This is Not A Review: The Fault in Our Stars by John Green

(I know it's long. Bare with me :-)

"Almost everyone is obsessed with leaving a mark upon the world. Bequeathing a legacy. Outlasting death. We all want to be remembered. I do, too. That's what bothers me most, is being another unremembered casualty in the ancient and inglorious war against disease."- Augustus Waters

God knows exactly when you're about to flounder. At exactly the right moment, before it all spins out of control, He sends you a sign, gives you a gift, a person, a Word. I think that in this moment, whilst being so insecure about my novel, about it's meaning, it's ability to enamore or move someone, The Lord sent me my hope in the form of a glaze jacketed bound novel called, The Fault in Our Stars. John Green. He's a wunderkind whose every word is hailed as gold. But even with all the prizes, and a public who lifts his works as timeless classics of our generation, he still wavers. This novel, took ten years to create. Ten. Here I am wondering, pleading with myself to go forward, all but giving up the ghost at the slightest hint of challenge, angry that my novel emerged glinting in my mind almost five years ago, and why's it taking me so long what's wrong with me is the whole world mad or am I simply not filling my role correctly? (Yes, these thoughts of mine roll through without punctuation after a while.)

Yet this genius of a man had the very same thoughts, the very same desire to write a beautiful novel, and was willing to endure, or perhaps not endure, but experience the process of waiting, developing, and finally marrying the ideas of cancer, lived/unlived life, and two concepts, that became caricatures, that were filled in with dialogue and facets to become characters who live, breathe, and experience all this crazy, brilliant, hectic, frightening stuff that we all feel sometimes.

There is a novel that began the process of weaning me away from all that academia taught me...that showed me to breathe life into literature. (Such novel I'll not even mention as most see it as infantile drivel. Nevertheless, I credit it for teaching me to believe in my work, and to imbue my piece with life. For allowing even the embarrassing, cheese-ball, clichéd feelings to scratch across pages, because really what do we have to lose with being ourselves? What is the cost for being embarrassed and becoming incapacitated to a zealous, courageously lived life?). That novel began the process of teaching me to be an ecstatically word crazed novelist. The Fault In Our Stars is the novel that awakened my desire to a be a writer who not only entertains, but who evokes something meaningful.

I've always said that I would read John Green, and I have three of his other novels waiting on my shelf. But surely, this was the one I was supposed to start with first. This whole week, I grappled with how to make dialogue mean something. How to make those scenes that are but small nuggets of moments lived mean something. How do I create romance, a great love, without making it this superfluous thing that everyone turns away from because it is simply implausible? I'm still learning, but I've realized that this answer cannot be found away from the process. You write, and then you write it again, and you expound further until finally you're able to extract the meat of it. There are times when I would try and write scenes that I would want to scrap even as I went to write the first words. I thought to myself, why write this, there's no point, how does it link with the novel as a whole anyway? There are moments in the novel where Hazel and Augustus discuss heavy things, and then others where they simply discuss video games, but these moments were no less meaningful because they meant something to them. They were special because it was their own experience, and nothing is too minuscule to share.

I thank you, John Green, for having the courage to write this novel. For showing me a depiction of intelligent writing that is not pretentious. For showing me not to sleep on the so called "non eventful scenes' in my novel. For having me in mind because my character is a 'Grace' as well. For writing characters who seem at times to have a sarcastic attitude towards the existence of God, not because I agree, but because I want the opportunity to draw many to a very real God without preaching at them. For your portrayal of Hazel, and making it okay to not understand everything. For making Augustus one of the most handsome, thoughtful, intriguing characters I've ever made acquaintance with in a novel, and the reassurance that Augustuses exist all around us, everywhere. Thank you for reassuring me that a novel conceived over a long length of time is not a battle lost, but a battle to be fought, lived, and accepted until the end.