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idea what they’re getting into.” - Suzanne Collins
Introduction
Suzanne Collins is not afraid to talk about war. The daughter of an officer in the U.S. Air Force, battlefields were her classroom. War’s horrors, but more importantly its whys, hows, and what nows, were learned and digested and put from pen to paper. In nearly all of her work, Collins doesn’t pretend that war is anything but its horrible self. She tackles it head on, showing it plainly to her adolescent audience because she believes they can handle it. More than that, she knows they need to learn it because soon enough they won’t be children, and they can’t remain ignorant forever. The quote above is all the justification Collins needs for the brutal reality of The Hunger Games. With her straightforward approach to explaining difficult topics Collins codified the Young Adult genre as it exists today, and established its purpose in giving answers to all the questions young adults don’t know they have, and the thousands they do.
History
Suzanne Collins was born August 10, 1962, in Harford, Connecticut. Her father was an officer in the U.S. Air Force, and Collins’ family moved frequently, staying in Indiana, Belgium, and Birmingham, Alabama. Collins’ father taught History at a university level, and an active officer who spent a year in Vietnam. He often took them to battlefields and would walk them through why the battle occurred, how it played out, and its consequences for the soldiers and the sides. This exposure to war at such a young age was incredibly influential on Collins and her approach to storytelling.
In 1985, Collins graduated from Indiana University after studying theatre and telecommunications, then earned an M.F.A. in dramatic writing from New York University in 1989. Collins spent her early career writing for children’s television shows. Starting with a short lived sitcom, she moved onto Nickelodeon shows like Clarissa Explains it All and The Mystery Files of Shelby Woo. She also penned stories for preschool viewers in Little Bear and Oswald. Writing for preschoolers, adolescents, and teenagers taught her that the audience’s age has nothing to do with good writing.
Building off her father’s lessons, and her experience in television, her first novel, Gregor the Overlander, was written while working in television, and was published in 2003. The novel was aimed squarely at children and followed Gregor as he fell into a world of men and giant rats living miles under New York. Despite skewing towards a young audience, Collins tackled issues of genocide and biological warfare with the belief that children could handle the topics if addressed in a straightforward manner. Gregor the Overlander would spawn four sequels from 2004-2007, which would collectively be known as The Underland Chronicles.
Collins’ international hit, The Hunger Games, was published in 2008. The Hunger Games carries the same thematic identity as her previous work, tackling mature concepts in a form manageable for adolescents. Collins got the idea for it when repeatedly switching between kids competing in a reality TV show, and news about children fighting in the war in Iraq. The series’ science fiction dystopia allowed Collins to address why child soldiers fight and the trauma they experience. And casting the actual death battle through the lens of reality TV let her explain propaganda to her audience in an easily understandable form. Two sequels, Catching Fire and Mockingjay, were published in 2009 and 2010 respectively, and the trilogy has won at least 77 awards. In 2020, Collins published a prequel to her trilogy called The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. In keeping with her father’s battlefield lessons, the prequel novel focuses on President Snow, the antagonist of The Hunger Games, and explores what turned him into the man we know. Collins has also worked on the movie adaptations of her Hunger Games books, the most recent of which, The Ballad of Songbird and Snakes, released November 17th, 2023.
Suzanne Collins' Writing Style
As an active script writer in the decade prior to the publication of Gregor the Overlander, Collins draws on her experience writing television to structure her books. She self admits to using a very classical 3 act structure that leaves the characters on cliff hangers at the end of chapters and books because that’s what happens in TV writing. This is evident when you look at The Hunger Games trilogy as a three-act structure itself. The second book, Catching Fire, represents almost entirely rising action as the rules around the hunger games begin to bend and break. It also ends on a massive cliffhanger with The Hunger Games interrupted and our protagonist taken by an unknown faction, enticing the reader to stick around for the third book after the “commercial break” between releases.
As mentioned above, Collins drew significant influence from her father’s battlefield lessons and strives to serve as a similar educator about war for children. As early as Gregor the Overlander in 2003 she was introducing war crimes and biological weapons into her books but didn’t shy away from their ramifications. Collins famously said, “I don’t write about adolescence. I write about war. For adolescents,” and that has been true of all her books. Rather choosing an audience, she chooses a topic, and the topic determines her audience.
The Hunger Games & Codifying the Young Adult Genre
The Hunger Games is Suzanne Collins’s most famous series, and for good reason. Through the view of a 16-year-old girl named Katniss Everdeen who only wants to save her sister and survive a death game, the Hunger Games explores how extreme poverty forces people to choose between bad options, how the government can use legitimate law to actively oppress its citizens, how the media we consume shapes our perception of events, and the consequences of our actions. With impressive themes and characters built on the shoulders of those that came before it, The Hunger Games is the lynch pin that legitimized Young Adult as a genre and codified many of its current styles, tropes, and themes.
Young Adult has been a flowering genre since 1967 with the release of S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders, a coming-of-age novel about two rival gangs, and Robert Lipsyte’s The Contender, where a high school dropout learns from a Harlem Boxing club that is the effort, not the win, that makes a man. The two novels eschewed the patronizing plots of junior novels that came before them, universally set in white rural communities where a teenager’s biggest problem was getting a date to the prom, and instead following in the footsteps of Laure Ingalls Wilder’s Little House series to explore more realistic settings and characters. Young Adult received begrudging recognition over the next few decades, and an effort was made to create a canon of Young Adult works, but it still struggled to be accepted in libraries and bookstores, keeping it away from the intended audience. Then, in 1997, something interesting happened.
Harry Potter was an international phenomenon and needs no introduction. Its fantastical world and characters drew in millions, and as the audience matured, so did the series. What started as children’s stories extoling the magical power of love ended indisputably in the Young Adult genre, raising questions about war, classism, propaganda, violence, and death to its readers. It was indisputable proof that Young Adult could sell, but Harry Potter was also an anomaly in the world of literature. Its success wasn’t proof of Young Adult’s potential because it had started outside of the genre, but it did prime the world the world for what came next. Many readers, now the demographic for Young Adult, were hungry for answers to Harry Potter’s questions. Enter Suzanne Collins and The Hunger Games, published one year after Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.
The Hunger Games picks up where Harry Potter cut off thematically, but in a ruthlessly more grounded world that offers deeper answers. It doesn’t build up to government control and brutal violence enacted on children for the pleasure and amusement of the state, that is the premise. Where the later Harry Potter books explore rebellion against a government corrupted and turned against its people, The Hunger Games exists in a world beyond that. The rebellion lost, the annual death game of 24 tributes is the result. Within the first book, there is no escape. There is no hope of overthrowing the government. Katniss’s last-minute gamble to try and commit double suicide with Peeta isn’t like Harry’s attempt at heroic martyrdom, but a strategic move designed to force the state’s hand, because the game needs a winner and suicide would snub the state. Dolores Umbrage’s bureaucratic glee for malicious application of the law is ratcheted up by President Snow. His decision to use the quarter quell to force Katniss and Peeta back into the Hunger Games as a punishment for forcing his hand is just as petty and deplorable. But now, it’s not a schoolteacher forcing rules onto students. It’s a politician forcing rules onto society. By bringing the themes raised by Harry Potter out of the fantastical and into a possible future of the United States, Collins teaches her audience to recognize how the government can use the law to oppress others. A tactic we know was effective because of an instance in 2014 when “anti-government protestors in Thailand used a symbol of resistance from the book (a raised hand with three middle fingers pressed together) to express solidarity with people oppressed by government rule.”
Beyond political oppression, The Hunger Games is deeply entrenched in propaganda. The reality TV nature of the hunger games serves as a propaganda machine for the Capital, recasting what should be horrific child slaughter into a yearly game for the rich to enjoy. They use the media to twist the winners into servants of the capital by separating them from the common people and using the news to control their image. Even if the winners hate the Capital, they’re forced to participate in its culture, which looks like an abandonment of the common people.
This idea of propaganda is so important that it serves as the premise of most of the third book and acts as the deciding factor in the story’s love triangle. District 13 doesn’t want Katniss because she’s a good fighter, but because they can use her as a symbol to create revolt against the state. Katniss is stuck at the base recording commercials and slogans, and when she is allowed to leave, District 13 is careful to control her exposure to the people actually fighting the war, so they can control her image. The ending of the book, where District 13 fakes a bombing on their own medics to justify breaking into the presidential mansion, killing Katniss’s sister, and the revelation that one of her love interests was fully aware of the plan and helped it happen, serves as the ultimate object lesson for Collins’ readers. You are not immune to propaganda, and it isn’t only your opponents that are using it. Gale is so swept up in the Us vs Them mentality created by the propaganda campaign, that he’s willing to kill Katniss’ sister if it meant winning the war. And when commanded to kill President Snow, the series antagonist, Katniss instead kills the leader of District 13. She sees past their propaganda and realizes District 13 don’t want to over throw the government, they want to take its place in the pecking order. This immense breakdown of propaganda provides answers to themes raised by the last Harry Potter book, where the government is spewing Death Eater rhetoric, but which never seemed to be the focus of the story.
It can’t be disputed that The Hunger Games has entered the canon of Young Adult, becoming a modern classic that defined many of the themes, tropes, and expectations for the genre today. In the decade after its release, The Hunger Games trilogy alone has sold over 100 million copies worldwide and been translated into 54 languages. Its success proved the legitimacy of the Young Adult genre, and in its wake sales of Young Adult skyrocketed, selling 80.9 million books in only the first six months of 2018. More than that, it shows why Young Adult is so important. The teenage years are hard for everyone, and there’s so much to learn that your parents won’t always tell you everything you need to know, or maybe they have particular views that you don’t agree with, but you don’t know any alternative. What began as an international breakdown of, and lesson on, war, government oppression, and propaganda, has opened the genre to explore all kinds of issues faced by teenagers.
Writing Advice: Staring at the Wall
We’ve already discussed the notable details of Suzanne Collins’ s writing style, her penitent for choosing a topic before her audience, and the influence of her father’s battlefield history lessons, so you may be surprised at she thinks staring at the wall can be as productive as writing.
Often in writing discourse we talk about the process of writing itself. Planning, plot structure, characters, themes, how to say what you mean and mean what you say and meeting our word goals. At every stage of the writing process, we are encouraged to write down our thoughts. Take thirty minutes to free write. Map the story out on paper. Do you want to learn more about your characters? Here are ten questions to answer for them. Writing is a hobby and a job we dedicate ourselves to. A never ending grind to produce more text and make progress in our story. But in our rush to write everything down, sometimes we forget to think.
Collins once said, “Some days all I do is stare at the wall. That can be productive, too, if you’re working out character and plot problems.” It’s an important reminder that writing is not all there is to writing. Your story and characters have to come from somewhere, and letting your mind sift through your tangled web of character relationships and plot threads, jumping from idea to idea is a great way to figure things out, as long as you remember to write your ideas down before you forget. If you find yourself staring at a wall instead of writing, take the time to let yourself think instead of forcing yourself back to the keyboard.
Conclusion
Suzanne Collins has had a monumental impact on the world of literature. Her stories offer complex and multifaceted looks into difficult topics, created a generation of readers and writers, and pushed a genre into the spotlight. It’s easy to overlook her legacy because of the swath of Young Adult dystopian novels that were released in her wake, but it’s worth taking a step back and looking at why she inspired so many.
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