I myself employ the John Green method where I read aloud or revise something in my head and if it could pass as something john green has or could potentially say or write then I scratch the whole thing and start over.
How does Veeky Forums revise its prose?
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write it
shelve it
write it again without referencing the original
then edit it
Why are you so familiar with John Green's writing?
I'm convinced all of Veeky Forums has a strange sexual obsession with this man
He is pretty hot.
He's the Rimbaud of our time.
Write as much as I possibly can in one sitting.
Double spaced, in notebook paper.
Wait for a day or two, let it settle. Open it back up, read it over carefully, making revisions between the kinds.
That's actually become something I do as well. Also making sure that all my characters don't talk exactly like me, like how all John Green characters talk just like John Green does.
Personally, I read it out loud. If I stop at all in any circumstance, then I rewrite the sentence.
Even if it means I have to stop to take a breath because it's too long, understand the writing, figure out ambiguity, vagueness, or because the words just don't mesh well together, etc. You get the idea.
I want everything to be smooth.
I write for 3-4 hours and read it 2 or 3 times at most. I correct myself then put it away and work on the next chapter. When I'm done, I revise the whole work as make final adjustments.
If I were to write in short bursts and revise the product of an hour's work, I'd self-correct to the point where it doesn't resemble the original. In the end, I still wouldn't be happy with what I wrote, so I'd just waste my time. I avoid my perfectionism by not giving myself a chance to over-analyze my own work.
I don't know about others, but this works for me. I'm at my best when I write something for the first time. After I correct and rewrite something, it's stylistically better, but not in overall, and the original work gets lost among the corrections. I can't be happy with that.
I am awful for editing as i write. But i just cant progress past a glaring problem with my writing.
(1) read aloud
(2) change the font
(3) smoke weed
(4) imagine your crush reading it
(5) create an audio file of it and listen (easy to do on a mac)
(6) have my mom read it
This actually sounds like a really good way to make sure your prose flows nicely. Thanks for sharing, user.
>I was gawky and she was gorgeous and I was hopelessly boring and she was endlessly fascinating
I'll never understand the appeal.
>expect john green bait thread
>get nice discussion of drafting and editing
pleasant surprise desu
are people attracted to funposting the best posters?
Our hatred of John Green fuels us to be better writers.
So none of your sentences have commas?
Don't you dare compare le funny meme man to this god-tier qt.
I note down a list of things I need to think about more or change because they don't work, then I go line-by-line and change individual sentences or paragraphs.
ye
>Writing
>Think of some insanely contrived and ironic twist on a word
>Read through it later
>What the fuck did I mean
Can you give some examples of John Greene's writing? I want to test this out myself.
>Just as the Bradys were getting locked in jail, Lara randomly asked me, “Have you ever gotten a blowjob?”
>“Um, that’s out of the blue,” I said.
>“The blue?”
>“Like, you know, out of left field.”
>“Left field?”
>“Like, in baseball. Like, out of nowhere. I mean, what made you think of that?”
>“I’ve just never geeven one,” she answered, her little voice dripping with seductiveness. It was so brazen. I thought I would explode. I never thought. I mean, from Alaska, hearing that stuff was one thing. But to hear her sweet little Romanian voice go so sexy all of the sudden...
>“No,” I said. “I never have.”
>“Think it would be fun?”
>DO I!?!?!?!?!?!?! “Um. yeah. I mean, you don’t have to.”
>“I think I want to,” she said, and we kissed a little, and then. And then with me sitting watching The Brady Bunch, watching Marcia Marcia Marcia up to her Brady antics, Lara unbuttoned my pants and pulled my boxers down a little and pulled out my penis.
>“Wow,” she said.
>“What?”
>She looked up at me, but didn’t move, her face nanometers away from my penis. “It’s weird.”
>“What do you mean weird?”
>“Just beeg, I guess.”
>I could live with that kind of weird. And then she wrapped her hand around it and put it into her mouth.
>And waited.
>We were both very still. She did not move a muscle in her body, and I did not move a muscle in mine. I knew that at this point something else was supposed to happen, but I wasn’t quite sure what.
>She stayed still. I could feel her nervous breath. For minutes, for as long as it took the Bradys to steal the key and unlock themselves from the ghost-town jail, she lay there, stock-still with my penis in her mouth, and I sat there, waiting.
>And then she took it out of her mouth and looked up at me quizzically.
>“Should I do sometheeng?”
>“Um. I don’t know,” I said. Everything I’d learned from watching porn with Alaska suddenly exited my brain. I thought maybe she should move her head up and down, but wouldn’t that choke her? So I just stayed quiet.
>“Should I, like, bite?”
>“Don’t bite! I mean, I don’t think. I think—I mean, that felt good. That was nice. I don’t know if there’s something else.”
>“I mean, you deedn’t—”
>“Um. Maybe we should ask Alaska.”
>So we went to her room and asked Alaska. She laughed and laughed. Sitting on her bed, she laughed until she cried. She walked into the bathroom, returned with a tube of toothpaste, and showed us. In detail. Never have I so wanted to be Crest Complete.
>Lara and I went back to her room, where she did exactly what Alaska told her to do, and I did exactly what Alaska said I would do, which was die a hundred little ecstatic deaths, my fists clenched, my body shaking. It was my first orgasm with a girl, and afterward, I was embarrassed and nervous, and so, clearly, was Lara, who finally broke the silence by asking, “So, want to do some homework?”
>"That's THE thing, Quentin," Margot's words come out of her mouth like breath. "We're paper, paper people like paper dolls, just like the paper town. Break the people here down into little pieces and all you get is confetti. We are a paper town living in a plastic word and we don't want to wake up and read the newspaper. Newspapers delivered by paper boys. We are marked by our paper cuts. Even on 9/11, the last remnants of the towers were just papers machéing the streets in their dying irony." Margot's breast heaves like vacuumed lungs. I took a moment to breath in myself. "You can see it, right?" She asks me, like this time she is really asking, and not just asking to ask.
>The city below us glitters like the stars above us and her star-filled eyes. I am: shaking, my intestines are in my bowels and in my throat. I realize that near her I am not even the paper in the wind. I am the dust.
>I wanted so badly to lie down next to her on the couch, to wrap my arms around her and sleep. Not fuck, like in those movies. Not even have sex. Just sleep together in the most innocent sense of the phrase. But I lacked the courage and she had a boyfriend and I was gawky and she was gorgeous and I was hopelessly boring and she was endlessly fascinating. So I walked back to my room and collapsed on the bottom bunk, thinking that if people were rain, I was drizzle and she was hurricane.
>my intestines are in my bowels
Seductiveness might be the worst word in the english language.
my vote is for zestful desu
This isn't real right, Just something you wrote?
>dying irony
Now I'm dying!
Very good answer
Why is "THE" capitalized like that?
>muh paper
Complete nonsense
>that tepid 9/11 allegory
>Margot's breast heaves like vacuumed lungs
Contextualized: Margot is having a sort of existential crisis, and Quentin is staring at her tits as she breaks down. Also, your chest doesn't heave as your lungs are emptied.
>asking
What is this
These aren't real. Sorry, but god could you imagine?
I feel like I've seen this one before so I guess it's actually legit? Still, pretty terrible.
The blowjob one actually is real
The sex scene is real. It's from Looking for Alaska.
I'm afraid to say, the 'sleeping' and 'paper' passages are real.
You're fucking with me.
the first one you quoted is actually real and the last one you quoted is real as well
the middle one im not sure
Yeah that one's real
>ctrl F
>"discernible talent"
>0 results
Any closing remarks?
>DO I!?!?!?!?!?!?!
Knowing how not to write is 90% of the challenge of being a good writer.
I am honestly livid right now, you people are telling me this:
>Just as the Bradys were getting locked in jail, Lara randomly asked me, “Have you ever gotten a blowjob?”
>“Um, that’s out of the blue,” I said.
>“The blue?”
>“Like, you know, out of left field.”
>“Left field?”
>“Like, in baseball. Like, out of nowhere. I mean, what made you think of that?”
>“I’ve just never geeven one,” she answered, her little voice dripping with seductiveness. It was so brazen. I thought I would explode. I never thought. I mean, from Alaska, hearing that stuff was one thing. But to hear her sweet little Romanian voice go so sexy all of the sudden...
>“No,” I said. “I never have.”
>“Think it would be fun?”
>DO I!?!?!?!?!?!?! “Um. yeah. I mean, you don’t have to.”
Was not only present in a published book, but a published book that won some kind of award for young adult fiction? I always knew John Greene was bad but Christ.
> and I did exactly what Alaska said I would do, which was die a hundred little ecstatic deaths, my fists clenched, my body shaking. It was my first orgasm with a girl, and afterward, I was embarrassed and nervous,
Has he never had sex?
...
...
His wife repeatedly dodged his advances in their youth, went on a date with him only after he tricked her into thinking the date was actually going to be a group hang out day with mutual friends, and only married him after he became filthy rich.
To answer your last question based around this info, no. His wife probably has ritual fuckfests with Somalian twins while he watches.
go home freud
>fellatio fiasco
His editor looked at this and decided it was fine.
>where I repeated in embarrassing detail the fellatio fiasco
this reads like english isn't even his first language
If it looks like a cuck and it quacks like a cuck...
This is hilarious. I can't feel sorry for him.
if it looks like fuckin trips and repeats like fuckin trips
Numerical Ouija confirms
Do you think that he's using the word "embarrassing" to emphasize the blowjob complication itself, or the abhorrent prose describing it?
Made me think, neurons fired, etc
>A brief explanation from John: My new book, An Abundance of Katherines, is about a boy, Colin Singleton, who has dated 19 girls, all of whom dumped him and all of whom were named Katherine. Some people may say, “Well, what entitles you to write such a book? Why do you presume to be such an expert in the field of getting dumped?” And so, to prove to you that An Abundance of Katherines is born of an Abundance of Experience, here are 19 sentences about 19 girls who dumped me.
>1. Jennifer Keene was the cutest girl in third grade, and as such was really out of my league, which she realized after four days.
>2. After it ended with my fourth-grade girlfriend Julie Baskin, I wrote in my journal, “my life is a waste” (seriously).
>3. Tiffany-whose-last-name-I-can’t-remember told everyone at camp I kissed like I was eating a sloppy joe, and then broke up with me during pottery class.
>4. Davonne Raizor, the cutest Cure fan in all of ninth grade, eventually revealed, “I keep trying to be attracted to you, but it isn’t working.”
>5. Barbara wanted someone harder core.
>6. Holly Brown liked Stuart more.
>7. Fran realized she didn’t like boys.
>8. Jen Spears realized she still liked Gilbert.
>9. By way of parting, Jeanette said, “You don’t need a girlfriend; you need a robot who says nothing but I-love-you,” and in doing so, made her way into “An Abundance of Katherines.”
>10. After several hours-long conversations about our relationship told me, Jenny told me, “I would prefer to HAVE a relationship rather than just discuss one,” which proved impossible.
>11. After two years, Major College Girlfriend and First Real Love Marie Ponzillo was like, “If we’re not gonna get married, we should probably break up, and we are SO not getting married.”
>12. Jill dumped me because I couldn’t get over Marie.
>13. Annika dumped me because I couldn’t get over Jill.
>14. Then came the smothering trilogy: Jessi Johnston felt really smothered.
>15. Carrie Sanders felt really smothered.
>16. Lesley Martin felt really smothered.
>17. After my junior year of college, Mary-whose-last-name-I-can-remember-but-she-is-a-lawyer-and-has-threatened-to-sue-me drove with me to Alaska, where we were spending the summer in a town of 18 people, and in pretty short order, Mary dumped me for one of the other 18 people.
>18. Emily Chambers was my Alamo: there were no survivors.
>19. Sarah Urist dumped me after two dates, because I was awkward and couldn’t talk to her (but then we stayed friends and I got slightly less awkward and then four years later we got married).
this man is god
I don't even see what's so bad about this, and I don't like John Green.
i assumed it was because he was talking about his small weenie which would embarrass a cuck like green and his self-insert characters
There is no way in fucking hell that that picture is real.
My word. I've spent a good part of my 20 years looking for somebody with a higher sense of self importance than my own. I think I've finally found that person. Maybe I can begin to heal, at last.
Also
>9. By way of parting, Jeanette said, “You don’t need a girlfriend; you need a robot who says nothing but I-love-you,” and in doing so, made her way into “An Abundance of Katherines.”
He never recovered from this BTFO-ing.
>ultimately an a misogynist act
you're destroying a woman's creation i guess??????
did he ever even try to explain it????
is the picture even real
there is no way that it is real
No, the picture isn't real, you dumb fuckers.
Did any of them even think it was?
Whatever, I just felt hostile.
Don't worry about it
sup john
>females just can't understand
Is he, dare I say it, /ourguy/?
Well, first I weed out all the typos. All the times where I wrote "the" when I meant "there" or "they" or vice versa. Then I clean up all the elephants in a research marathon. Then I go through looking for passive sentences, or sentences that just generally don't make sense, or sentences where I've just forgotten to write the end and they cut of midway with a period.
Then I sit and think for a bit, consider potential holes in the plot, or areas where I've dumped too much information or there's too much expositionary dialogue.
I go back and make links earlier on in the text that tie back to the end. Just a word or a line. Not even foreshadowing.
That done, I go through everything with a fine-toothed comb, pick out all the sentences I don't like or don't think are necessary, add others in, check for grammatical errors, and put it away for about four months.
Then I go through the entire process again before handing it to a friend to read through. By then, it usually doesn't resemble the original draft very much. If there's some glaring inconsistency, the friend will usually pick up on it. They will also spot the odd typo I've missed, or highlight an area that doesn't make sense to them which might have made sense to me, but needs revision for clarity.
I've never read anything he's written, though I did watch the movie adaptation of The Fault in our Stars and thought it was a bit weak. He's too tidy-looking for my personal tastes, though. I prefer my men a little wilder.
whhy are you such a gay
You mean lesbian?
>if it could pass as something john green has or could potentially say or write then I scratch the whole thing and start over.
Then why did you make this thread?
a faggot
>look, Cara, this user from a laotian pot glazing forum thinks he can write better than me!
I can't be a faggot if I wasn't born with a dick.
