Literary Birthday – 10 August – Suzanne Collins

Happy Birthday, Suzanne Collins, born on 10 August 1962.

Suzanne Collins Quotes

1. One night, I was lying in bed, and I was channel surfing between reality TV programs and actual war coverage. On one channel, there’s a group of young people competing for I don’t even know; and on the next, there’s a group of young people fighting in an actual war. I was really tired, and the lines between these stories started to blur in a very unsettling way. That’s the moment when Katniss’s story came to me.
2. Whatever age you’re writing for, the same rules of plot, character, and theme apply. You just set up a world and try to remain true to it. If it’s filled with cuddly animated animals, chances are no one’s going to die. If it’s filled with giant flesh-and-blood rats with a grudge, there’s going to be violence.
3. I’ve learned it helps me to work out the key structural points before I begin a story. The inciting incident, acts, breaks, mid-story reversal, crisis, climax, those sorts of things.
4. I’ll know a lot of what fills 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.
5. The more distractions I have to deal with before I actually begin writing, the harder focusing on the story becomes. Then I work until I’m tapped out, usually sometime in the early afternoon. If I actually write three to five hours, that’s a productive day.
6. Some days all I do is stare at the wall. That can be productive, too, if you’re working out a character.
7. Director Gary Ross has created an adaptation that is faithful in both narrative and theme, but he’s also brought a rich and powerful vision of Panem, its brutality and excesses, to the film as well. His worldbuilding’s fantastic, whether it be the Seam or the Capitol.
8. I’m not a very fancy person. I’ve been a writer a long time, and right now The Hunger Games is getting a lot of focus. It’ll pass. The focus will be on something else. It’ll shift. It always does. And that seems just fine.
9. Destroying things is much easier than making them.
10. [The Hunger Games is] very much based on the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur, which I read when I was eight years old. I was a huge fan of Greek and Roman mythology. As punishment for displeasing Crete, Athens periodically had to send seven youths and seven maidens to Crete, where they were thrown into the labyrinth and devoured by the Minotaur, which is a monster that’s half man and half bull. Even when I was a little kid, the story took my breath away, because it was so cruel, and Crete was so ruthless.

Suzanne Collins’ 10 Favourite Novels

1. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith
2. The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers
3. Nineteen Eighty Four by George Orwell
4. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
5. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
6. A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle
7. Lord of the Flies by William Golding
8. Boris by Jaap ter Haar
9. Germinal by Emile Zola
10. Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury

Source for List: Scholastic

Suzanne Collins is an American television writer and novelist. She is best known for The Underland Chronicles and the dystopian young adult Hunger Games series. The first Hunger Games novel was published in 2008. The series became a worldwide success and was adapted into five films. Collins wrote much of the screenplay for the first film, which was released in 2012. The next two novels, Catching Fire and Mockingjay, were also adapted for the big screen, with Mockingjay released in two parts in 2014 and 2015. The Hunger Games books explore power, violence, authoritarianism, and the effects of dehumanisation. They also examine how the media can be used to control people and shape public opinion. In 2010, Time magazine named Collins one of the world’s most influential people. In 2012, Amazon announced that she was the bestselling Kindle author of all time. Her books have sold more than 100 million copies worldwide. Collins has returned to the world of The Hunger Games with two prequel novels, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes and Sunrise on the Reaping. The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes was adapted into a film in 2023.

Source for Image: Author’s Website

by Amanda Patterson
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