Nicole Abadee
“You don’t need discipline if you really, really like it.” So says Veronica Roth, American author of the stratospherically successful Divergent science fiction trilogy, when asked how she has managed to write 13 books in 15 years. We are speaking over Zoom just before the publication of her latest book, Seek the Traitor’s Son; Roth is in Chicago, where she lives, and I am in Sydney.
Divergent was released in 2011, followed by Insurgent in 2012 and Allegiant in 2013. Roth has sold more than 45 million books worldwide, and they have been translated into 48 languages. The movies of the trilogy have grossed $US765 million at the box office. It’s an extraordinary feat for a self-described introvert, who grew up in Illinois, the youngest of three children.
The young Roth read anything she could get her hands on – Judy Blume, Baby-Sitters Club books, and especially sci-fi and fantasy, which her dad and brother introduced her to. At 11, she started writing her own fantasy books, “Lord of the Rings rip-offs” because she had just seen the film. She didn’t consider writing as a potential career – “I thought of it as fun – a source of joy and escape,” she tells me.
After school, she enrolled at Northwestern University in Illinois in a creative writing course. In class students had to listen in silence as their classmates critiqued their stories, which taught Roth a lesson that has stayed with her: “If someone who’s engaging deeply with your work doesn’t understand what you’re trying to do, it’s because you didn’t do it right. You have to stop being defensive and learn to grow.”
Roth wrote Divergent over the winter break of her final year in college, returning to a draft she had written four years before, at 18 (though she made significant changes.) Her agent submitted it to publishers, and what happened next is something most aspiring writers can only dream of. Her agent called to tell her that she had secured a six-figure, three-book deal.
She was 23, and still at college. How did she feel? “Happy. Excited. Scared. The happy part was that I wanted to get published. But the level of intensity was high,” she says. “I assumed the book would be published in the normal way, but the offer was really high – not to be crass, but it was a lot of money. I just freaked out.”
In the Divergent series, set in a dystopian Chicago, people are divided into five factions, and they must choose, at the age of 16, which to belong to. Tris Prior, the heroine, chooses Dauntless (the brave). Inevitably, Roth is often asked (including by me) which faction she would be. “Erudite,” she says, “Because I am a curious person. I love learning. All I want to do is read books.”
The success of the trilogy was phenomenal. Allegiant set a record at publisher Harper Collins for a record number of pre-orders – almost half a million. The books were made into three movies which came out in 2014 (Divergent), 2015 (Insurgent) and 2016 (Allegiant) and starred actors such as Kate Winslet and Zoë Kravitz. Roth was still not yet 30. It is difficult to imagine the life-changing impact of that kind of commercial success on someone so young. When I ask her to describe it, she thinks carefully before answering.
“It changed the course of everything,” Roth concedes. “The financial stability was huge, and also the career stability. When you have success like that, publishers will keep taking a risk on you even if your next book doesn’t sell as well. Plus, I met a bunch of famous people. It set me up for an interesting work life, which I am grateful for.”
It wasn’t all smooth sailing. What Roth was not prepared for was the wave of negativity – some of it deeply personal – that came her way. Many readers were unhappy with how the trilogy ended, and she received emails asking her to change it. She even received death threats. She says now, “I expected people to be sad, but I didn’t expect it to get so intense.”
There was also more general criticism of the trilogy. As Roth explains. “When a book series is that successful, it starts to reach people who aren’t the target audience, who want to read what’s in the zeitgeist. And those people didn’t like Divergent.” She had (and has) no problem with negative reviews which engaged with the material, but found it more difficult to cope with the “this writer’s an idiot” – type critique, or false assumptions about her intentions. “I stored all the negativity – I absorbed it like a sponge,” she admits.
That plus the previous success of the Divergent trilogy made it difficult to write the next books – Carve the Mark (released in 2017) and The Fates Divide (2018), a duology set in space. “The expectations were high, and I felt that no matter how it did, it was going to be disappointing – and it was.”
In 2020, she released her first adult novel, Chosen Ones. Had she always intended to write for adults? Roth responds with a smile. “No. I never had a plan. I just used my instincts.” In 2023, she released Arch-Conspirator, a sci-fi retelling of the Sophocles tragedy Antigone, then the Curse Bearer series (two books) based on Slavic folklore. None of her other books have been as successful as the Divergent trilogy, but that doesn’t matter to Roth, who just loves the writing process – “If you have one book that’s lightning in a bottle, you don’t expect any other to be like that.”
Meanwhile, since 2020, she had been secretly writing her latest novel, Seek the Traitor’s Son, a dystopian fantasy set in a world threatened by a deadly fever that blesses those who survive it with unique gifts. One group, the Talusar, worship the fever, the other, the Cedre, do not. A prophecy has decreed that Elegy, a Cedre (the heroine), will confront Rava, an evil Talusar general, and one people will emerge victorious. There is also an appealing love interest named Theren, whom Roth describes as an emblem of “non-toxic masculinity”.
In the acknowledgements, Roth says that she had no intention of publishing what she describes as “a big, romantic, indulgent, genre-straddling story.”
Why not? And why “indulgent”? “After the criticism of Divergent, I felt the need to prove myself, to make each book smarter. I decided I would just write this fun thing on the side.” She wrote it over five years, through 10 drafts. The idea of the fever was inspired by COVID-19 – Roth talks about the collective grief we experienced and says, “I wanted to make it more meaningful. I thought, ‘What if this Fever was even worse than COVID, but if you survived it, you developed superpowers?’”
That, she says, is one of the things she loves about science fiction – on the one hand, it is escapist, but, on the other, “by creating a layer of distance between you and something serious, it allows you to examine that more closely. You can explore social and political issues that otherwise feel too close to look at.” Here, she wanted to explore people’s different responses to COVID. It is also a love story. “At its core, it’s about two people processing difficult things that have happened to them, trying to experience grace for each other.”
She does not see it as romantasy, that rapidly growing genre, because, “Romantasy happens when the love story is the highest priority of the narrative. In Seek the Traitor’s Son the romance facilitates the plot – but the plot does not facilitate the romance.”
In the last two years Roth has spoken out about the deployment by the US government of ICE in Chicago. I ask for her views on the extent to which writers should involve themselves in politics.
She responds thoughtfully. “I would prefer my work to do the talking (there is often an anti-authoritarian theme in her books), but I’m also a human being living in this country. I talked about ICE this year because they were in my city, harassing my neighbours. I felt the need to say, ‘What is happening here is not OK. I’m going to protest’.
“We all go to protests now,” she says. “That’s how a lot of us are living our lives.”
Veronica Roth’s Seek The Traitor’s Son (Tor Australia) is out May 12.
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