PT Questions Answered

I live in Orlando (actually Winter Park but what's the difference really) and can't help but compare Dr. Jefferson to Dr. Phillips. Also Auduban Park is surprisingly close the the description of Q and Margo's neighborhood... I'm sure this has been said many times but I felt the need to say it.

Mon, 27 Aug 2012 12:38:18 -0400

Dr. Jefferson is indeed based on Dr. Philip Philips, for whom half of Orlando is named. (Dr. Philips had a legit medical degree from Columbia University, though.) I grew up in Audubon Park (on Leu Road) but based Margo and Q’s neighborhood on the Baldwin Park neighborhood, which was built on the site of the old Orlando naval training center.

The naval training center loomed large in my childhood: Many of my friends’ parents worked on the base, and there was this huge fake ship I could see on my drive to middle school that the sailors-to-be used for practice. Of course, it’s completely insane to build a naval training center in Orlando, which is sixty miles from the coast, but something about these real sailors practicing war on this fake ship really appealed to my feeling that everything was phony and inauthentic and ridiculous.

More than Disney World or Universal Studios, that fake ship anchored in the thick grass of central Florida seemed magical, and I am very grateful to have lived near such beautiful folly.

Why isn't there an "Only If You Finished This Is Not Tom" Tumblr?

Tue, 21 Aug 2012 13:53:22 -0400

Because no one’s ever finished it. (…including me.)

Why wasn't Q in band with Radar and Ben?

Tue, 21 Aug 2012 13:48:00 -0400

I liked the idea that he really had no built-in social network (in the old-fashioned sense of the phrase), that he was friends with Ben and Radar but separated from them for large swaths of time while they were doing band stuff. I needed Q to be isolated because I needed him to see himself in Margo when she talked about her own feelings of social isolation. Instead of actually hearing her when she’s talking, all he’s seeing is himself reflected back, which of course makes him think that he and Margo are perfect for each other.

p.s. Great username!

Is there going to be a movie or not?!

Tue, 21 Aug 2012 13:45:12 -0400

No, probably not. The people who worked at the studio that optioned Paper Towns and paid me to write the screenplay were not particularly pleased with my first draft, and they really hated my revision.

They felt the first draft was “literary,” which is an insult in the world of filmmaking, I guess, and my attempts to address their concern watered down everything they’d initially liked about the script, and after that, I was pretty pissed off at the head of the studio and it’s safe to say that he was very pissed off at me.

He then refused to pay me the last little pittance of what was owed to me, claiming I hadn’t done work I’d clearly done. I don’t have any particular desire to throw this guy under the bus by naming him, but it was a petulant and childish response to not being happy with the work done by a first-time screenwriter they were paying very (very very) little. There are a lot of petulant children in Hollywood, in my experience.

Anyway, I very happily went back to writing books, which is what I should’ve been doing all along.

Is it possible that someone will improve upon my script—or that a new script will be created from scratch—and there will eventually be a movie? Yes. But it’s very unlikely.

Out of all of your characters, I honestly think that Ben is one of the characters I wish I was friends with most in real life, and I've noticed in AAOK and LFA as well, you often seem to write the main character's best friend as an extroverted, and generally more outgoing type of person than the main character. Is there any specific reason you do this?

Tue, 21 Aug 2012 13:38:38 -0400

Well, I think people who narrate stories tend to be naturally a bit introspective, because the rest of people are busy out, like, living their lives, rather than obsessively trying to chronicle life. This is a very old convention in storytelling, and I certainly didn’t invent it, but it’s always struck me as both enjoyable and authentic.

I did try to play with it a bit more sophisticatedly in TFiOS, where Hazel is making a journey toward that extroverted kind of life and Augustus is making a journey away from it.

At the party when Q goes to talk with Lacey in the bathtub you describe her as wearing a sleeveless t-shirt, what exactly is a sleeveless t-shirt?????? Is it a cutoff t-shirt or a tank top? I just think of something called a t-shirt as having sleeves so this description really threw me for a loop . A visual aid would be helpful.

Tue, 21 Aug 2012 13:36:02 -0400

In the screenplay I wrote, Lacey and Q make out in that scene.

But anyway, I imagined one of those scoop-necked cotton tops with relatively narrow straps, I think. The pleasure of writing from Q’s perspective is that you don’t need to use particularly precise language when it comes to girl clothes, because what the hell does he know about girl clothes?

While reading Paper towns, I just couldn't help but think that it was so selfish for Q to skip his graduation for someone that only paid attention to him once. Maybe because so many family members came to mine it was such a weird decision for him to not show up. Was the decision for Q to skip graduation a way to show that he is not close to his family.

Tue, 21 Aug 2012 13:33:04 -0400

I mean, bear in mind that he thinks this girl is going to die.

If I were like, “You can either go to your graduate or potentially keep someone from dying,” you would probably choose the latter, whether you knew the person or not.

Furthermore, it all feeds his (wrong-headed) notion of knight-in-shining-armor-saving-damsel-in-distress heroism, which in Q’s defense is so widely and deeply celebrated in our culture that it would take superhuman effort to escape it.

Does Dr. Jefferson Jefferson change his name to "Dr." despite not actually being a doctor because of the whole theme of the novel about people not actually being who they pretend to be, like Margo not actually being the crazy, adventurous, fun-loving girl she says she is? I just started reading the novel for the fourth time and just realized that

Thu, 16 Aug 2012 09:56:21 -0400

Well, I wanted to write—as I often do—about the relationship between given identities and chosen identities.

When you’re a teenager, you have to make a lot of decisions about which of your given identities you’re going to hold onto, and which you’re going to abandon. Like, say you were raised going to church every Sunday. Well, to be honest, you probably didn’t have much say in whether you went to church. But at some point, that WILL be your decision, and that identity will shift from given to chosen.

But there are a billion examples of this in adolescence. And I think that’s why we talk so much about being phony or fake and so on: Teenagers are beginning to realize that these identities are very complicated and fluid, and that can make them feel inauthentic.

So if your name is Jefferson Jefferson and then you go to court and have your name changed to Dr. Jefferson Jefferson, with Dr. as your first name, are you a doctor? Of course you’re not. But then you also are a doctor, because everyone calls you doctor and everyone assumes you’re a doctor. You are something to others but not to yourself, which is an experience a lot of us have as teenagers (and afterward, for that matter).

Margo especially goes through this, because the way people think of her is not at all the way she thinks of herself, and the interior life people imagine her having is wildly different from her actual interior life. So I wanted to use Dr. Jefferson Jefferson as a way of beginning that book-long conversation about whether your you-ness is imposed from within or from without.

So Bluefin doesn't actually exist?

Thu, 16 Aug 2012 09:48:59 -0400

That really depends on how you define “actually” and “exist.”

if Margo is so concerned about fairly capitalizing all words, why doesn't she capitalize letters in the middle of words?

Thu, 16 Aug 2012 09:48:43 -0400

I think she is concerned about the words, not the letters. Maybe I should’ve had her be concerned about the letters. That would’ve been a little more metaphorically resonant.

MY BAD!

First off, Paper Towns is by far my favorite of your books (they all rank astronomically high). As far as my question goes, Was Margo Roth Spiegelman in any way a reflection of how you felt when you were her age? Even as an adult i found myself identifying with her thoughts and fantasizing about what it would be like to have the courage to do such a seemingly selfish act because you felt you had to.

Thu, 16 Aug 2012 09:45:55 -0400

Well, sure, yes.

Like, there is a lot of talk among people about not participating in evil systems and not wanting to be fully integrated into a social order that has a deformed conscience. (We all do this: Almost all of our lives require an underclass. Like, if you drive a car or are often driven around in one, it’s worth remembering that if even half of the world’s population treated cars as Europeans and Americans do, gas prices would be >$10 a gallon and carbon emissions would be insanely high.)

But almost every human being ends up integrating into the social order anyway. A famous example of this is Mark Twain, who wrote about roustabouts and troublemakers and created, in the form of Huck Finn, the greatest rebel in American fiction, a boy who heroically refused the so-called “civilizing” forces of class consciousness and institutionalized racism.

But Mark Twain himself was fully integrated into his social order. He sought wealth and powerful friends and lived in a fancy house, etc.

So of course sitting in my suburban home with my very socially integrated life I am going to fantasize about making the radical choices. But I wanted to make it clear in the novel that the radical choices are not easy and also not easily justified: It’s not at all clear to me that Margo’s choices are more heroic than Quentin’s. I am personally very old-fashioned and pragmatic in my values, and I think very highly of political, economic, and social stability. I think there is a quiet heroism to such stability. But I also think it can be bold and brave to decide to lead a very different life and to pursue goals that the social order doesn’t value.

What happened after the end of the book?

Thu, 16 Aug 2012 09:32:25 -0400

You guys.

In Paper Towns one of your characters claims that Tomorrowland is the worst of the lands in Magic Kingdom. Do you stand by this belief too?

Thu, 16 Aug 2012 09:31:52 -0400

I hate all of Disney World equally. I hate every square inch of it, except for

1. The Hall of Presidents, which I merely dislike.

and

2. The Swiss Family Robinson Treehouse, which I have mixed feelings about.

Other than that, I hate the whole thing with a fiery unrepentant passion. I grew up in Orlando, so it is my birthright to hate Disney World. The mere phrase “The Magic Kingdom” makes me throw up in my mouth a little.

I for one am glad to have thrown off the oppressive shackles of monarchies in favor of representative government, and I don’t like going back to Disney and having to imagine that I am the subject of a King, particularly when the king in question is a large talking mouse partly responsible for the destruction of reasonable copyright law in the United States.

do you see your female characters as Manic Pixie Dream Girls?

Thu, 16 Aug 2012 09:23:07 -0400

No, but I’m not a 16-year-old boy.

I mean, I don’t think I romanticize the life of any human being, except maybe Steven Gerrard.

I look at Kristen Stewart or Britney Spears or One Direction or whomever, and mostly I only see the pure terror and misery of never getting to be away from being one’s performed self, which is the problem that Margo Roth Spiegelman has in this novel, although her performed self is played out on a tiny stage.

Paper Towns is a novel about the problem of imagining other people as manic pixie dream girls (or manic pixie dream boys, for that matter). No one IS a manic pixie dream girl; they’re just constructed that way by those observing them.

I've been re-reading PT for an english assignment and I came across a passage quite early on where Q says "Margo's beauty was a kind of sealed vessel or perfection- uncracked and uncrackable" and it made it me wonder if you made the vessel reference here on purpose. I mean, even if you didn't I still think that it really says something about the way Q view Margo, but I can't help but wonder. Thank you.

Thu, 16 Aug 2012 09:17:51 -0400

Yeah, that was purposeful, but this is a great example of books belonging to their readers and how it doesn’t really matter whether it was purposeful.

Let’s say that I included that by accident—like, in that moment of writing, I just thought of Q thinking of Margo as a sealed vessel.

And then much later in the novel, I happened to have Q and Margo to cracked vessels, and argue that the only way light can get in and out of those vessels is via the cracks.

Let’s just imagine that’s a total coincidence and meant nothing to the author.

It can still be useful and meaningful to us, because it can still be a way into thinking about how imagining people as human (rather than uncracked and uncrackable sealed perfection) proves not only to be more accurate but ultimately a lot more fulfilling.

So that journey—from imagining the other as a sealed vessel to imagining the other as a cracked one—is kind of the journey of adolescence, the journey toward empathy. Intent is irrelevant there. The thing stands on its own. (…if it’s any good, at least.)

how do you think of someone as a human being? It said that it's: a treacherous thing to believe that a person is more than a person - that people are more than words like "nice" "funny" and "smart" but how else do we present ourselves? do we just let the other person imagine us however they want to with any words they choose. now I'm just rambling

Mon, 13 Aug 2012 22:11:59 -0400

Right, so when you imagine yourself, you think of yourself as a massively complex individual. You may hate yourself or like yourself or whatever, but you certainly think of yourself as fully human. As Whitman puts it, “I contain multitudes.”

The problem is that your brain is the only brain you’ll ever have; your eyes are the only eyes you’ll ever see out of; your experiences are the only experiences you’ll ever know as your own. This is what makes it so easy to dehumanize people—to say, for instance, as Aristotle famously did, that some people are just naturally born to be slaves. But it also makes it easy to dehumanize people in subtler ways. (I’d argue, for instance, that I am able to spend $90 a month on cable television while 2 billion people live on less than $60 a month only because I do not feel those people’s joy and pain and desire as acutely as I feel my own. If I did feel every individual’s need as acutely as I feel my own, I would almost certainly forego cable TV and send that money to those who need it for food and shelter.) But in addition to dehumanizing people, we can also imagine them as more than human: When we think of celebrities, or those we love romantically, we may see this as superhumanly free from the fear and pain and despair that plague the rest of us.

So anyway the task of understanding the reality of other people’s experience is incredibly difficult, because you are stuck being you, and can never even for one second be them. But this is true not only for people who live very different lives from yours, but also for those closest to you. You see everybody in your life in the context of you: YOUR sister, YOUR best friend, YOUR mom, YOUR nemesis, whatever. But they do not see themselves that way. They see themselves as the center of history, just as you see yourself.

This turns out to be a really big problem that (at least in my experience) can only be solved by empathy, an imperfect and incomplete tool (see my $90 monthly cable bill) but the best one we have.

It feels weird to clarify your answer (as like I'm obviously not the author), but someone was asking if Margo was Jewish. She makes a comment about using her Bat Mitzvah money for her escapades, so yeah, she's Jewish.

Mon, 13 Aug 2012 21:58:55 -0400

Aha! So she IS Jewish!

Speaking of names, Myrna Mountweazel?

Mon, 13 Aug 2012 21:54:43 -0400

Myrna because it sounded good with Mountweazel. Mountweazel because of reasons.

any particular Reason margo has Weird Capitalization?

Mon, 13 Aug 2012 21:53:41 -0400

Well, she says herself that she feels like traditional rules of capitalization are unfair to the words in the middle. Margo is super concerned with the way that people’s conformity and lack of intellectual curiosity makes life less interesting than it ought to be, and this seemed like a good (and very teenage) expression of her concern.

(That said, there are very good reasons why we do not capitalize random words in the middle of sentences.)

All of the streets in Q's neighborhood are named after the same person (Jefferson Road, Jefferson Way, Jefferson Court, etc.) I was just wondering is there was any particular reason you did this? Was it connected to anything else in the story?

Mon, 13 Aug 2012 21:50:02 -0400

It was just meant to indicate the lack of creativity and sameness in the design of Q and Margo’s neighborhood, which is part of what Margo finds so completely unbearable.