Lessons I Learned from Suzanne Collins
When I picked up the 1st Hunger Games book, my junior year of high school, my 1st thought was that I had never met a character like Katniss Everdeen. For one thing - despite the fact that I loved J-Law in the role - I absolutely loved that book Katniss seemed to be a woman of color. I loved that she held her family together, not just by being the caretaker for her mother and sister but also by being hardcore and hunting game that she sold illegally to feed her family. I loved that she took risks and put her life on the line - by defying the law, but also by entering her name in for the Hunger Games several times to be able to provide for her family. And when she volunteered her life in exchange for her sister’s - that was the moment that I knew that no matter what, Katniss was going to go down in history as one of my favorite female characters ever.
What I’ve since come to realize is that what attracted me the most to Katniss was her strength and boldness. Her - I can’t think of another way to say this - complete lack of femininity. At 16 years of age, Katniss was the 1st female heroine I could remember reading that truly broke the mold of what a female heroine traditionally looked like. Her sexuality was an almost-foreign concept to her. She had much more important priorities in life than the wants or desires of the men around her. She was self-sacrificing as a matter of equal parts loyalty and logic, and even though she was deeply flawed and sometimes very wrong, everything she did and every choice she made felt absolutely real to me.
Why I Love Her
Though Collins has seen some success with her first book, the illustrated children's book When Charlie McButton’s Lost Power and her autobiographical picture book Year of the Jungle, she is far more widely known for her two novel series The Underland Chronicles and The Hunger Games Trilogy. Both series touch on themes of war, characters being thrust into hero roles, and loyalty to family. But they are very different from each other in tone, intended audience, and in the way the characters come to life. Gregor is not Katniss, Boots is not Prim, the rats are certainly not the Capitol.
Many reviewers praise the Collins’s series for the intricate plot, detailed and believable action sequences, thought-provoking narratives, and ability to make complex themes digestible for young audiences. In her NYT review, Katie Riophe praised the Hunger Games novels, stating that the “specifics of the dystopian universe, and the fabulous pacing of the complicated plot, give the books their strange, dark charisma." Booklist writes that “Collins’ crystalline, unadorned prose provides an open window to perfect pacing and electrifying world-building, but what’s even more remarkable is that aside from being tremendously action-packed science fiction thrillers, these books are also brimming with potent themes of morality, obedience, sacrifice, redemption, love, law, and, above all, survival.” Similarly, The Underland Chronicles is called a “skillfully told adventure” in Booklist, an “immensely readable installment” in The Horn Book Magazine, and Kirkus Reviews returns to praise Collins’ finale to the series stating that “Collins’s greatest achievement in these tales is the effortless introduction of weighty geopolitical ethics into rip-roaring adventure.” Both The Underland Chronicles and the Hunger Games series serve as a testament to Collins’ strengths in worldbuilding, pacing, and allegory. Still, for me personally, nothing compares to her ability to create three dimensional characters.
Gregor is an eleven year old boy, living in near-poverty in NYC, facing the challenge of a missing parent. He is something that I have never been and can hardly relate to. On top of that, he is the protagonist of a novel series meant for readers in elementary and middle school. Yet, I find Gregor to be startlingly real. As an adult, I wanted to protect him, I wanted to scold him, I wanted to follow him - I felt as if I was living each experience right along with him. As Gregor grew, I recognized and catalogued his growth - proud when he came to conclusions that helped him develop and nervous when I could see him going down the wrong road. I came to know him, to understand how his mind worked, to the point that I could almost call out the pitfalls of his decision making before he’d even made a decision. It didn’t stop at Gregor either. Luxa, Ripred, Boots, and later even Lizzie - they all grew and changed and revealed new dimensions to me as I kept reading.
Katniss is a sixteen year old girl, which I was when I began reading, though her experiences catching game and doing whatever it took to keep her family afloat were very foreign from my boarding school existence. She was and is so many things that I was not then and am not now, and yet I felt a deeply close and personal bond with her. When she did what I would have done I pressed in, nervous to see if we’d made the right decision. When we disagreed, I would grip the book and wish I could tell her she was wrong - or stare wide-eyed as she understood something in a situation that I had missed. I kept reading the Hunger Games not to see the balance restored or the games put to an end, but to see how Katniss could possibly survive what she was going through and come out on the other side. I was enthralled by her, by Peeta and Gale, by her mother and Prim and Haymitch and Cinna and every person who entered her orbit.
Creating characters with so much dimension that a reader can form a bond with them, is a talent and a skill that I have grown to deeply appreciate. It is exceedingly difficult to do it once, and Collins has achieved it multiple times. She succeeded in both series, with multiple characters. Each character is unique, not only within one novel but from novel to novel. Katniss is not Gregor, and nor is she Luxa, though both she and Gregor are oldest children and support to their mothers, and both she and Luxa are spunky and opinionated. Ripred the brilliant but sometimes nasty rat, is not Haymitch the savvy, bitter drunk. Sweet and determined Prim is neither innocent Boots nor gifted, anxious Lizzie. Then there are the numerous main characters for which there is no parallel at all, and a host of minor characters that Collins’ fleshed out with enough personality to draw readers to tears at their misfortune.
Both The Hunger Games and The Underland Chronicles are commercial successes with strong reviews and many loyal fans across the world. But they are also writing triumphs, showcasing the brilliant skills Collins has to offer.
What I’ve Learned From Her
Whether someone enjoyed The Hunger Games or The Underland Chronicles or not, there is no denying that Collins’ is a gifted novelist and character builder. She repeatedly gives her characters strengths and weaknesses, tests those strengths and weaknesses, exposes their vulnerabilities, and gives them multiple opportunities to do the right and the wrong thing. And in addition to providing a narrative roadmap for how to grow your characters, Collins’s writing has given me four insights into how to create the type of characters that stay with a reader long after the final book has been put down.
She let me think of my female characters in a whole new light
I never thought, as a teen, that I was limited in how I thought of female characters. Collins showed me that I was. Through Katniss, she showed me that I was placing limitations on the type of stories I assigned to female protagonists. I was holding femininity in a traditional sense as some kind of baseline - measuring my character on a spectrum of ugly to beautiful, rugged to dainty, heavy-framed to slight, and on and on along certain paradigms. Collins shifted my thinking completely away from these measures altogether. She freed me to think of each character as a reflection of her world and upbringing and the journey she was to embark on in my novel. If her function is to escape a prison, does it truly matter what she looks like? If she’s attempting to invent something never seen before, must she be either soft-spoken or brash? Rather than focusing on a spectrum, reading Katniss allowed me to focus only on what needed to be conveyed to understand why my character behaves how she does, why others react to her how they do, and why her change matters to her accomplishing the central conceit of the novel. Once I was able to truly wrap my head around this and implement it, my characters stepped into the realm of the three-dimensional for the first time.
She showed me the power of different types of strength in building a cast of characters that is truly stronger together
In both The Hunger Games and The Underland Chronicles, the main character cannot win alone. The same can be said, theoretically, for many popular works of fiction. The difference in Collins’ work, is that the inability of the main character to solve the entire problem is not solely a function of time, limited knowledge, or lack of resources available to them. Katniss lacks the innate desire towards group planning and strategizing that allows District 13’s success, and lacks the innate diplomacy and understanding of others that allows her to stay alive. Gregor lacks the deeply ingrained puzzle solving gift that exposes the final key to success, and lacks the innocent, loving attention to detail that brings together otherwise unlikely allies. Who Katniss is and who Gregor is alone, without the support of every other character they are surrounded by, is not enough.
This is an important distinction when creating characters for a novel. After all, if your character can be everything, you don’t necessarily need the other characters around them. While time, limited knowledge, and lack of resources are good reasons to include other characters, I think these can at times be shallow. They can lead to the creation of two-dimensional characters who are tied to the purpose that they serve - getting things done quickly, having knowledge the main character does not, or having access to things the main character needs. Collins’ focus on these inherent differences comes through so much more powerfully, and allows each secondary character to stand out as a person. Writing this way demands that you give each character a well-rounded personality full of strengths and weaknesses that overlap but also differ from your main character’s - and that you understand why these similarities and differences are best brought to light to the reader.
She helped me see how a story can be romantic without being a romance, or giving undue attention to romance
It certainly feels like every book that is popular now is secretly or overtly a romance novel. To be fair, this has probably been true since the dawn of storytelling, as it certainly persists through the Greek plays and myths, through novels and stories from all different cultures from the “classics” to obscure folklore, and it is still true today. The average reader seems to like a little romance in their story, which makes sense because love - even its absence - has such a profound impact on who we are. What Collins’ series reminded me of was that even with a book led by a woman making a choice (sort of) between two men with romantic feelings for her, romance *still* did not have to take over the other elements of the story. Katniss does not expend much extra energy truly thinking through her feelings for Gale and Peeta. She does not pine and she does not gloat and she is not driven absolutely crazy worrying which man she should pick. This isn’t just because it’s not in her personality to do so because she’s some kind of “cool girl” - it’s because there are literally more important things going on in her life.
That subtle realization and distinction simultaneously reminded me that romance is almost never the only thing that a character is working through, and freed me as a writer to give romance its due space and nothing more in a narrative. In a romance novel, its due space might be the forefront of the novel. But in almost any other genre, it probably isn’t, and there is no need to attempt to yank it back into a seat of importance that it doesn’t need or deserve. Collins’ writing pushed me to think of romance as only one peice of a story, and to see that even with beautiful, tender, romantic moments a novel is still allowed to be driven primarily by so many other narrative factors. Her writing also pushed me to remember that just as in real life, no man and especially no woman, should ever be defined entirely by their relationship status.
She taught me the power of having your main character be a *part* of the solution without being the solution
As a girl who grew up on “heroes,” I used to write and dream up stories where my main character would come in the nick of time with the answer to the central conceit of the story. Sometimes it was something innate to who the character was such as an ability or skill, other times a last-second idea brought forth from personal knowledge or experience. There is nothing wrong with these stories. It just hadn’t occurred to me truly, until I read the Hunger Games, that this was not the only way a novel could end. It hadn’t occurred to me that my main character, the central character to the novel and the one on which the entire novel rested, might only play a small role in “fixing” whatever needed to be fixed. And, beyond that, that the novel or series could still be compelling, entertaining, captivating, and worthwhile.
Katniss’ one shot with her bow and arrow does not re-make Panem, but it is one small but significant part of making sure that the re-built Panem can be better than the Panem of old. After Gregor leaves, the real hard work of re-building and re-imagining the Underland still needs to be done. But that the entire solution has not been grandly revealed, or the full problem solved, does not detract from what each of those conclusions means for the personal journey of those characters. They each play their part in fixing things, they each contribute something uniquely them, and this contribution is realistic and is enough. As a writer, it was powerful for me to embrace the idea that my characters need not solve the world for the novel to achieve closure.
For what I have written, and for countless other reasons, I will always appreciate the incredible characters Suzanne Collins brought into the world for all of us to read. I hope that every woman, regardless of the genre she is writing in or the characters she is creating, can find inspiration in Collins’s beautiful character building work. Though I sincerely doubt that she reads this blog (well not yet - a girl can dream) I know that she is an incredibly talented author, and with examples like her paving the way, I know that we all can be too.
If you’re a fan of Suzanne Collins, or if there’s another author that you love that you’d like to see me write about - leave me a comment below, on facebook, or on my instagram!
