Paper Towns is a novel by John Green, best known for his first YA novel The Fault in Our Stars.
Paper Towns, which featured fifth on the New York Times bestseller list in the first week after its publication, has been made into a film that will be released later this month.
Green, who is an executive producer for the adaptation, is involved in promoting Paper Towns. He is currently promoting the movie across America on the “Get Lost Get Found” tour with Cara Delevingne and Nat Wolff, who play the leads in the movie.
Earlier this week, Twentieth Century Fox released a “Story Featurette” in which John Green introduces the story:
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Entertainment Weekly interviewed Green to find out more about Paper Towns. He says he was thinking about “how young men often romanticise, and in the process dehumanise, the girls they like”.
In the interview, he also speaks about Agloe, New York, the strange real-life made-up town that features in the book and other things that inspired him:
Quentin Jacobsen, the focal character in the book, has been in love with his neighbour Margo Roth Spiegelman for as long as he can remember. This excerpt from the book, shared by Teenreads, is Quentin memory of their shared childhood:
The way I figure it, everyone gets a miracle. Like, I will probably never be struck by lightning, or win a Nobel Prize, or become the dictator of a small nation in the Pacific Islands, or contract terminal ear cancer, or spontaneously combust. But if you consider all the unlikely things together, at least one of them will probably happen to each of us. I could have seen it rain frogs. I could have stepped foot on Mars. I could have been eaten by a whale. I could have married the queen of England or survived months at sea. But my miracle was different. My miracle was this: out of all the houses in all the subdivisions in all of Florida, I ended up living next door to Margo Roth Spiegelman.
Our subdivision, Jefferson Park, used to be a navy base. But then the navy didn’t need it anymore, so it returned the land to the citizens of Orlando, Florida, who decided to build a massive subdivision, because that’s what Florida does with land. My parents and Margo’s parents ended up moving next door to one another just after the first houses were built. Margo and I were two.
John Green has a lively question and answer page, where he answers fans questions about what inspires him, what his characters get up to in their spare time and just about everything else.
Read what he has to say about the writing in Paper Towns:
Q. Why did you sometimes switch from writing in past tense to writing in present tense?
A. So when people tell stories, they often switch from past to present tense—sometimes even in the middle of a sentence. Often, they do this because whatever they’re describing in the present tense feels so immediate and unresolved to them that it seems as if it is still happening, even though the events of the story occurred in the past.
So you might tell a story of the time your car hit a deer by saying, “So I was driving down the highway listening to Aerosmith’s new album and then BAM out of nowhere This deer jumps out and destroys my windshield.”
Putting aside the question of why you were listening to the new Aerosmith album, there’s the question of why you changed tenses when telling that story. I think it’s because driving down the highway is something you’re accustomed to and reconciled to and can definitely see as being an event in the past.
But the deer hitting your windshield was so shocking and scary that it feels as if you are still experiencing it, so you tell this part of the story in the present tense.
This happens all the time in regular human conversation, and I wanted to use this to give the reader a sense of immediacy and disquiet when Q switches to the present tense. When he narrates in the present, he’s talking about things that shake him so deeply that he doesn’t feel like they happened; he feels like they are still happening.
Book details
- Looking for Alaska by John Green
EAN: 9780007424832
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- An Abundance of Katherines by John Green
EAN: 9780141346090
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- Paper Towns by John Green
EAN: 9780142414934
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- Will Grayson Will Grayson by John Green
EAN: 9780141346113
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- The Fault in Our Stars by John Green
EAN: 9780141345659
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