“After a third draft working with Ilene, she sent it to Dutton and six months later I had a publishing contract” Green says. Cooper offered a detailed editorial letter and served as a mentor for Green through subsequent versions of the manuscript.
“It was 40 single-spaced pages in 10 point font,” he notes. “That’s when I got the idea for the before-and-after structure.” Green wrote a first draft and presented it to Cooper to read. “But I didn’t really work on it till late 2001,” says Green. I saw that real people like Ilene wrote books they weren’t written in ivory towers.” Green told Cooper about his book idea over lunch one day, and she was encouraging. “One of the editors there, Ilene Cooper, was also an author. “I never even would have tried to write the book had I not worked there,” he says. I felt helpless and angry after my time as a chaplain and I wanted to write about love and grief and forgiveness, and how we can be hopeful in a world marked by ambiguity and questions we can’t ever find the answers to.”Īs those big themes simmered in Green’s imagination he focused on his day job as an editorial assistant at Booklist in Chicago. Secondly, after graduating college, I worked as a student chaplain at a children’s hospital for six months.
“I went to a boarding school in rural Alabama, so a lot of the story is autobiographical. “I guess it really started in two places,” says Green, reflecting on the origins of Alaska’s tale. Next month Dutton is marking the book’s birthday with the release of a special 10th-anniversary edition and a celebratory marketing campaign.
He did just that with Looking for Alaska, his first novel for young adults (Dutton, 2005), which won the 2006 Printz Award, was a PW Flying Start, and eventually became a bestseller. Long before the success of the book and movie versions of The Fault in Our Stars, his Vlogbrothers YouTube channel, or the blockbuster fundraising campaign Project for Awesome, Green was an aspiring writer looking for a way to channel his intense emotions into a story. But more accurately, he’s been having quite a decade. It’s often been said recently that author John Green is having a moment.
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