Our local indie bookseller, Joseph-Beth, has been on a roll! On March 31, they hosted yet another great YA panel, with Emery Lord, Kate Hattemer, David Arnold, and Courtney C. Stevens.

As usual, I live-tweeted from the event, and I have collected those tweets here with some additional photos and tweets from other people in attendance. Below that, I also have a few more notes -- both funny and insightful -- from the authors. Enjoy!


And here's what couldn't quite be captured in 140 characters...

ON THE WRITING PROCESS

Kate hates drafting. Because it's like, "Good day's work? No! Bad day's work!" So she tries to do the first draft pretty fast -- like two months. (Plus that way, if she were to die suddenly, no one would ever get the chance to see it.) She relishes revision.

Emery revises as she goes. She especially hones the first third of the story, meaning that it takes much longer than the rest of her book. When she's stuck, she likes to go to concerts.

David wrote his first book as the stay-at-home dad of newborn. So basically: Whenever, wherever he could.

Courtney says, "Every book is a different beast." She actually threw away about 20,000 pages to get to the book that is now THE LIES ABOUT TRUTH. "I don't think that makes me a bad writer. I think turning in that first book would have made me a bad writer."

QUESTION FROM EMERY (who moderated the panel): What writer would you trade brains with? You could see their work-in-progress, and they could see yours.

Emery: Melina Marchetta
David: A.S. King
Kate: Richard Russo
Courtney: Markus Zusak and Neil Gaiman

QUESTION FROM THE AUDIENCE: People always talk about the challenges and frustrations of writing. What about the joys?

David wrote a lot of his story to his son. (So obviously that was very meaningful and rewarding for him.)

Emery writes to a point of catharsis. She writes to give herself a happy place.

Kate loves the feeling of getting the prose just right.

Courtney thinks the bad stuff actually doesn't have to do with writing and actually is just about personal insecurity. She anchors herself to moments that no one can take away. Like getting a message from someone about why her book mattered to them. Changing someone's life through art that you made.

MISCELLANY

"No one will ever think it's autobiographical," Kate joked about writing her debut novel from a boy's POV. She also added, "Or maybe that's because it's about a heroic gerbil..."

David and Courtney are writing a Middle Grade book together via email, just for fun. It's structured as letters between two kids, one at summer camp, the other back at home.

Kate finds that she's always talking about books. For example: She once chatted with her sister about Harry Potter for 4 hours straight. "That's what humans do; we talk in stories."

Somewhat related: Kate's little sister listened exclusively to Harry Potter audiobooks from age 2-6. She ended up with a British accent!

A couple weeks ago, I had the pleasure of attending the launch party for Jasmine Warga's debut novel MY HEART AND OTHER BLACK HOLES. It was held at a local Barnes & Noble that Jasmine frequented as a teen herself. Throughout the evening, the crowd kept growing and growing, filling the room with family, friends, and fans. The event coordinator later revealed that this was their largest turnout ever!

Jasmine (left) speaking with a young fan who approached her before the event.

Me (left), Jasmine, and fellow Cincinnati author Kate Hattemer. Other writer-friends in attendance included Emery Lord, Becky Albertalli, and Adam Silvera.

With a book as thoughtful and heartfelt as MHAOBH, it's no surprise that people were lining up to listen to what Jasmine had to say. Here are a few highlights from her brief talk and the Q&A session afterward:

• Jasmine didn't specifically decide to write a Young Adult story. She just followed the voice of the protagonist that came into her head, who happened to be 16. There is also an immediacy of emotion when you're a teenager, which Jasmine enjoys and thought would work well for the story she needed to tell.

• Jasmine used humor to make the sad/hard things in her story more accessible to readers. She herself has always been drawn to black comedy. Furthermore: "When I was a teen, I read really really dark stuff -- so this seems light compared to that!"

• One audience member asked, "Did you ever want to write [Aysel] out of being suicidal?" Jasmine considered this for a moment, then responded that because of her affection for Aysel, of course she wanted to rescue and protect her protagonist. But even stronger than that feeling was Jasmine's resolve to portray Aysel authentically, which meant letting her stumble and suffer. Jasmine added, "As a society we really stigmatize depression -- and [we have] this fear that if we talk about depression, we're going to make it contagious." Part of her motivation with MHAOBH was to debunk that myth and foster that important conversation.

• In terms of her working style, Jasmine prefers not to plot because she writes to discover, and she uses the sense of mystery to carry her through the process. She also likes to jot story notes on her phone. When asked if she was working on a second book, she said yes and added, "If anyone is passing this on to my agent or editor, it's going really well!"

• Jasmine's dad really wanted her to be a doctor. "But I think this turned out all right," she joked.

• Even though she followed her own heart instead of her father's, Jasmine did worry that her dream of being an author was "too big." She credits her husband for having faith and encouraging her even when she wavered and considered doing something more stable.
I have many other notes from the night, but I think you get the gist. Jasmine was the perfect combination of funny and insightful -- just like her book.

Interestingly, the most obvious element of diversity -- Aysel's Turkish heritage -- was not a focal point of the conversation. As we discussed in our YA Diversity Book Club chat, that's actually a good thing in this case, because it signals how organic that element was to the character and story. Race doesn't stick out -- and doesn't need to -- here. It just is.

For more on MY HEART AND OTHER BLACK HOLES, be sure to check out all of our features:

• The group's discussion of MHAOBH at Teen Lit Rocks
• The Q&A with Jasmine Warga at Gone Pecan
• "I Will Follow You into the Dark: Mental Illness in YA" at the Reading Date

PS: Guess who sold out this entire stack of books?

Do you have a post about MY HEART AND OTHER BLACK HOLES? Link up here!


Next month we're reading BLACK DOVE WHITE RAVEN by Elizabeth Wein. Please feel free to join us! You can also see the full archive of YADBC posts and our #YADiversityBookClub tweets.

I went to Books by the Banks, a local book festival, this year. It was the first I've gone without any of the other WHYA girls. Sarah moved to England or some such nonsense, Ingrid is up a Rocky Mountain somewhere, and Kristan was off on some silly honeymoon or whatever. So I went with my (very) bearded boyfriend. One of the panels I went to featured Middle Grade authors Emma Carlson Berne, Andrea Cheng, Jasper Fford, and Alan Gratz.

In the interest of not writing a blog post that is forever long, I'm going to share just a few of the answers that I found amusing and inspring.

Why do you think adults read children’s books?

Alan: Immature adults?

[Everyone laughs]

Jasper: I’ll start. I don’t know! I write what amuses me, and I leave it up to the publishers who’s going to buy it or read it. The difference between my books for grownups and my books for children is not quite such a difference, because I kind of write for the child in the adult. I always figured that if you can enjoy the Muppet Show, you can enjoy my books. So it really doesn’t matter if it’s a grown up or if it’s a middle grade book.

Alan: I think one of the reasons that Middle grade is also appealing to adults is that they’re action packed. Kids don’t have the patience. I’ve picked up an adult book before and I’ve read 200 pages in, and my wife will say, “What do you think?” and I’m like, “Weeeell, I don’t know, the story hasn’t gotten going, and I’m not sure I like the characters, and…” No kid has ever said that. They’re not going to say, “I’m going to give it another hundred pages and see if it picks up.” If you don’t get them quickly, they’re not going to stay with you. In the same way, I think many of us as adults think, “I want a book that gets on with it.”

Jasper: We could also say that books for adults are actually a bit boring.

Did you know you wanted to be writers when you were kids? Can you tell us about an unusual or unexpected experience that impacted your career path?

Alan: I grew up in a very sports oriented family. My father was the high school football coach, and my uncle had played football for the University of Tennessee. My extended family expected me to grow up and be the star quarterback for the high school football team. But I was terrible, no matter what sport I tried, and I’m an absolute klutz. And my dad – I will love forever for this – he realized at a young age that I was not good at sports, and he said “You’ve really started to show some talent at writing. Why don’t you keep writing and not worry about playing sports." So many parents who are coaches are so ready to guide their children into the sports life, but my dad didn’t. That was a huge thing for me. I felt the pressure from the rest of my family to be an athlete, but my dad was always there saying, “No no no, do what it is that you’re good at, not what everyone else expects you to do.” That was how I became a writer.

Andrea: I was a storyteller before I was a story writer. I would tell a story, and my sister would say, “No no, it didn’t happen that way you’re making it up.” Then one day she got really frustrated and said, “The only way you can lie and it’s okay is if you write stories.”

Last week, thanks to an invitation from Joseph-Beth Booksellers, Stephanie and I had the pleasure of meeting Sandy Hall, the first author to be discovered and signed to the Swoon Reads imprint. Swoon is an exciting new project from MacMillan -- a contest that might be best described as YA-meets-American-Idol.

Here's Sandy, charming us with details of the romance between college students Lea and Gabe -- and also sharing her experience on this journey of writing and publication.


Fun factoids from the evening:

• Sandy had been working in libraries since she was 16 years old.
• She loves and values having "a finger on the pulse" as a YA librarian now.
• She had written in the past -- and "failed NaNo for several years in a row."
• She also failed freshman writing in college -- which means "there is always hope for anyone!"
• Mostly she wrote fanfic. (For Glee!)
• Last fall she saw the call from Swoon Reads for manuscripts, consulted with one of the teens she knows ("What kind of YA romance do you want to read?"), and then sat down and started writing A LITTLE SOMETHING DIFFERENT.
• Sandy loves the Swoon community, which is full of supportive and enthusiastic readers and writers.
• Because of her fanfic background, the "crowdsourcing" aspect of Swoon Reads felt familiar to Sandy.
• When MacMillan wanted to call Sandy about her deal, her mom warned, "If they ask you for money, it's a scam!"
• Working with MacMillan was a dream come true, and they helped her edit the story to be even stronger.
• They reduced the number of POVs, and also made Lea a freshman instead of a junior. This basically required rewriting half the story.
• ALSD is definitely a YA story, even though it's set at "Fake Rutgers."
• Now Sandy is working on something new, and it is for MacMillan again, but it probably will not feature multiple POVs.
• She likes to write early in the day, and probably averages 1,000 to 1,500 words. (But on a good day, she can write double that!)
• Chuck Wendig's blog Terrible Minds = her Bible. She particularly relies on (what Chuck calls) a “vomit draft,” in combination with her own system of index cards (which you can see pictures of in ALSD).

• Evoke emotion. Immerse the reader. 
• A reader should feel like your character(s) had a life before the book and will have one after. 
• Exposition should convey a lot of voice.
• Give the right information in the right dose at the right time (i.e., when the reader needs it). 
• Summaries should mostly be avoided, but are occasionally necessary. Try to feather the information in little by little rather than all at once. 
• In the first pages, put in less setting and more character reaction

Last week, we told you about the Dark Days event at our local independent bookstore, and we introduced the books that were featured: The Bitter Kingdom by Rae Carson, The Brokenhearted by Amelia Kahaney, and Not a Drop to Drink by Mindy McGinnis. This week, we’re sharing our interview with these authors, and giving you a chance to win each of these three titles!

I opened by asking what comes first for each writer: character, world, or story. Rae and Mindy both said character without hesitation. Amelia said “For me, on this book, story came first,” but went on to say character usually comes first for her as well. Then I asked them to talk a little about each element.

Mindy McGinnis

Character — “My main character actually came from a dream that I had. I watched a documentary called Blue Gold about a fresh water shortage. I have a pond in my backyard, and I had a dream that night that I was teaching a young girl how to handle a rifle to protect our pond. In my dream, the child was very young, eight or nine. I woke and I thought ‘Wow. That’s a ridiculous thought. You shouldn’t give rifles to children.’ But then I thought ‘If someone was eight or nine years old, and you gave them a gun and told them to kill people to protect themselves, what kind of person are they going to grow up to be?’ And that’s where I got my main character.”

World — “My world pretty much built itself, because my world is my backyard. I have a pond in my backyard. The basement is my basement. The street is my street. My world is my world but a little waffled.”

Story — “I don’t plot at all. I just sit down and write. I just fly, truly, by the seat of my pants. I’m a complete, total, 100 percent pantser, and I usually don’t really know what’s going to happen, and I just go with it. The story’s going to tell itself. Before I started writing, I would hear writers talk about characters making their own decisions, things like that, and I was like ‘You’re the writer, you’re in charge, you’re God to these people,’ but you’re not. These people are their own people.”

Amelia Kahaney

Character — “I kept seeing a girl with long red hair, who was very lithe and dancerly, jumping through an urban night sky. I have a friend who is very lithe and dancerly, and I think I ended up modeling some of my main character, Anthem Fleet, on her, looks-wise. And I just thought about what a privileged dancer would do if the terrible things that befell her started to befall her.”

World — “My world is New York City. I’m in the heart of Brooklyn, so not as crazy as Manhattan, but still pretty darn packed. At the time that I began writing the book, Occupy Wall Street had just started their campout. The bankers had to walk by them every day, and there were these amazing images. I went down to the encampments as much as I could. I was so into what they were doing, and I was so interested in seeing the signage. They set up a whole library down there. Just seeing someone finally talking about how much some people have and how little everyone else has… it’s this new thing where, in this country, we’re talking about class. So I ended up creating a very divided city with the rich in a small enclave and the poor everywhere else.”

Story — “I was so into the Dark knight franchise, and my story has the feel of a superhero origin story. Those comic book convention are there for a reason. They really work. I have been a pantser, but The Brokenhearted was very carefully outlined. Also, I was terrified of writing a novel, and having the outline there really kept me going. I would finish chapter five, and I would say ‘I can’t do this.’ Actually, I said that until about chapter thiry. But then I would see the outline for chapter six, and I would just start to do it. That really was the guiding force for me.”

Rae Carson

Character — “[Alisa came from] jadedness and disgust current societal norms. I was rebelling against some things, like ‘Oh, princesses are always pretty. Well, fine. This one’s not going to be.’ I was just sick and tired of seeing some of the same things over and over again. I have a confrontational nature, so I wanted to do the opposite and see if I could make a sympathetic character out of that.”

World — “I was a social science major in college, so I studied history, economics, government, and I think that was actually a really good foundation for writing high fantasy. In addition to that, I have this insatiable curiosity about everything. I’m the type of person who goes on wikipedia to see what last night’s ratings for my favorite show were, and two hours later, I’ve somehow gone down the wikipedia spiral, and I’m reviewing Moroccan architectural history. Worldbuilding comes from a place of knowledge, knowing not just what you know, but what you don’t know and being curious about the things that you don’t know. If you don’t have a curiosity of about the world and the world you’re writing about, it’s going to be a drag. My advice is always, if you want to be a writer, indulge your curiosity shamelessly.”

Story — “I have a super basic outline in my head — like beginning, middle, end, and a couple touchstone points. Everything else, all the details, I discover as I go.”

On Wednesday, Rae Carson, Amelia Kahaney, and Mindy McGinnis stopped by our local independent bookstore, Joseph Beth, for the last stop on the Dark Days tour. I got to sit down and chat with them, and I had a front row seat at their panel.

Excited to have @WeHeartYA be the official event blogger for the #DarkDays tour stop at @JosephBethCincy!

— Pitch Dark Books (@PitchDarkBooks) October 7, 2013

Helloooooo, Cincinnati! Don't tell Columbus, but you seem way more happening. #betrayal #pitchdarkdays

— Rae Carson (@raecarson) October 9, 2013

In their own words, each author explained what their book is about:

“The Girl of Fire and Thorns trilogy is a high fantasy trilogy in the tradition of Game of Thrones or Lord of the Rings. Lots of adventuring, magic, quests, destiny, prophesy, and all that fun stuff. But instead of being like Jon Snow or Aragorn, my protagonist is more like Ugly Betty. She is underestimated at every turn, but she surprises people as the series progresses.” -  Rae Carson

“The Brokenhearted is an urban superhero story set in a fictional city called Bedlam where a river runs through the middle, dividing the rich from the poor. The protagonist is named Anthem Fleet, and she’s a very privileged high-school girl who is obsessed with ballet and dating the right guy. Then everything quickly falls apart. She falls for a different boy and descends from her highfalutin, privileged existence to go to the south side where things are rougher. The boy is kidnapped and she’s dispatched into a polluted river. When she’s saved from death by a mad scientist woman, she gets a new heart, and the heart has hummingbird DNA. The story is her trying to get her boyfriend back, and trying to understand her new body, and coming to terms with the fact that she’s this freakishly powerful person now.” - Amelia Kahaney

“Not a Drop to Drink is about an America thirty to forty years in the future where drinkable water is very rare. (Unfortunately, this is based on a documentary that I watched, so you might want to stock up!) The concept is that if you live in the city and you can afford water, you’ll have a fairly normal life. But most people can’t afford it, so the cities are emptying out. The people who live in the country have either a pond or a hand-dug well and have their own water resources. At the age of nine, my protagonist Lynn’s mother hands her a gun and says, 'You’re going to have to kill to defend the pond.' So she grows up this way, killing to protect their water source, so the two of them can live. Her mother is the only person she’s ever spoken to her entire life until about the age of sixteen or seventeen — she honestly not sure how old she is — and things start to change. She has to figure how to adapt to being human and less of this feral thing she’s been raised to be, and learn how live as opposed to just survive.” - Mindy McGinnis

If you follow us on Twitter, you might have caught our live-tweets from the event. But in case you missed it, here they are again, showcasing the humor and intelligence of these awesome ladies:

"I don't like to base characters on real people. That gets real tricky real quick." @MindyMcGinnis #pitchdarkdays

— We Heart YA (@weheartya) October 9, 2013

"I just want to get to a place where kickassedness is more multidimensional without being sexualized." @akahaney #pitchdarkdays

— We Heart YA (@weheartya) October 9, 2013

"I sit down and I write. That's pretty much what happens." @MindyMcGinnis when asked about her writing process #pitchdarkdays

— We Heart YA (@weheartya) October 9, 2013

"I have two notes on my laptop. One says 'Open the document' and the other says 'It's supposed to be fun.'" @akahaney #pitchdarkdays

— We Heart YA (@weheartya) October 9, 2013

"Have hope and keep fighting." @akahaney on what the message behind her book is. #pitchdarkdays

— We Heart YA (@weheartya) October 9, 2013

Last week, I had the privilege of interviewing Sarah Dessen at a signing she did at our local independent bookstore, Joseph Beth. I arrived half an hour early, and I got to chat with Sarah as she signed books and got ready for the event. Enjoy!

You published your first novel in 1996. You’ve been an author for nearly 20 years, and you’ve done countless events like these. What was your first signing like?

My first signing was at my hometown independent bookstore and everyone in the world came. It was so nice. My family was there, my parents, everybody I worked with, all my friends. So I had this great first reading with a like hundred people there.

After those initial events where I had a ton of people come out that knew me, I would go somewhere else and there would be three people there. Two of them came with me and one of them worked at the bookstore. Over the years, I’ve gradually seen the crowds get bigger. It’s been this slow build. So now when I show up, if there’s anybody, I never take it for granted.

What else has changed from the beginning of your career to now?

I think when you’re a beginning author with any publishing company, there’s only so much they can put behind you. And I have so much support right now from Penguin.

Also it’s the amount of readers invested in the next book. It used to be that nobody cared if I was writing, except my mother sort of cared just because she loved me. But now I have a lot of girls that are excited about the books and are waiting. And that’s like a double-edged sword in some ways, because they’re really enthusiastic and they can’t wait for the next book, but I don’t want to disappoint them.

You’ve said in an interview that every time you finish a book you feel like you’ll never write another. What is it that makes you sit down anyway and do it all over again?

I just get really jumpy. I say “squirrelly”. That’s the word I use. I finish a book, and I think I’m never going to write a book again. That was really hard. Then I have a little bit of time to watch bravo and eat popcorn, hang out with my friends and not think about writing. And it just starts to bubble up again. Even leading up to this tour, knowing that I really needed to be focused on [The Moon and More], I was very anxious about the book that I’m working on right now. It’s always there, it’s kind of this sense of just pushing forward and pushing forward.

What advice would you give to aspiring writers?

I always tell people who want to write — and this is usually advice that they’re already taking — is to read as much as they can get their hands on. You can take writing classes and talk to other writers and do writing workshops, but reading is how you absorb how other people handle dialogue, plotting. That’s how you see how stories come together.

And I always tell people to work out a discipline. Try to figure out what time of day you write, because everybody is better at a different time of day. I write in the afternoons, because when I first started writing after college, I had a morning job and an evening job. The only time I had free was one-five, and that was my time when I wrote. So that’s when I write now. And if I’m not writing at one o’clock, I’m very aware it. Even on this trip, I feel like I left the iron on or something. There’s a lot to be said for just showing up everyday.

And it’s not fun a lot of the time. For me it’s kind of like exercising. I never want to do it, but I know that once I do, I’ll feel good. You get going, and you hit your stride.

Like writing endorphins?

Yes! Exactly. And you won’t ever get those unless you start.

All of your books are contemporary. What is it that draws you to realistic fiction?

I think I’m too lazy a writer to do something like historical fiction. You have to do so much research. I just write what I know. All of my stories, they don’t come from my high school experience, but they’re definitely based on things that happened to me in high school, or things that happened to friends of mine, or things that I wish had happened to me. I still live in the same town where I went to high school, so it’s not that hard for me to get back into that frame of mind.

If you were to break out of your genre, what would you write?

Eventually I would like to write adult contemporary, because a lot has happened to me since high school. I got married. I have a child now. But it would have to be very organic. Even though there have been contemporary adult publishers that have come to my agent and said “we’d love for Sarah to write an adult fiction book,” I’m afraid it would seem very forced. There’s something about the teenage voice that is organic to me right now. I just always wait and see what the next story is going to be. If the next story happens to be about a girl in her twenties, that would be great, but I feel very lucky to be where I am, and I don’t feel the need to push into other places.

I’ve not started the new book. (I’m halfway through What Happened to Goodbye, and I’m really liking it.) Can you tell us what The Moon and More is about?

It about a girl named Emaline who lives in my beach town of Colby. I always wrote about girls that went to the beach and had that summer that changed everything. So I was interested in what it would be like to live in this tourist town where everyone has these life changing experiences, but your whole life is there. And what it’s like to be permanent in a place that other people think of as temporary.

It’s the summer right before she’d about to go off to college. She’s going to a state school with her boyfriend that she’s been with for three years. Everything is layout and very organized in terms of what is going to happen in her life. Then, as often happens in my books and in life in general, everything changes all at once.

The summer after graduation from high school is the first time that I feel there isn’t one natural step in the next direction. A lot of people go to college, but there were people in my school who were going into the military, and there were people who were going to go straight to work for their parents. It’s the first time there isn’t just one trajectory, and I was interested in that.

I’ve read that this one is a bit different than your other books. How is that?

I think the ending’s a little bit different, not to spoil anything. I think it’s a little bit of an older book than some of the other ones, because it’s dealing with what happens after high school. It’s like as far as I go into the adult world, August before freshman year of college.

Do you have a favorite scene is this book?

Oh my gosh. That’s a good question! I love any of the scenes where Emaline is with her sisters. I like scenes where you have a bunch of women sitting around a table. Talking, bickering, arguing, you know?

I first got one of the ideas for this book when I was coming back from the beach with one of my babysitters. She was in college, living in a big rental house with a bunch of girls. She was texting with them, and they were all hanging out in her room. And she was just like “I’ve told them a million times to get out of my room. My room is the only clean room. I keep it really organized, and they all go down there and put their drinks down without a coaster and mess up my bed.” So there’s a thing with Emaline that her mom and her sister are always in her room.

So you said you’re working on something new already?

I started something in January. It was going pretty well, but then it veered off in this awful direction right before I went on paperback tour in April. So I was forced to take a break from it. Then I came back and cut fifty-sixty pages. So I’m actually really glad I’m on book tour right now, so I have an excuse to not think about it. But once I get home and the dust settles a little bit, I’ll start writing again.

* * *
After the interview, I joined the rest of the crowd, who were singing I Will Survive and giggling as they waited. Sarah talked for a few minutes, read a couple pages of The Moon and More, took questions, did some trivia, gave prizes, and then got to work signing books for the long line that awaited her. It was such a fun night!


And here are some of the lovely readers I met in the lines:

Contest: Leave a comment telling us about a fun author event that you went to or getting to meet an author you love, and you could win a signed copy of Sarah Dessen’s new book, The Moon and More. (Contest closes on the 4th of July.)

On Monday, October 15th, John Green spoke at the Main Library in Cincinnati, Ohio to kick off Teen Read Week. Kristan and I met up early for crêpes and ate as we walked the remaining block to the library.

Inside, the place was packed. Anywhere you stood, there was at least one pizza john shirt staring creepily in your direction. There was evidence everywhere of Doctor Who obsessions, and a ukulele player sang Britney Spears songs in the back. There was even a girl dressed up as one of John's books. We managed to find seats only about ten rows back, which seemed too good to be true. It was. See the column in the picture below? We're directly behind it.

"I want to argue tonight that despite all of the terrible things that you’ve heard about the vapid apathy of this generation of teenagers and how they do nothing all day but look at tumblr, […] that, in fact, today’s generation of teenagers is, in many ways, the best informed, the best read, most thoughtful group of teenagers the world’s ever known."

Holding up one of his books: "These words are just meaningless scratches on a page, until someone makes them real."

"That’s one of the things that reading can give us, and I think it’s one of the things that we most crave. We crave feeling outside of ourselves. […] When I read a great novel, I feel like I am seeing the world out of someone else’s eyes. I feel like I have a life outside of my own — if only for a little bit — and I can imagine what it’s like to be someone else with a complexity that I could never imagine what it’s like to be even the people whom I love the most, who are closest to me."

“I really like teenagers, but not in a creepy way. [The crowd laughs.] I find them really interesting because they’re doing a lot of important things for the first time: they’re falling in love for the first time, they’re experiencing grief for the first time — in many cases, at least — and they’re almost always for the first time grappling in a sovereign way with the big questions of our species.”

“In my experience at least, when you treat teenagers as if they aren’t stupid, they won’t disappoint you. I think when you credit anyone with intelligence, they tend to rise to the occasion.”

Both John’s faith in the intelligence of his readers and the teenage struggle with the “big questions” became evident later when a young girl from the audience asked, “I was just wondering why you think people suffer?”

Instead of skirting the question or giving a nice neat answer as I saw many adults do when I was a teen. He answered with seriousness and honesty, explaining how he cannot imagine we live in the best possible world and that he tries not to look for a reason because it just makes him angry. Then he countered that while there is tremendous suffering in the world, there is also tremendous joy.

“For me the saving grace of the question of why people suffer, the place where I find hope in that, is that even though we all suffer, even though we will all have terrible pain that we have to live with in our lives, there is also going to be moments of great fulfillment.”

“So my answer to why people suffer is I don’t know, but I am very very grateful that even though we suffer — and I don’t want to diminish it — even though there is terrible pain in the world, for now, for today, we are very lucky to be observers of the universe.”

Update: For anyone interested, you can watch the entire speech on the library's YouTube channel.