The Hunger Games
The Hunger Games
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Suzanne Collins on The Hunger Games
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
One late night, two screens, one collisionThe book began not at a desk but on a couch, in a moment of exhausted channel-surfing. Collins was flipping between a reality competition and footage of the Iraq War when the two feeds stopped feeling separate.
One night I’m sitting there flipping around and on one channel there’s a group of young people competing for, I don’t know, money maybe? And on the next, there’s a group of young people fighting an actual war. And I was tired, and the lines began to blur in this very unsettling way, and I thought of this story.
Once that collision registered, Collins needed a classical frame to hold it. She turned to the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur, in which Athens was forced to send tribute children to Crete to be killed, a setup whose cruelty had stayed with her since childhood.
And even when I was a child, I was blown away by how evil that was. It was like Crete was sending this very clear message, which was, if you mess with us, we’ll do something worse than kill you. We will kill your children. [paraphrased from audio]
That childhood reaction became the emotional engine. The name of the book’s country, Panem, comes from the Latin panem et circenses, bread and circuses, the Roman formula for keeping a population distracted and compliant.
Her father’s career shaped the moral seriousness behind the premise. He returned from Vietnam when Collins was around six and made the education of his children about war a deliberate, sustained project.
My father was career military. He was a veteran, he was a doctor of political science, he taught at West Point and Air Command and lectured at the War College. And when he got back from Vietnam I was probably about 6, and he, I think, felt it was his responsibility to make sure that all his children had an understanding of war, about its cost, its consequences. So I felt like I was tutored in that by somebody who was very experienced in it both as real life and on a historical basis.
How she wrote it
From playwright’s blueprint to gamemaker’s arenaCollins came to novel-writing after a decade in children’s television and years writing for the stage, and she carried a playwright’s architecture with her. Before a single scene was drafted, the structural skeleton was already in place.
I’ve learned it helps me to work out the key structural points before I begin a story: the inciting incident, act breaks, mid-story reversal, crisis, climax, those sorts of things. I know a lot of what fills in the spaces between them as well, but I leave some uncharted room for the characters to develop. And if a door opens along the way and I’m intrigued by where it leads, I’ll definitely go through it. [paraphrased from audio]
Katniss arrived early and whole, but her central weapon required a separate justification. Collins wanted the bow to feel earned rather than convenient, and she reasoned backward from Katniss’s circumstances in the Seam, the impoverished mining district where she grows up.
In this one, I needed a weapon that would be believable that she could use — not magically use but really use. You could have built a bow out of things you found in the woods, if you knew how. You could realistically have snuck out and used the bow and become very good. In fact, you’d have to be very good to feed your family with it. So her talent with the bow is hard won. It’s not something that magically happens when someone zaps her.
The Capitol’s elaborate entertainment apparatus, including the Gamemakers, the stylists, and the production crew who stage the annual killing as spectacle, drew directly from Collins’s years working in television. The personalities were not invented from scratch.
If you take the crew who create the Hunger Games each year, a lot of those personalities, their attitudes, their absorption with the show they’re creating, come from my work in television. In a way, it’s very easy for me to imagine the world of the game makers because in a much gentler way, I was one myself. [paraphrased from audio]
That self-recognition extended to the character she finds most personally uncomfortable to claim. She told TIME that the figure she most closely identifies with across the whole trilogy is not Katniss but Plutarch Heavensbee, the head Gamemaker, because his job of building the arena and manipulating the characters inside it is not far from what a novelist does.
With Katniss established as the book’s center, Collins needed a historical model for how the story could grow into a rebellion across three volumes. Theseus gave her the premise; a different figure from antiquity gave her the arc.
Once The Hunger Games story takes off, I actually would say that the historical figure of Spartacus really becomes more of a model for the arc of the three books, for Katniss. We don’t know a lot of details about his life, but there was this guy named Spartacus who was a gladiator who broke out of the arena and led a rebellion against an oppressive government that led to what is called the Third Servile War. He caused the Romans quite a bit of trouble, and ultimately he died. [paraphrased from audio]
The personal thread
A six-year-old’s education in the cost of warCollins has described The Hunger Games as part of a deliberate series, a war-appropriate story for every stage of childhood, a project that grew directly from what she was taught and how she was taught it. The argument behind that project came partly from watching what happened to young people who were not taught.
I think it’s very uncomfortable for people to talk to children about war, and so they don’t because it’s easier not to. But then you have young people at 18 who are enlisting in the Army, and they really don’t have the slightest idea what they’re getting into. I think we put our children at an enormous disadvantage by not educating them in war, by not letting them understand about it from a very early age.
That conviction came from watching her father navigate the same tension. He had returned from Vietnam with a combat veteran’s knowledge and a political scientist’s framework, and he chose not to spare his children either.
This is such an unflattering thing to say about yourself, but it would be Plutarch Heavensbee... Because he’s the head gamemaker. Plutarch is creating the story, and he’s creating the arena, and he’s manipulating the characters — a writer isn’t far from a gamemaker. I’m not for creating arenas or anything, but if you look at it from a creative perspective, we’re really doing the same job.
The comparison is an uncomfortable one for Collins, and the discomfort is the point. Her father built arenas of a different kind: battlefield tours, history lessons, unsparing conversations with his children. She built one on the page, and she knows it.
On what the book is wrestling with
Just war theory dressed in a televised arenaThe political argument underneath The Hunger Games is not invented from whole cloth. Collins had been working through just war theory, a body of ethical reasoning about when war is morally defensible and what conduct is permissible within it, across her earlier Underland Chronicles series, and she brought it into Panem with specific intent.
Just war theory has evolved over thousands of years in an attempt to define what circumstances give you the moral right to wage war and what is acceptable behavior within that war and its aftermath. In The Hunger Games Trilogy, the districts rebel against their own government because of its corruption. The citizens of the districts have no basic human rights, are treated as slave labor, and are subjected to the Hunger Games annually.
Collins chose dystopia as the genre not as a backdrop but as a mechanism. The distancing effect of a fictional future society allows readers to examine political and moral questions they might otherwise deflect.
I think of dystopian literature as being cautionary tales. It’s a way you can kind of frame it and try to make sense of it and set it outside yourself but look at the issues involved.
Young readers, Collins argued, are the right audience precisely because of where they are in their own development. Adolescence is the period when the question of whether to trust authority stops being abstract.
They are themselves beginning to question authority. And they are themselves beginning to look at government and situations throughout the world and wonder if they’re moral or not. And you have to have that. You have to at some time in your life begin to question the environment, the political situation around you and decide, you know, whether it’s right or not. And if it isn’t, what part you’re going to play in that. [paraphrased from audio]
What she wants us to sit with
Questions that come home with the readerCollins was precise about what she hoped readers would carry out of the book. The questions she named in a video interview move from the abstract to the personally accountable, and they do not let the reader stay in the audience.
Questions about how elements of the book might be relevant in their own lives. Like, ‘How do you feel about the fact that some people take their next meal for granted when so many other people are starving in the world?’ What do you think about choices your government, past and present, or other governments around the world make? What’s your relationship to reality TV versus your relationship to the news? Was there anything in the book that disturbed you because it reflected aspects of your own life and, if there was, what can you do about it? [paraphrased from audio]
That last question is the sharpest one. The book does not ask readers to admire a hero from a safe distance. It asks whether anything in the Capitol’s logic, its appetite for spectacle, its willingness to let some people starve while others consume, already exists in the world the reader woke up in that morning.