First Draft Episode #260: Hank Green
July 21, 2020
LISTEN TO THE EPISODE
Hank Green talks about A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor, the sequel to his #1 New York Times bestselling debut, An Absolutely Remarkable Thing. Hank is, along with his brother John Green, the CEO of Complexly, co-host of the Vlogbrothers YouTube channel and the Dear Hank and John podcast, and is also co-founder of VidCon, DFTBA Records, and Crash Course.
Sarah Enni: This weekend, July 25th and 26th, First Draft is teaming up with authors supporting authors organization A Mighty Blaze to present YA Weekend, an event celebrating new young adult writers. Join us for a slate of amazing panels to talk about queer love stories, writing grief and trauma in YA, political narratives and international settings. I'll also be hosting two Track Changes panels where industry experts will weigh in and give us some behind the scenes perspective on publishing. Check out AMightyBlaze.com for more information, and be sure to watch the event live this Saturday and Sunday, July 25th and 26th at Facebook.com/AMightyBlaze.
Sarah Enni: Welcome to first draft with me, Sarah Enni. This week I'm talking to Hank Green new media entrepreneur who got his start on YouTube co-hosting the Vlogbrothers channel with his brother YA novelist John Green. Hank just released A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor, the sequel to his number one New York Times bestselling debut, An Absolutely Remarkable Thing.
I really loved what Hank had to say about how his books are not YA, not adult, they're kind of digital native books. What he learned about fame, or the pursuit thereof, by writing his first book. And he stokes the fires of my existential Facebook dread, by talking about how we're all part-time citizens of corporate autocracies online. Ugh, god stick with it though, I was so excited to talk to Hank about all these things, and it was a really, really great conversation. Everything Hank and I talked about on today's episode can be found in the show notes.
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If you're in aspiring writer with questions about the business, or a seasoned vet who still isn't quite sure she understands her entire contract, you should be listening to Track Changes. That's the podcast series that's been appearing in your First Draft feed the last few months, and the most recent episode gets into After The Book Deal. What the heck happens after you send in that contract?
I've also created the Track Changes newsletter where every Thursday, sometimes Friday, I share more of the info that I gathered while researching for this project. And I've been really getting into the weeds and contextualizing a lot of things about the industry, including lately what all these firings at Barnes & Noble are about. You can sign up for a 30-day free trial of the newsletter and learn more about both Track Changes projects @FirstDraftPod.com/TrackChanges.
Okay, now please sit back, relax and enjoy my conversation with Hank Green.
Sarah Enni: Hi Hank, how are you doing?
Hank Green: I'm great. I am feeling very good because my book came out this week and so far people like it. It's like two years of waiting for this moment and it's here, and I'm just loving watching people interact with each other on the internet over it and get excited and tweet at me. And it's wonderful.
Sarah Enni: Yeah, the more social part of book writing is always a fun element.
Hank Green: Yeah. I mean, my life is making content in a very different way than this. So usually I get pretty immediate feedback on the stuff that I do. And that is really not the case with a book. Though I, of course, have lots of help and input during the process, but you don't really know until it's out.
Sarah Enni: Yup. Yup. So for my podcast, I'm gonna get into the book and your whole writing process. But for my podcast, I like to get a little bit of background info. So I'm gonna go all the way back and ask, where were you born and raised?
Hank Green: I was born in Birmingham, Alabama, but I lived there for two weeks before I moved to Orlando, Florida, before my parents did. Or, maybe two months or something like that. But basically my mom's parents were in Birmingham so that they were there to basically have the kid. And then I grew up in Orlando, my whole life, until I went to college. Orlando is cooler now than it was then. Still not that cool. We lived in the city, we didn't live in the suburbs, I guess in Orlando terms. Like there was a very busy street, a block away from us. There's no like "The City" in Orlando. But we had sort of a suburban-like lifestyle and we had lots of kids in the neighborhood and me and John grew up with a pretty good little friend group of neighborhood kids and ran rampant. And it was all that good stuff.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. I want to ask specifically about reading and writing growing up and how that was a part of your life.
Hank Green: I have a learning disability that interferes with sensory processing. So I was a slow learner to reading and needed a lot of work on that. I still am a slow reader. I still read at like middle school level speed when I take reading tests. And I'm like, "That's not a problem. I'm fine. That doesn't hurt my feelings!" And it is fine, obviously, I've managed fine with that. So it took me a while to come to novels as a thing. And the assigned books, I was never able to read in the assigned amount of time. And that was kind of a source of, you know, I didn't talk to anybody about that. I just assumed that I was a bad student or that I was procrastinating or that I wasn't working as hard as everyone else.
But it gave me sort of this like sense that books weren't for me, because I couldn't finish Lord of the Flies in the amount of time that we had to finish Lord of the Flies. I don't understand why we had to read that book anyway. But I eventually, because I was a nerd, like I still was good in school, you know? And the thing that nerds are supposed to do is read books. Eventually I picked up Jurassic Park and I was like, "Oh, I can read this." Like, "This is a big, long book, and I can read this."
And there are other books that I'd loved, like Sideways Stories From Wayside School and those sort of younger reader things. But that was the first novel that I read and felt very, very fun, and very up my alley, and very like, "maybe I could work on genetic engineering someday."
And indeed that is much the path that I took. And then I don't know how I came across it, but I read Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy, and those books are actually really dense and long, and there's three of them and they're really grown up. And so that was like my first book series that was, you know, I don't want to say that Michael Crichton isn't literature, you know what I mean?
And those books continue to mean a lot to me. And Kim Stanley Robinson is still one of my favorite authors and I will drop everything when he puts out a new book. And that was my sort of entree, in many ways, into fiction and science fiction, but also into my career as a science journalist and also at various points an actual scientist.
Sarah Enni: So the challenge I have in interviewing you today is that we could spend an entire hour talking about everything besides a book. So I'm just going to urge my listeners to google you...
Hank Green: [Laughs] Ignore that!
Sarah Enni: I'm gonna say there's lots of other places where you can see Hank talk about a lot of other things, but I want to keep an eye on you expressing storytelling. So I know it's kind of a broad swath, but I'd like for you to kind of lead me to how you [pauses] you've spent much of your career telling stories, as you said, sometimes as a science journalist, sometimes as a YouTuber, as a podcaster, as a nonfiction writer. But I'd like to hear you say how your storytelling developed and what it was that led you to feel like there was a time for a book.
Hank Green: Sure. I mean, I think that we are all storytellers, but my graduate degree is in environmental writing, basically. It's an MS in environmental studies, which is a weird thing to have when you focused on journalism and communication and nonfiction writing, but that was what the degree was. And I remember even in undergrad, when I would write up my lab notes and send them to my teachers, I would always try and make them funny and do things you're not supposed to do, but they encouraged it. They saw that maybe my career wouldn't be in the lab before I did, I think. Cause I remember getting notes back from my teachers being like, "Hey, if you want to do the writing thing, like that is a thing. There are real jobs there. And having a science degree can actually really help that."
And indeed it did. And so I always imagined that a potential career for me would be writing about science for a more lay audience. And that is a lot of what I ended up doing, and still do, for a lot of my work. But I do that in a really internet specific way where I don't think I've ever written a feature story. I don't think I ever wrote a feature story when I freelanced. A story that's long and multiple pages in a magazine. And my videos are all under a thousand words. And even Crash Course and SciShow videos are usually under 2000 words. So not that long. Whereas, the second book is like 130,000 words. So that's like for comparison, if you're not used to word counts as a metric.
What that meant was that I found, oftentimes, that I wasn't getting all the way down into the thing that I was really interested in. I wasn't getting the depth that I wanted, but I didn't have opportunities because this was the format that I was expected to be creating in. And it was also what I was good at. So having that process of writing like a thousand freaking essays and nonfiction stories as a science communicator and essayist on YouTube, or whatever you call what my job there is, that I did get a lot of practice at speaking concisely, at making things interesting, at like holding onto attention. So that was really useful work.
But then I was like, "How do I do this in a way where I get to explore a story for a long time?" And that transition was really exciting and felt really necessary because I wanted to get at some stuff that I'd been working through, but didn't have the opportunity to really get at. And a fiction, like a novel, was a really good way, at least, to actually get at those things. In a way that also allowed me to say some things that might sort of come off as even a little bit like douchey, if I was saying them about myself, because it's like, "God, [unintelligible] was so hurt."
But to get that from the perspective of somebody who was actually having a harder time than I was. Because a lot of people do have a harder time, for various reasons. Oftentimes when they come to it younger. And so, to talk about it and also to talk about this thing that I think is in the first book, to talk about fame, which is something that more and more people are actually dealing with, whether it's directly or if it's a friend or a family member or something.
Sarah Enni: So before we get into my specific questions about what's in the book, and we're talking about An Absolutely Remarkable Thing and it's sequel A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor, which just came out. I'd like for you to actually pitch those books for us if you don't mind.
Hank Green: I'm so bad at this cause I don't know whether to focus on like the fun part which I feel is like the right thing to do. So it's like, "These are adventurous stories in which young people," they're like in their mid-twenties, "are sort of a combination dragged into, and drag themselves into, a national debate about a very peculiar and very cool thing that is happening to humanity. And that is really exciting because they get to solve these very strange puzzles and they get to figure out stuff that nobody else knows. And they also get to be famous. But that fame also tears their social group apart, to some extent. And also ends up tearing them... like the main character in the first book, really is very destructive to her ultimately." That's as non-spoilerish way as I can say it.
But it's also about fame and how fame generally can cause you to dehumanize yourself, to not focus on the parts of your life that actually matter, to devalue your actual relationships. And also about internet punditry and the tendency to make everything into a battle right now. Even things that clearly should not be battles like wearing a mask for example. I can't believe that that is like the... I created a stand-in for an issue that would be divisive. And there are lots of actually divisive issues that I understand, but this one I don't.
And then the second one is much more about social media. So these people are still on the same adventure, but instead of being about individual effect, it's about more societal level effects and about what social media might be doing to us now, might do to us in the future. What could happen if we don't put any checks on the power that they have amassed and yeah, basically that. But also the fate of humanity hangs in the balance.
Sarah Enni: What's difficult I can imagine, as someone pitching the book and also in someone wanting to interview you but not spoil the book, is the not spoiling part of this. So I'm gonna ask about the book and we're gonna endeavor not to ruin a reader experience. But I love that just a moment ago, you were saying these issues that you're exploring in the books are ones that can be uniquely explored through fiction, whereas they can't in other ways. And I'm really interested in that cause both of these books stood out to me as kind of being idea books.
You really kind of grapple pretty explicitly with the subjects internet and human behavior, fame, consequences of corporate power, the power of collective curiosity. I'd like to hear you talk about how fiction allowed you to get at those things in a way that you can't as just Hank talking to people.
Hank Green: Yeah. Well I think there's a couple things there. One, creating a really compelling narrative with characters that you invite people to care about means that you can mix it in there without it being all about that one thing. I think that reading and writing a very long essay on internet fame would not reach the same size audience as reading a narrative that is really compelling and interesting, and there's fight scenes, and there's giant robots and stuff like that [chuckles], now I feel like I've belittled the book. Don't worry, it's not a mecha anime. Also, don't worry. And also, I don't want to disappoint anyone, both of those things.
And the other thing, which is that, this is something that science fiction has always been really good at and I think it's uniquely good at. Is that you can talk about the issues, things that are happening in the world right now, without having it be about the world right now. Because we've all got very strong opinions about the world as it stands right now. But if I throw in a reason for people to be upset and divided that isn't one that we're already currently dealing with, that allows a certain amount of distance from it.
That is easier to examine the mechanisms of what are going on without getting mad that like, "But are you saying that that cause is bad?" I'm like, "No, I'm not saying the cause is bad, just saying this is what's going on. And we should know that. And we should know when we're using tools that might be actually manipulative." There aren't multiple ways to do activism. There aren't multiple ways to fight for the people's hearts and minds. But we should know the mechanisms of what are actually going on so that we can be more careful with it, so that we can pull back, so that we can know when the story that we're telling is really deeply true. And when it might be manipulative.
And also the dynamic between is this about getting to a better world or is it about winning? And that's something that in the first book the characters have a lot of struggles with. And in the second book they've kind of moved past, which is really nice. Where in the first book, April's trying to win, not trying to do the best thing, which is also true of her opponents.
Sarah Enni: Oh my gosh. Okay. There's so much there to get into. I feel like I really connected to your books because I am also constantly thinking about these issues and trying to think about how to incorporate all the feelings I have about Mark Zuckerberg into a work of fiction that is not just some diatribe, I guess. But I also want to ask, what you're speaking to is the difference between inviting a reader to ask questions and be curious about their own life, versus say the alternative to talking about these issues, which is what an op-ed in the New York Times that sort of sets up a straw man, and just tries to convince people.
And you've been kind of in a role as an educator and an advocate and a storyteller for a long time, but what is it like to see people react with something that you created where there's not maybe a desired outcome. It's just seeing how it affects people or what conversations it starts.
Hank Green: Right. I think it's better. Cause I think that when you're on the op-ed page of New York Times, or something, then you're there amongst a bunch of other people who are trying to do that work. Who are trying to have an opinion that is persuasive. And it's almost like the existence of all those other people in those spaces kind of belittles it and makes it like, "Oh, so this is what this space is for. It's for convincing me of something." And I love op-eds. I love to write them, I don't get to that often. And I also love to read them. But I'm much more interested in inspiring a conversation. And it's been really rewarding to see this book doing that, especially among people in their teens and twenties.
I don't see this as a young adult book. I see it as like, if you're over the age of 13 or 14, you could probably enjoy it. But my hope is that someone my age or older would also be like, "Ah, there's interesting stuff here." And it's not marketed as YA. But watching those conversations happen on TikTok for example, where people are like, "Oh, I'm thinking a lot more about how I interact with this app." And I'm like, "Yay!"
Sarah Enni: Yeah, it struck me as, not to interrupt, but when I was thinking about YA, new adult, I saw it references different things in different places, but to me, I feel like it's a digital native book is how I was thinking about it.
Hank Green: Thank you! Yes. That's why this radio tour that I'm on right now includes no radio stations. That's what they call it in the business, a radio tour. And yeah, it absolutely. And I've read a lot of books that tried to be that. And that's one thing that I felt like I could bring to the table. I am always online. So I am able to write about this stuff in a way that feels natural. And I also try and spend a lot of time in internet spaces that are not internet spaces I would natively inhabit. So places that are less white, places that are less male, even places that are less of my political ideology, just to try and understand what's going on in those spaces.
I also occasionally will just dunk my face into places that are younger, which is weird because I'm like, "I feel like you guys need to be here doing this without observation." But like, "I'm just gonna take a quick look and then go away." And try to not let them know I was there. And I think that that's important to recognize that there are different kinds of social spaces and to let people, especially with age, to let people be their age in a space without feeling like they're being observed by old people, or their parents, or their teachers.
So I try to do that to get a better idea of how the mechanics of these things work generationally, and in different demographics, which is interesting because it's different. It really is. Young people these days, I keep forgetting that every year I get a year older and so, you know, 16 year olds every year get more digitally native. And so they are better at it than us, which gives me a lot of hope. They're harder to manipulate. They understand advertising better. They establish their own rules really effectively and not like universally, but they find sort of groups. And then like when you're inside of that group and you violate a rule, they're pretty ruthless about it. And I'm like, "Do it. Yes!"
Sarah Enni: I want to ask about that, because what struck me about April May, and I'll ask about multiple point of views in a second. But in the first book, the point of view character, April, really does speak with a ton of authority. And that's sort of her narrative tone, is that she's confident and she's moving through the world. Though she obviously has a lot to interrogate. But you've spoken about this other places and I'm interested in your thinking about, you know, I found it difficult as someone who's watched Vlogbrothers to be like, "Well, but this isn't Hank. This is like a theory of fame, but it's April's theory." And I think you understanding that Hank, the character, is also in the minds of your readers. I'd just love to hear how you thought about that.
Hank Green: Yeah. This is a relatively new thing that we're having to deal with now. And I talk about it a lot with my brother, because when John wrote, John Green is my brother, he wrote Looking for Alaska and The Fault in Our Stars. When he wrote Looking for Alaska, in no way did he ever imagine that anyone would know anything about him. You know, they would know him through the book.
Here's Red Mars. This is what I knew about Kim Stanley Robinson when I was reading Red Mars. This is my copy that I read back in high school. "Kim Stanley Robinson is the author of the Nebula and Hugo Award winning Mars trilogy," which I knew because of how I was reading it, "As well as The Years of Rice and Salt and several other books." They list them all. "He lives in Davis, California." That's everything I knew, and could know, without going to the library and looking up an article or an interview that he may have done in a science fiction magazine or something. And so that's everything I knew.
And now the author can be, not always, but can be really present on the page in a way that you have to be careful about. Because I think that it actually does influence the kind of work you can write. But for clarity, what that means isn't like, "Oh, no!" It's just like, this has always been true. We have to write inside of the worlds that we are in. And because I am in the public eye and a fair percentage of my readers, probably over 50%, know not just a little about me, but like a lot about me.
And so I think that that's like, I could see it as a problem and be like, "Oh, no, I can't do the same scenes that I would do if no one knew I was there." Like, for example, I would never be able to write an actual sex scene between 23-year-olds, which is a perfectly normal thing for authors to have done over the years. But I couldn't do it now because people know my brand and they're like, "This is weird that Hank is thinking about this." So when it comes time for two people to love each other physically it's like, "That occurred."
[Both laughing]
Hank Green: And I don't mind that. I don't think it holds it back, but I do get to also play with things. And I get to toss in little references here and there. There's some references to John's work. And there's some references to inside jokes from our podcast and stuff. So there's little things like that that you wouldn't notice if you didn't know about them and they don't stand out as weird. They're just like cute little things.
But also, I think that there is a broader thing there that people see some of these things as my ideas coming out through the characters. And that interplay, I think that that is like, that worries me a little bit. Because I want you to be immersed in the story. And I think that it can draw people out, but it's the situation we're in. And so I might as well lean into it a little bit and say like, "Okay, you are now reading kind of a different kind of book, because this book has the author in it more than a book from 20 years ago."
Sarah Enni: Yeah. And sort of to our point about a digital native book, I don't think it bothers me as a reader as much as it might someone who is older. I'm so used to understanding like, being loyal to an author for many more reasons than just their work, which is interesting. And I don't know if it's good or bad. So it didn't bother me.
Hank Green: That's a fascinating question. It's something that I think about a lot, but honestly, just talking about it right now helped me think about it more than I I have. So thank you.
Sarah Enni: Oh, well, I'm so happy. The other thing is, I mean, that's what really struck me with April was that it felt like it was this sort of like channeling. April was such a fun character to be in, and you got the chance through her say these things really explicitly on the page. But I love that in A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor, you sort of blow it apart and you get the chance to explore all the different characters that we met in the first book. That's also like wildly intimidating sounding to me. So how did you tackle that challenge? What was that like?
Hank Green: It was very hard. It was a little easier because I had gotten to know the characters fairly well in the first book. And so I didn't have to create them from whole cloth. They had backstories and I knew things about them. They had some backstory that wasn't even in the book, or it still isn't in the books, and so I had that to work from. But I had gotten so inside of April's voice, and also April's voice was so informed by my own voice as we just talked about, that I think that actually creating four additional voices is not something that I...like I can read it and be like, "I know why I made these decisions." But at the same time, I'm not gonna be as good at that as some authors, I think. If we're looking for a weakness in the book. I feel like I could have, well I don't know if I could have, but I feel like there could have been more work done to differentiate the different voices.
Have you read There There by Tommy Orange?
Sarah Enni: No, not yet.
Hank Green: It has like, I don't know, 25 point of view narrators, and they all have deeply different voices. And I'm just like, "All right, well..." I read that book while I was writing this book and I was like, "Okay, well, I'm not gonna be that good at this." And I think that that's fine to recognize and to know going in as a writer that you have strengths and weaknesses and I'm okay with it. But what I did do to try and get better at that, I did a bunch of things, I would write the same scene from everybody's perspective who was in the room, and I would see how I was doing it differently.
And then I'd pick, cause this wasn't the case all the time, but sometimes three or four of the characters would be in the room at the same time. And so I'd write it from every person's perspective. And sometimes I had to do that, or I'd have to rewrite it from a different perspective, for a structural reason. And once I did that once, I was like, "Oh, I could like try to do that and see how this person imagines this situation." Cause it isn't just the voice it's also how they imagine the situation that they're in. And what they're thinking about those other characters is different than what the characters are thinking, or what that character thinks that person is thinking isn't the same as what they're actually thinking.
And so to know that was extremely informative to the final draft, and also really helped me understand the characters and their perspectives better. But I also think that it makes some amount of sense that their voices are somewhat similar because they are all following April. And they're like, "This was the first book. And we aren't professional writers. So we are now writing this memoir together and all of our voices are going to be to some extent informed by April's voice."
Even if like Maya is more reserved and Miranda is more unsure than April. April is a very confident narrator and Miranda isn't. And even if Andy just can't shut up, literally. If I had had my way Andy's voice would've been intolerably verbose, because he's that white guy who thinks that all of his thoughts are gold.
Sarah Enni: Andy was a very fun character. I enjoyed him. While we're talking about the process of writing the book, I would love to hear, you know, you've talked on your videos before about having written many things in the past, but then getting the sense that this one was gonna stick and be the final one.
I'm interested in what it was like to move into the book space, given that you sort of intimately know that space because of your brother and his success. Then what was it like to have your own success? I mean, the pressure kind of keeps mounting on you as the author. So what was it like to go through that experience and how did you kind of keep your head down throughout?
Hank Green: I mean, so first knowing that it's possible to be an author in two different ways was really empowering. One way was the YouTuber way. I've read some YouTuber books that got published, and so I'm aware that it doesn't have to be perfect to get published if you have an existing audience. There are good YouTuber books. There are also bad ones. And so that possibility was there. And so I knew that if I wrote something, that it would be able to be published. There was the other part though that was like, I knew authors. I knew my brother obviously, but I also knew authors who were less successful than John. And who do this as a job and get paid job amounts for it, which is the vast majority of authors get paid the amount of money that normal people get paid.
And seeing that they are normal people and they work. They work. They go to work and that work is research, and it's revision, and it's writing, and it's also working on their own craft. And so just a ton of work that goes into this. And they work for eight hours a day, like a normal person. And sometimes they work for more than that, because they also have to develop their audience on Twitter, and they have to do all this networking stuff, and go to lots of events if it's not this year.
And so there's all that stuff. And so I saw that it was a job that people had and I was like, "Oh, it's just a thing that people do. It's not this unattainable wild thing." And so being in that world allowed me to believe that it was possible to write a book in a way that I don't think that I could have, if I hadn't met and become friends with Maureen Johnson and Pat Rothfuss and people. And then there's the second part of your question, which I've forgotten. Do you remember what it was?
Sarah Enni: Oh yeah, I do. Well, actually, since this is the second book, and I think you got the chance to talk about being John's brother, plenty. I'm interested in how then it's a whole different thing. An Absolutely Remarkable Thing debuted number one on the New York Times bestseller list. So now you're being compared to yourself or your past self, which is an entirely different creature.
Hank Green: Yeah. And I never felt like my work was gonna be compared to John because I was writing it and I was very aware of how different it was. But there was a little bit of concern that people might think that it was gonna be John-like, but of the problems to have, right?
Sarah Enni: Yeah, not too bad.
Hank Green: I try to remind myself of that. But yeah, following up the book, I didn't really think about, you know, "Is this book going to do as well commercially?" Cause one: Sequels tend to not, cause you have to have read the first book. So what sequels often do is they sell more copies of the first book, which is great. And I want more people to read the first book. But they tend to do, overall, they'd have to almost sell fewer copies than the first book, because you have to read the first book to read the second one.
And so I wasn't so concerned about that. I was concerned about it being different and good. And so I didn't want to do something as [pauses], the format of the first book, the structure is simple. It is a fictional, like, what's it called? Like autobiography basically. So it's fictional memoir. And it's one person writing the whole thing except for the last chapter. And it's a fairly straightforward story in terms of an arc, in terms of a three act structure.
The second one is not that. It still has a three arc structure, except that it has three of them. Because there's several different stories that are happening at the same time, they all have to sort of hit the same points in the structure at the same moments, which is tight [grudgingly laughs], hard. And you have to take the energy from one narrator and pull it into a different story that is in a totally different place, a physically different place, but it should have some of the same sensations where the other story is. So all that stuff is much harder.
And so it was that stuff that I was like, "I am going to set out myself a harder task cause I want to prove that I can do something more difficult than the first book." And to some extent it was about proving it. But if it was just about proving it, I would have abandoned it. Because it also turned out to be the right structure for the book, and the right structure for the story, and very necessary and needed.
And I also didn't realize how hard it would be and what the problems with having, you know, but the other thing is that I love, my favorite story is one with three or more plot lines that tie up in the end and it all becomes necessary. And it all becomes... it's just my favorite thing. And I wanted to do that. I wanted to try it and I wanted to make people feel that. And I was able to do it, I think! Like when I read it I'm like, "Yeah! That climax is real good!"
So it was more about trying to, a little bit, one-up my first book in terms of the craft so that I could keep getting better at this, I guess, is a big part of it too.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. I talk to people, I don't know whether this lands with everyone, but I talk to people about how it's a little like golf, where you can only really compete with yourself. It's just about, "Is this more fun for me?" Cause you just can't go head-to-head.
Hank Green: Yeah. Music is like that. I'm never gonna be a guitar player, like professional guitar players are guitar players, but I still like being better than I once was.
Sarah Enni: Totally. I want to ask about, hang on, I have a quote from you, I"m gonna try to find it. You had a video where you said that, "Writing the first book made you better understand some self-destructive habits that you had." You talk about fame is a matter of seeking attention in power, that's like the equation, a little bit. I'm interested in whether you feel like writing that book, you know, you said you realized some self-destructive habits, I mean, did it solve things for you? Did you come to any understanding? Did you move past things by writing that first book?
Hank Green: Yeah, I did. And I think that everything is a process, of course. But my general feeling about epiphanies is that they last like a week and a half. But I think that habits can be formed in that week and a half that can last longer. And I think that I was able to do that a little bit. But also, it did change how I imagined what I do. And I think most people who have my job, aren't really thinking much about more than the success of the thing that they're making right now. And trying to get the feeling of that success. Whereas writing the first book helped me realize that the success wasn't the thing I was trying to get.
And I should be honest with myself [pauses], or shouldn't be. And I need to move beyond and say like, "Okay, what am I trying to actually get? And what am I gonna do with that thing that's gonna make me feel like I'm having a positive impact on the world?" It's gonna make me feel like enjoyment of some kind. And so know from the beginning that this isn't just about getting a bunch of likes, so that shouldn't be the goal anymore. And it's very hard to build an audience without that being a big part of it, at least initially. But now I've got it. And so everything needs to be about something other than that, I can't just be making stuff to get the likes.
And I think that that really has stuck with me. I will look at a piece of content that I have made and I'll be like, "I'm not going to release that." Cause this does not add anything. It might increase the audience, but it will degrade my overall brand or it will interfere with what I'm trying to build generally. And I think that that's really important to recognize. And occasionally I will post a drunk TikTok and be like, "Ah, that probably wasn't great for the brand, but that's cause I was drunk!" [Laughs]
Sarah Enni: [Laughs] Part of why I'm asking too, is that I loved hearing that writing the first book was like, as a writer, obviously I completely relate to that. You write something and you're like, "Oh, I didn't know that I thought that." And that's really clarifying and really deeply gratifying. And April is, as we've been saying, kind of the focus of the first book, and then second books always have to grow the world and this world did kind of grow and expand.
And you did talk a lot about, to me, it felt like you sort of went from the fame and accumulation of power of an individual to then platforms, companies, who are we trusting, who is getting this attention and why? Which is something, as I mentioned before, I'm very interested in, and sort of obsessively reading about Mark Zuckerberg, and what he is, or is not doing at the time. So I would just love to hear, what did you want to tackle by exploring those kinds of things? What was it like to build an evil empire of your own? What was that experience like?
Hank Green: Yeah, it was cool. And it was interesting, I was reading, I think it was this book, Recursion by Blake Crouch. I don't know if you've read this?
Sarah Enni: I haven't yet.
Hank Green: But I got frustrated cause the beginning of that book was very similar to the beginning of my book in several ways. And I wrote him and I was like, "Dang it, Blake!" But it diverted greatly, it turns out, by the second act. But the creation of the evil corporation, I think it will be a trope that we see more of, and have seen plenty of, like Zurg Enterprises, or whatever it's called, in The Fifth Element. So that was fun and interesting. And sort of an extension, like extending the Silicon Valley philosophy of like, "Regulation really stands in the way of progress. And we should just let people choose."
And what that really means is that we let the powerful people choose, and let the marginalized people clean up. So there was that, but then there was the part where I was actually trying to think about what social media platforms could become if their power is left unchecked for 20 or 50 years. And their systems get very good at figuring out how to satisfy people, or the opposite of that, figure out how to weaponize people. And not just letting people use the platform to do that, but the platform, who has all of this data, all of this understanding. And right now, we aren't great at synthesizing that data into perfect understanding, but we're getting better at it cause that's what advertisers are buying when they engage with these platforms.
But I think we're right at the beginning of that, I think they will get way better at it. And that should be legitimately scary to people. And I wanted to sort of talk about what that looks like if we give away all of ourselves to the platforms. And to recognize that we sort of live there now, we live in those places. And so Mark Zuckerberg is kind of the president of a part of my life and he's unelected and has no term limits and is 36 years old. So it's not like he's going anywhere. And just like a tremendous amount of power.
He basically runs a country that has 2 billion part-time citizens. And there is no oversight. There is no election. There is no democracy. We sort of live a part of our lives inside of these corporate autocracies, and run our businesses there, and have our relationships there. The majority of how Americans have social lives now happens inside of countries that we don't even notice we're citizens of.
Sarah Enni: Right. I heard you on another show talking about social media platforms as governments. And I'd been thinking about it, I guess that way, but I hadn't heard it said so explicitly and it was a very chilling.
Hank Green: Yeah. Yeah.
Sarah Enni: It's not the most soothing thought.
Hank Green: I think that there are ways in which we could have that not be the case, but I think that right now, we're kind of there already. And I worry that if it's left unchecked, that we will be really there in 10 years.
Sarah Enni: Do you, so this is a little off-the-wall question, but I wrote a book that came out last year and it was about sort of an Instagram-like company and a girl who struggles with whether she loves it too much or is using it as a placeholder for personality or whatever. So I was kind of getting into that stuff. And then I had some people tell me like, "Oh, wow. I hadn't really thought about my use of social media this way before." And though I was really gratified by that, I was also like, "What do you mean you haven't thought about it before?" I was like, "Are you kidding me?" Everyone needs to be really obsessed with this question. Are you also frustrated by that?
Hank Green: I think that for a lot of young people, it's just the world. And so they don't think about it. It's just like how I was raised with phones and so phones are just part of how the world works. And so you don't think about it. It's like the structure of life. I think that that's fairly normal. I was on a podcast and I said like, "You know, most people who are building audiences online, they're doing it so that they can gather power to sell stuff for other people or grow their own audience." And that person was like, "No." And I was like, "What do you mean?" And he was like, "Most people are doing it so that they can feel any amount of just like that rush of the likes so that they can get more likes on this post than the last post."
And I was like, "You, right. That is correct." Most people haven't really gotten to the point where they even are trying to figure out the currency conversion of like, "How do you turn this into that?" They are only trying to get this. Cause like I've been doing this for so long that building the attention is the first step. And the second step is converting that attention into something else. But most people are still at that first thing where it's really just about like, "Ooh, attention! Ooh, attention! Ooh, attention!"
And I think this is a normal thing for that to be the case, especially with young people, because they're trying to understand who they are and like how the world interfaces with them and how they interface with the world. And that's a way to do it that has a lot of immediate and clear feedback, that quantified feedback, you know?
Sarah Enni: Yeah. Yeah. I mean the kinds of conversations that I can imagine being started by A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor, are one step in the direction that I think both you and I would like to see broader conversations go. But this is truly me just as a person being like, "What else can we do to make people think more analytically about who they're trusting with their identities?"
Hank Green: Yeah. I mean, I think that privacy is particularly a really hard one. Because I think that very few people who don't have a lot of resources have the space to even think about it. So I think it's pretty easy to think about it if you're 45 and you're 20 years into your career and you've got a lot of stability.
Sarah Enni: It's pretty high on the hierarchy.
Hank Green: Yes. Exactly. But what I think is really important to recognize is when the thing isn't having, like, you want to do it, but you don't enjoy to do it. And that's the distinction I keep trying to hit people with is like, "Just notice if you're enjoying it. Cause whether you want to do it has no bearing on whether you enjoy doing it." I don't know why that is, but that is apparently how the human mind works.
I want to do all kinds of things that I don't enjoy. And this actually bears out in neuroscience that it seems like it's two different systems. Like the system that creates cravings and the system that handles enjoyment are not connected to each other. And this is why addiction is a thing where people continue to indulge in things that they don't even enjoy, but like they can't stop.
Sarah Enni: Right. Right, right. Yeah. That is fascinating. Well, I could talk to you about that all day, but that is not what we're gonna talk about.
Hank Green: It's in the book.
Sarah Enni: So with the time I have left, I want to ask about your future endeavors with fiction. And then we'll wrap up with advice. But you've kind of completed the story with these two books, it was a duology. So how did you like it? And do you think you want to do it again?
Hank Green: I liked it very much. And it was very hard to do at the same time as the other things, there was a lot more time pressure with the second book, which definitely contributed to some unhealthy sleep schedules in the last two years, at various times. So I think that I will need to, and I think this has been a good time to look at priorities, but make sure that I am prioritizing things correctly before I know for sure when the next novel project will start.
I think that there will be another one. I just don't know if it's like two years away or five years away. I've got a couple ideas that are really cool and weird. I want to write all of them. But I have to make sure that the current crop of things are stable and healthy.
Sarah Enni: I want to ask just really quick about that. I'm interested in how you, as a creative person, you've been a musician, you've been an educator, you've been a vlogger and a vlogger with education. I mean, you've done all these kinds of different things. So now when an idea comes to you, does it immediately take the form of podcast, vlog? I mean, how do you interpret what ideas kind of pop up to you?
Hank Green: They're so different from each other that I know exactly. Like, I don't have ideas that exist outside of a medium. So the book ideas make no sense as anything else. And the podcast ideas make no sense as anything else. I also run a physical merchandising company. And that's something that I've got an idea there that needs to take precedence right now, because it's in part to help raise money for our project in Sierra Leone.
And it's become weird. This is weird. It's become harder to raise money from rich people in the last few months, which we had been doing effectively. And I'm like, "Why is it harder now? It feels like it should be easier now." One, the stock market isn't even down anymore. And two, like, "Aren't you concerned about like the global health infrastructure?" Like, "Aren't you more concerned about that now than you were before?"
But I think, I'm kind of expressing our frustration there, but what it seems to be is that they are very busy trying to fix problems at the source of their wealth. So they tend to be people who run companies. And so they're dealing with a lot of pandemic stuff. So they just don't have time to think about philanthropy right now. But it's like, "But please! How about you don't think about it and you just give us money?" Like, "Why do I have to have a bunch of calls with you? Just give me money."
Sarah Enni: I also, and again we're a little bit off topic, but this was something that I made a note of in your sort of meditations on fame in this project, is somewhat related to that. Like the last few months have not been super kind to celebrities. A lot of celebrities have gotten chipped up. And I think there's been a lot of shift in how people think about selfies and huge mansions right now. So do you think there's any kind of shift that might last, or is this just an odd moment?
Hank Green: No, I think there's a shift that might last. I think that if you take a look at inequality globally, and also in America, then it becomes very hard to say that there's anything like deserving of any of that level of inequality. And so I think you have to take a strong look at it. And I think that it went from looking like, "I aspire to this, to you're rubbing that in my face." And I've always felt like that kind of wealth displays slightly destructive.
And it's also personally not healthy. Because you see it in your friends and so you're spending a lot of your cognitive resources, but also a lot of your money, trying to understand how to match up with, like, to play the rich people games. And it's wild to me to have interfaced a tiny bit with that culture to see how rich people figure out how to spend all their money. And I'm just like, "Oh, you're not happy." Like, "You're only spending money right now because you feel really insecure. And that's a wild way to feel when you have $80 million."
Sarah Enni: Yeah. Interesting. Okay, to get back to it. You're not in a rush to start the next project is what I'm hearing.
Hank Green: I have a couple of things that I need to do first, unfortunately. It's also very difficult for me to think that I will be able to write a next book that won't be even harder to write than this one. Because what I want in my soul is to be like, "I'm gonna write a series of short, easy, novellas." And like, "I'm not gonna care about anything." But I also am like, "Well, what if I made this extraordinarily complicated thing where like, there's this, and that, and all this stuff?"
Have you read, it's called Solitaire Mystery? I'm not sure if that's what it's called. Yeah. The Solitaire Mystery. I keep thinking about that book and about how it plays with storytelling. And it's basically a book in which the reader becomes a character, the author becomes a character, and I'm just like, "Argh, that's my jam!"
Sarah Enni: Have you read House of Leaves?
Hank Green: No.
Sarah Enni: You might want to jot that down. It's a whole project. It's like, you need the physical objects type of thing.
Hank Green: Oh! Yeah, yeah, yeah. I haven't read that, but I have heard about it. Yeah.
Sarah Enni: Very cool. Very, very cool. And I'll link to all these books in the show notes as well. Oh my gosh. Okay. Last thing and then I'll let you go. Cause you have to move on with your radio tour. I like to wrap up my show with advice. So, honestly, I would really love to hear, if someone's in the same position you were, where you have a career as a content creator in another medium, do you have advice for someone like that, shifting to books and tackling this kind of really old school content creation?
Hank Green: Yeah. I would say if you reach out to an agent and they tell you how much money you can make, don't hire that agent. If you reach out to an agent and they say, "Show me the book." Then work with that person. Because if you are just selling what you have created, which is the existing audience, then you are just sort of cashing in, or even cashing out, like basically saying like, "I've built this and now I'm going to convert this into money." And you don't want an agent or your publisher to be thinking that way. You want them to be thinking, "Okay, this audience is an activation energy for this project."
So it's a way, and it's valuable. It's extremely valuable. But it has to be the start of the thing that you build on top of, to get attention on something great. Cause the first thing you want to be doing is creating a great piece of art. Because if you like say, "Okay everybody, you're gonna pay $27 for this book." And then they read it and they're like, "Well, that wasn't..." Like, "It's clear that no one at the publishing company really worked very hard on that." Then you degrade your relationship with the audience.
So this is an opportunity to create something wonderful in a medium that is new to you. And you have that opportunity and not many people do. But you have to take that opportunity seriously and devote a lot of energy to it. And I've seen it done. I've seen lots of YouTube creators do that and make great stuff that their audiences really love. And it grows what they do instead of trades on it.
Sarah Enni: Do you feel like you are meeting whole new people with the book? Like someone who doesn't know of Hank Green is gonna pick up this book?
Hank Green: Yeah, no, absolutely. That's very cool. And it has happened a bunch. The book did extremely well, An Absolutely Remarkable Thing. The only scale upon which it did not do well is if you compare it to John Green. But I do not do that. So yeah, our average YouTube video gets viewed by fewer people than who read that book, which is wild. And that's, in part, a testament to the great work that the people at Dutton did to get it in front of people and the work that booksellers have done, who love the book. But definitely lots of people who read it don't know who I am, which is really great.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. That's really cool. It's been such a pleasure to talk to you today, Hank. I really appreciate all your time this morning. And good luck with the rest of your tour and thanks for the great books. I really, really enjoyed them.
Hank Green: Yeah. Thank you so much.
Sarah Enni: Thank you so much to Hank. He is on Twitter and Instagram @HankGreen, and he's pretty much everywhere else too. You can find links to all his stuff at HankGreen.com. You can follow me on Twitter and Instagram @SarahEnni and the show @FirstDraftPod (Twitter and Instagram).
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Every Tuesday, I speak to storytellers like Veronica Roth, author of Divergent; National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature Jason Reynolds; Creator of Sex and the City Candace Bushnell; YouTube empresario and author Hank Green; Actors, comedians and screenwriters Jessica St. Clair and Lennon Parham; author and host of NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast Linda Holmes; Bestselling authors and co-hosts of the Call Your Girlfriend podcast, Ann Friedman and Aminatou Sow; Michael Dante DiMartino, co-creator of Avatar: The Last Airbender; John August, screenwriter of Big Fish and co-host of the Sciptnotes podcast; or Rhett Miller, musician and frontman for The Old 97s. Together, we take deep dives on their careers and creative works.
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