At The New Yorker, Laura Miller reviews The Hunger Games, a series of young adult novels set in a society in which teenagers are annually drafted to take part in a gladiator-like contest. But more broadly, Miller explores the genre of dystopian fiction and its appeal to teenagers. She attributes it partially to teenagers’ ability to identify with the powerless, since they are at a time in their life when they desire autonomy but are not granted it:
It operates like a fable or a myth, a story in which outlandish and extravagant figures and events serve as conduits for universal experiences. Dystopian fiction may be the only genre written for children that’s routinely less didactic than its adult counterpart. It’s not about persuading the reader to stop something terrible from happening—it’s about what’s happening, right this minute, in the stormy psyche of the adolescent reader.
Miller notes that the interior logic of The Hunger Games does not hold together unless you regard it as a reflection of the adolescent mind.
Of course I am thinking about this subject because of my decision to revise my dystopian novel All We Ever Wanted (Was Everything) as a young adult series. (I’ve since learned there has been a novel of that title published weekly, so I will have change the title — right now, I’m thinking I’ll call it The Zones. It’s too bad because the thread of narrative in the Bauhaus song was such an inspiration to me.) I began writing the novel when I was nineteen, just out of adolescence myself, so I feel like it has the rawness of my teenage years in it — and also the rawness of my relative inexperience as a writer.
The two main characters, I admit, are a bit Mary Sue — idealized and stand-ins for aspects of my personality. (Much like the Mouse and the Minx in “Minx Mouse Monster.”) I didn’t realize it as I was writing it, but Cat, the privileged young woman with prophetic dreams, represents my desire for being a near-perfect person. (The point of the Endowment in the novel was to help society become perfect by privileging those whose genes mark them as “perfectable.”) She is pretty, smart, and nice — a little naive, too, but of course that changes. Nina, the volatile magic user, is a femme fatale — and also hot-tempered, mercurial, often mean. She’s something of my shadow self. Her flaws are mine writ large.
So what I need to do is not so much change these characters, or the other characters — they fit almost exactly the “outlandish and extravagant figures” that Miller describes — but make them more into people. I also need to gather up the narrative and start making sense out of it, giving it stronger structure that has three acts. I kept changing what I was doing when I was writing it — first it was going to be a short story about Cat (I was inspired by the novella version of “Beggars in Spain” by Nancy Kress), then it was going to be a series of short stories set in the same universe. I even toyed with the idea of making it a comic book series at one point.
I have so much more experience with writing with intention now that this will be something I can do. It also will be fun. I’ve missed these people and this world.
