which isn't fun either... Wash your hands, cover your coughs, and find a way to hold in balance the futility of effort with the necessity to struggle.
So often we try to make other people feel better by minimizing their pain, by telling them that it will get better (which it will) or that there are worse things in the world (which there are). But that's not what I actually needed. What I actually needed was for someone to tell me that it hurt because it mattered. I have found this very useful to think about over the years, and I find that it is a lot easier and more bearable to be sad when you aren't constantly berating yourself for being sad.
We kiss. Her hands are freezing on my face, and she tastes like coffee and the smell of the onion is still stuck in my nose, and my lips are all dry from the endless winter. And it's awesome.
We feel the same emotions for our ideas as we do for the real world, which is why we can cry while reading a book, or fall in love with movie stars.
In the writing of poetry we never know anything for sure. We will never know if we have 'trained' or 'practised' enough. We will never be able to say that we have reached grade eight, or that we have left the grades behind and are now embarked on an advanced training.
The beauty of jazz is that it can accommodate all styles. You can take jazz and put rock in it, and it's still jazz.
Words are really beautiful, but they're limited. Words are very male, very structured. But the voice is the netherworld, the darkness, where there's nothing to hang onto. The voice comes from a part of you that just knows and expresses and is.
I don't care who likes it or buys it. Because if you use that criterion, Mozart would never have written Don Giovanni, Charlie Parker would have never played anything but swing music.
The struggle of literature is in fact a struggle to escape from the confines of language; it stretches out from the utmost limits of what can be said; what stirs literature is the call and attraction of what is not in the dictionary.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.