Trivia / Looking for Alaska

for the novel:

• Beam Me Up, Scotty!: A popular quotation from the book is "The only way out of the labyrinth of suffering is to forgive". This isn't present verbatim in the novel; it was probably paraphrased into a more quotable form from a sentence found near the last chapter.
  "He was gone, and I did not have time to tell him what I had just now realized: that I forgave him, and that she forgave us, and that we had to forgive to survive in the labyrinth."
• Creator Backlash: John Green is not fond of the book's cover, stating that it was supposed to have just the smoke and no candle, but people at bookstore chains complained that the smoke looked like cigarette smoke. When the book was re-released for its 10th anniversary, the candle was removed so just the smoke was visible, the way Green wanted it from the start.
• Troubled Production: Plagued the film adaptation of the book for the over 10 years since it originally came out (see main page).
• What Could Have Been: The tenth anniversary edition includes excerpts from the very first draft, revealing a number of differences from the finished product:
  • The first draft was titled Misremembering Alaska.
  • Pudge was initially written to be a disaffected Deadpan Snarker, with a coarser, more cynical attitude.
  • The Colonel was originally written to be attracted to Alaska alongside Pudge.
  • The novel featured the motif of a discarded cicada skin gifted to Pudge from his mother, which was inspired by a real gift Green received as a teenager.
  • The funeral scene took the longest to get right; originally, Pudge never even attends. Later iterations featured Alaska's burial which was eventually cut.
  • Instead of the symmetrical before/after structure, the novel originally jumped to different out-of-order time periods every chapter, (500) Days of Summer-style, because of, in John's words, "important literary reasons." He's now embarrassed about this.
• Write What You Know: The Culver Creek Preparatory School was closely based on the real life Indian Springs School (Birmingham, Alabama), a boarding school John Green attended. The Bufriedos were real, and they were even less healthy than the book made them sound.
  • Also, John Green may or may not have orchestrated a prank involving a stripper during his high school days.

for the TV series:

• Author's Saving Throw: John Green was disappointed in himself for failing to get across the fact that his depiction of the main characters' antics did not constitute an endorsement to many readers. The series adds a number of scenes that make it clear that their behavior is not something to emulate, particularly two blistering "The Reason You Suck" Speeches in Episode 6: the first from Lara to Miles when she breaks up with him over how seriously he's taking the school's ridiculous code of silence even though it won't even be relevant to his life in just a year and a half, and the second from Starnes to The Colonel where he informs Chip that by letting his vengeance on the Weekday Warriors escalate to outright crimes, he not only failed to hurt them in any meaningful way, but also gave their racist parents all the justification they needed to have HIM kicked out of the school.
• Saved from Development Hell: The adaptation had been in Development Hell for damn near a decade. The long wait probably explains why there are many scenes from the book recreated very faithfully onscreen (although there is some considerable amount of Adaptation Deviation or Adaptation Expansion), as well as the fact that the series is set in the Turn of the Millennium (as the novel was).

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