What I Learned from Suzanne Collins

Gregor and the Marks of Secret

Suzanne Collins is the newest writer I look up to.

I loved The Hunger Games, Catching Fire, and then thought Mockingjay was OK. Then I found out she did a mid-grade series of five books, called The Underland Chronicles. I loved these books nearly as much as The Hunger Games, and tried to read with the idea of what makes Collins so damn good?

Here’s what I came up with:

• Ignore the fear of tropes: if you’re good enough, who cares? The Underland series is about a boy who falls miles underneath the Earth to find a mystical world and discovers he’s prophesied to save them all. *yawn* right? Hell no. Collins makes it engaging and awesome (and later in the series, a mentor brings up the fact that the prophesies might all be bunk anyway.) — (It’s also an amusing reversal of the “white man saves the colored people” tale, as Gregor and his sister are described as having “dark skin” and the people of the Underland are so pale you can see their circulatory system.)
• Raise the stakes with red shirts: In Gregor the Overlander (Book 1), the prophesy says four of the twelve traveling together will die. The first three are characters who don’t talk much and two of them join the party late. One of them dies right after he joins them. We don’t get a lot of emotional attachment to them, so we get our tragedy but it feels at arm’s length. BUT she makes at least one of the deaths matter; the last to die is a major supporting character. She does this in The Hunger Games too, but in that, since the book is about a fight to the death, she makes the characters make friends among the kids they’re supposed to kill, so there’s tons of death, but only rarely does she break our hearts (but damn, she does it quite well when she does.)
• Adventures are often tragedies that people never recover from: At the beginning of Gregor and the Prophesy of Bane (Book 2), all of the survivors of the quest of book 1 are brought to eat together. They look at each other and half of them leave. The host says, embarrassed, that he thought it would be healing, but it was too much for them. Collins is like Tolkein; she explores the fact that adventure (read- battles and war and loss) changes people. The end of the series reminded me forcefully of the end of The Return of the King. There’s a lot of sense of not belonging anymore. Also, Gregor goes through adventures and gets injured, and it’s mentioned more than once that he will eventually encounter the very real issue of not being able to wear shorts or a tshirt ever again because he’d never be able to explain away his scars. In Mockingjay, Katniss spends much of the book paralyzed by PTSD. These experiences redefine a hero on a very deep level.
• Good guys can be manipulative bastards: Collins does this in both The Hunger Games and The Underland Chronicles. A human military strategist turns to incarcerating Gregor and then holding a family member hostage in order to get him to cooperate, and that’s for fighting for the “good side.” Katniss in The Hunger Games is impulsive to a fault and that impulsiveness is manipulated many times by her mentor. (Both of these manipulators pay for their meddling in different ways.)
• Did I mention that adventure changes you? I mention this again because reading these books felt real. The whole dancing with teddy bears ending of Return of the Jedi, where everyone is smiling, suddenly feels pointless. The fact that is that you return from battles wondering how you could have fought for your life one day, then worried about what to buy from the corner store the next. One character in The Hunger Games drinks constantly to keep away his memories. Even though Gregor comes to care deeply for many in the Underland, he does look to subsequent visits with great dread.
• Love is complicated, and not in a Facebook sense: The Hunger Games has a love triangle that takes a very long time to resolve, and The Underland Chronicles has the confusion of first love amid the time of war. And some things are blatantly obvious, but it’s never easy.
• Keep the action coming: While it is nice to occasionally let your characters take a break, you don’t want your readers to take one. Collins is the master of pacing, starting at a jog and often running at a full out sprint, but never, ever, stopping. I read The Hunger Games trilogy in record time, and while I read most of The Underland Chronicles via audiobook, I bought book 3 since the library didn’t have it. I started it in the afternoon and was finished by late evening. Granted, it’s a mid-grade book, so the structure isn’t mind-taxing, but still, I don’t find enough time to read, but with her books, I MAKE TIME. The cliché about not putting down books is true. That’s what you want to write.

I love Collins’ work, but I recommend them to any writer who wants to look at the building blocks of a good story. See all her books at Indiebound.