I started as a playwright. Any sort of scriptwriting you do helps you hone your story. You have the same demands of creating a plot, developing relatable characters and keeping your audience invested in your story. My books are basically structured like three-act plays. Suzanne Collins Read Quote
If I took the 40 years of my dad talking to me about war and battles and taking me to battlefields and distilled it down into one question, it would probably be the idea of the necessary or unnecessary war. Suzanne Collins Read Quote
The Underland Chronicles’ is an unnecessary war for a very long time until it becomes a necessary war, because there have been all these points where people could have gotten off the train but they didn’t; they just kept moving the violence forward until it’s gone out of control. Suzanne Collins Read Quote
I have a pretty big TV background, and I have clocked so many hours in so many writers’ rooms over the years. Suzanne Collins Read Quote
Any time you read a book and get attached to the characters, to me it’s always a shock when it goes from page to screen and it’s not exactly what was in my head or what I was imagining it should be. Suzanne Collins Read Quote
When I was young, I was trained in stage fighting and rapier and dagger for several years. Suzanne Collins Read Quote
I wrote ‘The Hunger Games’ in a chair, like a La-Z-Boy chair, next to my bed. I had an office, but my kids sort of took it over. Suzanne Collins Read Quote
There’s a basis for the war, historically, in the ‘Hunger Games,’ which would be the third servile war, which was Spartacus’ war, where you have a man who is a slave who is then turned into a gladiator who broke out of the gladiator school and led a rebellion and then became the face of the war. Suzanne Collins Read Quote
If I have to pick one story that most influenced ‘The Hunger Games,’ it would be the Greek myth of Theseus, which I read when I was about 8 years old. In punishment for past deeds, Athens periodically had to send seven youths and seven maidens to a labyrinth. In the maze was this Minotaur, and it would eat them. Suzanne Collins Read Quote