10Dec

Believe Care Invest: Katniss Everdeen in Suzanne Collins’ “The Hunger Games”


  • Rural Appalachia in a dystopian future: Katniss Everdeen gets up early while her mother and little sister sleep, slips out of the electric fence surrounding their village, and goes out to hunt wild game with a bow and arrow.

As I point out in my first book, Suzanne Collins doesn’t fit the popular narrative of the overnight success Cinderella story. She started out with a five book series about a kingdom of cockroaches that sold respectably. But then she dug down and hit gold, narratively and financially. She realized that the legend of Theseus (Evil king demands that teens be summoned to take place in deadly games) might resonate with today’s teens, transposed it to a dystopian future, and crafted a powerful new fable.

I think that Collins’ greatest inspiration was that there was a generation that was aging out of the Harry Potter books and was now craving something super-dark, and she was prepared to give it to them. So how does she convince these former-Harry-lovers to embrace a new type of heroine?

The late Blake Snyder wrote three great books of writing advice that are still widely disseminated today, but I have a problem with his central piece of advice, that heroes should be introduced by a selflessly heroic moment in which they “Save the Cat.” “The Hunger Games” takes a different path. Let’s look at the third paragraph:

  • Sitting at Prim’s knees, guarding her, is the world’s ugliest cat. Mashed-in nose, half of one ear missing, eyes the color of rotting squash. Prim named him Buttercup, insisting that his muddy yellow coat matched the bright flower. He hates me. Or at least distrusts me. Even though it was years ago, I think he still remembers how I tried to drown him in a bucket when Prim brought him home. Scrawny kitten, belly swollen with worms, crawling with fleas. The last thing I needed was another mouth to feed. But Prim begged so hard, cried even, I had to let him stay. It turned out okay. My mother got rid of the vermin and he’s a born mouser. Even catches the occasional rat. Sometimes, when I clean a kill, I feed Buttercup the entrails. He has stopped hissing at me.

I guess you could say she saves a cat …from her own murderous impulses. But she still describes her as disgustedly as she possibly can!

So why do we like this cruel heroine? Just from this one paragraph, we already believe, care and invest:

Believe: This one paragraph does a great job showing a consistent worldview. The syntax is consistent terse (“He hates me. Or at least distrusts me.”). Her value judgments show her character (“he’s a born mouser”). Her idea of showing kindness is to share the entrails of her kill. She doesn’t seem like an accumulation of author-imposed traits. She seems like a fully-realized human, albeit an unpleasant one.

Care: She’s clearly suffering and doing what she can to survive (“The last thing I needed was another mouth to feed.”) If she was living a comfortable life in the suburbs, we would hate her for wanting to kill a cat, but seeing her hunger, our heart goes out to her. We wonder what we would do.

Invest: We definitely trust her to solve whatever challenges this book offers. She’s bad-ass, and she’s ready to make hard decisions. Shortly after this, still on page one, she slips though an electrified fence to bow-hunt her own food. We’ve picked the right hero!

Don’t worry, Katniss does get a chance to kill a cat a few pages later:

  • Then when this crazy lynx started following me around the woods looking for handouts, it became his official nickname for me. I finally had to kill the lynx because he scared off game. I almost regretted it because he wasn’t bad company. But I got a decent price for his pelt.

All of this cat killing ironically sets us up for her one big moment of selflessness later. If Katniss volunteered for the Hunger Games because she was a super-nice person, we wouldn’t buy it. It’s only because she’s so vicious that it’s believable and compelling.
By Believe Care Invest, Hunger Games0 Comments
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22Dec

The Hunger Games: The Archive

Let’s do one last post before the holidays to archive the Hunger Games posts I’ve done over the years:


But I had lots of posts before that as well (and most of them were a lot more critical than my recent posts):

By Hunger Games, Prose90 Comments
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20Dec

Rulebook Casefile: How “The Hunger Games” Fills the Reader In on What’s Going On

Let’s look at how the first chapter of “The Hunger Games” parcels out information.

  • Katniss wakes up, sees her mother and sister, interacts with cat, mentions to us that it’s Reaping Day but doesn’t explain what that means.
  • Katniss goes out the door, sees the town, explains to us what District 12 and the Seam are.
  • She slips out through the fence, mentions that her father died in a mine explosion.
  • She gets her bow, explains black market economy and peacekeepers.
  • She meets up with Gale and they eat, and she tells us about the capitol.
  • They find the black market, then interact with the mayor’s daughter, in her nice reaping clothes. They discuss the mathematics of who will get chosen, which we don’t understand, then, as they leave, Katniss explains the system to us.
  • Katniss returns to her family and they go to the Reaping. Katniss explains to us how the lottery works.
  • Katniss sees the officials lined up. For the first time, she tells us the story of how North America became Panem, then she explains how the Hunger Games works.
  • Effie addresses the crowd. Prim is chosen.

So over the course of ten pages, we gradually find out everything we want to know, and it’s very effective. Let’s look at other ways Collins could have done it.

  • The book could have done what the movie did: The movie just begins with onscreen text explaining in a few paragraphs what the Hunger Games are, before Katniss is introduced. Then we get a snippet of Caesar Flickerman interviewing the game-maker Seneca Crane, where they fill in more of the what the games are, then we cut to District 12 (identified by an onscreen title)
  • On the other hand, it could have all been mysterious until we arrived at the Reaping at which point Effie could have described everything to the crowd (even though they already knew it)
  • Even past that, they could have waited to actually show us what the Hunger Games were.

The book on other hand, makes good use of first-person direct address. Katniss just tells us everything we need to know, in little pieces, sometimes motivated by something she sees, but sometimes not. The key is that it’s all interspersed with action and dialogue. She’s up and about, visiting several locations, hunting and killing, having several conversations while she’s telling us all this.

She also tells it to us in the most intriguing way possible: She first mentions Reaping Day and the Hunger Games without telling us what they are. She lets us dangle for a few pages, and engages in some dialogue about it with others that we don’t understand, and then, once our interest is built for a while, she finally explains to us what they each are.

We get the information fast enough that the book can get going quickly, but just slowly enough that it never feels like an info-dump. It’s a model of how to set-up a future world.
By Hunger Games, Prose, Rulebook Casefile, Storyteller's Rulebook5 Comments
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17Dec

Storyteller’s Rulebook: Juxtapose the Melodramatic with the Mundane

It’s hard to care about melodrama. When characters are feeling huge emotions about huge events, the natural tendency as a reader is to roll your eyes and say, “Whoa there, it’s too big, too much, too silly.” All we know are our piddly little lives. We don’t know what we would do in these shocking circumstances and we can’t imagine.

So it’s hard to write big shocking moments without losing your audience. But here’s a trick: juxtapose the melodramatic with the mundane. Here’s Katniss when her sister’s name is called:

  • There must have been some mistake. This can’t be happening. Prim was one slip of paper in thousands! Her chances of being chosen so remote that I’d not even bothered to worry about her. Hadn’t I done everything? Taken the tesserae, refused to let her do the same? One slip. One slip in thousands. The odds had been entirely in her favor. But it hadn’t mattered. Somewhere far away, I can hear the crowd murmuring unhappily as they always do when a twelve-year-old gets chosen because no one thinks this is fair. And then I see her, the blood drained from her face, hands clenched in fists at her sides, walking with stiff, small steps up toward the stage, passing me, and I see the back of her blouse has become untucked and hangs out over her skirt. It’s this detail, the untucked blouse forming a ducktail, that brings me back to myself.

We’re in the same position as Katniss: Only the untucked shirt makes it real to us. It’s too hard to comprehend the horror that a twelve-year old will be sacrificed in a future gladiatorial game. It’s absurd. It’s too big. But an untucked shirt is small. We can comprehend that. It’s real. And if it’s real, juxtaposed with the other, then the other must be real as well.

A twelve year old, telling us about the wild gladitorial dream she just had, wouldn’t mention that untucked shirt. It’s too mundane. That’s the sort of detail you would only notice if you were actually there. So when we see it, we’re suddenly actually there.

The more outlandish your scenario, the more important it is to include little glimpses of mundane details, just to make it real.
By Hunger Games, Prose, Storyteller's Rulebook4 Comments
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15Dec

Storyteller’s Rulebook: Get to the Premise Quickly (Even if It Means Skipping Some Set-Up)

So we get to the Reaping in “The Hunger Games”, and they’re going to read out the names of the tributes. First we hear the female tribute: Oh no, it’s Katniss’s sister Prim, who we care about! Then we hear the male tribute and it’s…Peeta Mellark! And we say, “Who?” We’ve had the chance to meet various villagers that morning, but not Peeta, so the name lands with a thud.

Then Katniss fills us in that she’s not close with Peeta, but she does know him and like him because of something nice he did for her a while ago.

Why not establish beforehand who Peeta is, so that his name will have an impact on us when it’s read out? Because there’s just not time. A little set-up is fine, but the reader wants the plot to start going as soon as possible.

If there’s time, then there’s some value in letting us know who someone is before something happens to them, but not if it takes too long. The book is called “The Hunger Games”, not “Life in the Seam”, and we want to get to find out what that is and begin the process.

We have about ten pages of set-up (most of which is action in the woods). During that time we get to meet three possible female tributes: Katniss, Prim, and the mayor’s daughter, but we only meet one potential male tribute: Gale. If Collins had introduced Peeta during this time, she also would have had to introduce some other men so it wouldn’t be too obvious, and we could have some shock that it’s Peeta. (Also it would be too much of a coincidence if Katniss had only interacted with a few people that morning and two of them had their names called. It’s far more believable that she only met one that morning.)

Finding out a reason to care about Peeta after his name is called works out fine. Collins knows she can just make us care retroactively, after the name fails to get a reaction from us. In fact, we’ll care more. She’s lost the potential for shock, but she knows we’ll feel more for Peeta’s backstory now as a result.
By Hunger Games, Prose, Storyteller's Rulebook0 Comments
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13Dec

Rulebook Casefile: The “Drown the Cat” Intro in “The Hunger Games”

The late Blake Snyder wrote three great books of writing advice that are still widely disseminated today, but I have a problem with his central piece of advice, that heroes should be introduced by a selflessly heroic moment in which they “Save the Cat.”

“The Hunger Games” takes a different path. Let’s look at the third paragraph:

  • Sitting at Prim’s knees, guarding her, is the world’s ugliest cat. Mashed-in nose, half of one ear missing, eyes the color of rotting squash. Prim named him Buttercup, insisting that his muddy yellow coat matched the bright flower. He hates me. Or at least distrusts me. Even though it was years ago, I think he still remembers how I tried to drown him in a bucket when Prim brought him home. Scrawny kitten, belly swollen with worms, crawling with fleas. The last thing I needed was another mouth to feed. But Prim begged so hard, cried even, I had to let him stay. It turned out okay. My mother got rid of the vermin and he’s a born mouser. Even catches the occasional rat. Sometimes, when I clean a kill, I feed Buttercup the entrails. He has stopped hissing at me.

I guess you could say she saves a cat…from her own murderous impulses. But she still describes her as disgustedly as she possibly can!

Why do we like this nasty heroine? In the parlance of my book, we believe, care and invest:

  • Believe: This one paragraph does a great job showing a consistent worldview. Every word is colored by a very unique way of seeing the world. She doesn’t seem like an accumulation of author-imposed traits. She seems like a fully-realized human.
  • Care: She’s suffering and doing what she can to survive. If she was living a comfortable life in the suburbs, we would hate her for wanting to kill a cat, but seeing her hunger, our heart goes out to her. We wonder what we would do.
  • Invest: We definitely trust her to solve whatever challenges this book offers. She’s bad-ass, and she’s ready to make hard decisions.

Don’t worry, Katniss does get a chance to kill a cat a few pages later:

  • Then when this crazy lynx started following me around the woods looking for handouts, it became his official nickname for me. I finally had to kill the lynx because he scared off game. I almost regretted it because he wasn’t bad company. But I got a decent price for his pelt.

All of this cat killing ironically sets us up for her one big moment of selflessness later. If Katniss volunteered for the Hunger Games because she was a super-nice person, we wouldn’t buy it. It’s only because she’s so vicious that it’s believable and compelling.
By Hunger Games, Prose, Rulebook Casefile, Storyteller's Rulebook7 Comments
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10Dec

The Annotation Project: The Hunger Games

Well folks, I didn’t get any non-bot comments on two weeks of “Gone Girl” pieces. I’ve always been reluctant to do books due to my fear that nobody actually reads, and that suspicion feels like it’s being confirmed. Let’s do one more book, see if anybody responds, then see where we’re going from there.  UPDATE: As requested, here’s a link to a downloadable Word file.












By Annotation Project, Hunger Games, Prose12 Comments
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