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Veronica Roth is only 22, so her bio will be short. She’s from a Chicago suburb. She studied creative writing at Northwestern University, and wrote DIVERGENT, her YA dystopian thriller (Katherine Tegen Books, May 2011!), while she was supposed to be doing homework. This was a decidedly good choice that will unfortunately make it difficult for her to someday lecture her future children on how important it is to get your homework done.
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1) Why Chicago as the setting for DIVERGENT? Is there any significance to this?
There are so many reasons I chose Chicago. For one, I’ve lived in the Chicago suburbs most of my life, so it’s a place that’s both familiar to me and unfamiliar to me at the same time.
As I worked more and more of the city into the manuscript, I got the chance to rediscover
my home, which was wonderful—there’s so much I don’t know about it! Also, I wrote about the Dauntless riding the trains before I realized that the only place I have ever been where trains are above ground and in constant motion is Chicago—that I had been writing about my favorite city without even knowing it. But my personal connections with the place aside, I also found it interesting to turn such a clean and organized place upside down.
2) In your dystopian world, 16-year-olds have to choose a faction to join. If you had
to choose, which faction would you join? Would you be scared to diverge from your
family's usual choice?
It’s hard to say, because I’m not sure I would be brave enough to actually go through with
it, but I believe I would choose Dauntless. Not because of a thirst for freedom, although
that’s certainly appealing, but because I think courage is so important. I would be compelled
to choose them not by aptitude, necessarily, but by ideology. For the record, though, my
favorite faction is Abnegation, so I might pick them if I was too afraid to choose Dauntless. I
make different choices than my family members all the time (and they do the same), so I’m
not sure how much they would factor into my decision. Mostly because I would break all the
rules to see them again if I chose to leave them.
3) You graduated from Northwestern University with a degree in creative writing.
What would you say it the most important thing you learned there that had the
biggest impact on your writing?
I learned so many things, it’s hard to pick just one, so I’ll list a few: Writing a story is like
mountain-climbing with a heavy backpack—pack only the things you need to get to the top,
the rest is just weighing you down. Turn off the internal editor. People rarely argue about
exactly what they’re angry about—they argue about silly things instead. “Said” is really the
only dialogue tag you should use, because it doesn’t call attention to itself. No one is either
completely good or completely bad. Revise, revise, revise. The list goes on.
4) Do you see yourself writing in any other genres as you get deeper into your writing
career?
I don’t think about it much, because I don’t want to impose limits on myself. I will say
that I feel particularly connected to the YA genre and would be hesitant to leave it. But if
the right idea comes along, I’m not going to ignore it just because it’s not YA.
that I feel particularly connected to the YA genre and would be hesitant to leave it. But if
the right idea comes along, I’m not going to ignore it just because it’s not YA.
May 3rd, 2011
In Beatrice Prior's dystopian Chicago, society is divided into five factions, each dedicated to the cultivation of a particular virtue—Candor (the honest), Abnegation (the selfless), Dauntless (the brave), Amity (the peaceful), and Erudite (the intelligent). On an appointed day of every year, all sixteen-year-olds must select the faction to which they will devote the rest of their lives. For Beatrice, the decision is between staying with her family and being who she really is—she can't have both. So she makes a choice that surprises everyone, including herself.
During the highly competitive initiation that follows, Beatrice renames herself Tris and struggles to determine who her friends really are—and where, exactly, a romance with a sometimes fascinating, sometimes infuriating boy fits into the life she's chosen. But Tris also has a secret, one she's kept hidden from everyone because she's been warned it can mean death. And as she discovers a growing conflict that threatens to unravel her seemingly perfect society, she also learns that her secret might help her save those she loves . . . or it might destroy her.
Debut author Veronica Roth bursts onto the literary scene with the first book in the Divergent series—dystopian thrillers filled with electrifying decisions, heartbreaking betrayals, stunning consequences, and unexpected romance.
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