lol, someone compared it to fault of our stars then insinuated Vonnegut was a jerk being the only one to reply to the letters and tell children that the pursuit of art in itself is fulfilling
Her comments gave me brain damage. She kept insisting he was a jerk in the letter somehow (one of the most genuine, beautiful pieces of advice laid to paper at that). Probably because she was insistent on comparing it to a fucking YA novel for some reason.
Guy who has only seen The Boss Baby, watching his second movie: Getting a lot of ‘Boss Baby’ vibes from this…
Yeah there’s no real comparison between this and the author’s reply within the plot of Fault In Our Stars. Vonnegut gives good advice here. I obsessively saved everything I ever wrote for years. I found that destroying or forgetting the stuff I made made me focus on creating for the right reasons and allowed me to honed my taste once I started missing a piece or two and wishing I hadn’t deleted them. The vast majority of ideas, the initial gush of output that could eventually be formed into a Good Thing, are nothing exceptional. And that’s okay
What happens in fault in our stars related to this? Everyone was reading that book when I started high school but I avoided it to be Not™️ Like™️ Other™️ Girls™️
So when John Green was younger he was a student chaplain for a children’s hospital in Ohio. He tried to write a book about it for like a decade, but only finished after Esther Earl, a young Internet personality who he was close with through Nerdfighteria, died of thyroid cancer at the age of 16.
So this book is about a young girl who has cancer and is really into YA books and writes her favorite author, who himself has written a book about a young girl with cancer. She goes to meet him as her Make A Wish thing and he ends up being a total prick. She wants to ask him questions about the characters and get some resolution and he straight up tells her no, that she’s being a silly child and that his characters are fictional, so the answers don’t exist. You find out later that he wrote this book that she loved so much as a way to cope with grief of losing his daughter. So its success was very much tied to the worst day of his life. But at that point he’s already been such an asshole that it doesn’t matter.
