Thursday 30 June 2011

Veronica Roth: Divergent Was Originally from Four's POV


Veronica reveals some Divergent secrets while on the Dark Days of Supernatural book tour!

"One of my DIVERGENT secrets (which is . . . not so secret anymore, really) is that when I first wrote it, it was from a male point of view. Actually, it was from the point of view of Four, Tris’s instructor in the current version.

I wrote about thirty pages from his perspective, five years ago, during my freshman year of college. The faction system was essentially the same, but with four factions instead of five—Candor didn’t exist yet—and with a less clear system binding them together. I got stuck at the thirty-page mark and filed the story away with the rest of my unfinished snippets.

Wednesday 29 June 2011

The Joseph Beth Rookwood Kids Team: Q&A With Veronica Roth


In the world of Divergent people are divided up into five societies (factions) that each holds a different core value. It must have been hard to choose only five. Were there any factions that were considered but didn’t make the cut?

No, actually! In fact, I originally came up with only four—Abnegation, Dauntless, Erudite, and Amity—but the faction system is supposed to encompass a wide range of virtues, and I felt that one—honesty—was missing. Candor was my somewhat late addition.

Divergent takes place in a future Chicago. How did you decide to place your novel in a real setting vs. an entirely created world?  Have there been pluses or minuses to having to stick within the geography of the city?

I originally didn’t plan for Divergent to take place in an actual city, but after the rough draft I discovered that I, as a writer, found it more compelling when it was grounded in a real place. That real place became Chicago when I realized that I had already described it, in the complex system of above-ground trains that always seem to be running, and the immense building that would become the Sears Tower in my manuscript. I haven’t found many minuses to sticking to a city’s geography. Sometimes I have to do research, but even that helps me to get to know the city that I have lived so close to all my life, which is a definite plus. I also give myself the freedom to step away from reality when I need to, because the book is set so far in the future that the city has changed a lot from modern Chicago, and that allows me some creative liberties. 

Read the rest of the interview at Source