katniss
Why Henry James Should Rewrite The Hunger Games
(If he wasn’t dead).
Dear Suzanne Collins,
I really love The Hunger Games Trilogy. I love the world of Panem, the concept of the districts and the Capitol and the Games, and the social commentary THG makes on our current society of laziness, wastefulness, obsession with reality television, and disregard for future generations.
I love that you’ve created a series with a girl protagonist that guys are interested in reading too.
I love that you took the model of female-protagonist-two-male-love-interests-sci/fi-fantasy-YA-series and spun it around to be compelling, unique, and full of the right kinds of moral messages: Be brave. Look out for your family and friends. Vanity isn’t important. Stand up for what you believe in.
I love that you’ve eclipsed some of Twilight’s popularity. PUN INTENDED.
I love that you’ve written books that translate amazingly to the screen, resulting in one fantastic movie and what I’m sure will be two more equally fantastic ones.
And I love that, like me, you’re a Connecticut girl.
But Suzanne, despite how much I love you, and The Hunger Games, I just have to say:
You are not a very good writer.
I will forgive you because you studied Drama and Telecommunications in college and grad school, not English or Creative Writing. I’m actually really jealous of the writing success you’ve had (not only did Collins write for 90s Nickelodeon shows like Clarissa Explains It All, The Mystery Files of Shelby Woo, Little Bear, and Oswald; she also already had written a bestselling series called The Underland Chronicles before she wrote The Hunger Games. Whaaaat?)
But you really break every rule in the book. Last night I read that Katniss said something “icily”. Stephen King and I aren’t even dead and we turned in our graves.
I wonder, why did you decide to write in the present tense? I guess because you wanted the action—and there is a lot of it—to be in the moment? I understand if that’s why you chose it, but it’s really awkward and distracting throughout all three books. I think you have a hard time changing scenes from the first person present, so we end up getting a lot of description of Katniss showering, brushing her teeth, going to bed, doing her hair, between days and scenes… yaaaaawn.
Also, I sometimes don’t feel like the severity of the situations and events are described with serious enough language. Every time someone gets killed in THG, whether in the arena or elsewhere, it doesn’t really phase me. Oh, someone got stabbed in the neck? That’s cool. Nbd.
I do love all of your characters. I think your ability to give names to things rivals JK Rowling’s, and I love that all of the main characters are good people who you want to root for. But aside from that, I find a lot of them sort of one-note (except Haymitch. He fascinates me. And maybe Finnick). But Cinna, Peeta, Prim, Gale, and Rue (but we’ll excuse Rue cause she’s a kid) are so blindly good that I don’t, at times, find them believable. They need a little more depth, especially Peeta and Gale. And don’t even get me started on the prep team.
Katniss does have some internal struggles—I really like that she took a long time, for example, to consider whether she would be the Mockingjay—but every time she breaks down crying because she feels like this person or that person or this district is dead because of her, I wanna be like, “Calm yourself, Katniss. I mean, you had a part in it, but obviously it’s mostly the Capitol’s fault. You didn’t put the gun/arrow/bomb to their head”. Her modesty and empathy are just a little over the top, and she should be more logical than that. I believe that someone could feel like that, but I don’t believe Katniss feels that way.
I read book one first, then saw the movie, then read the second and third book, and a lot of times I have to imagine the very dynamic Jennifer Lawrence doing the things that you describe Katniss doing. Only then, when I imagined Jennifer, did the actions seem more believable.
This is where I think Henry James should come in. If he wasn’t deader than Seneca Crane, you guys would make a great team. I read The Turn of the Screw a couple of months ago, and Daisy Miller for a course last year, and he’s a master at everything you seem to struggle with: His writing is fluid, clean, and detailed. He digs right down into the psychology of his female protagonists, to the point that reading her thought processes feels like you’re having them yourself. His secondary characters are extremely dimensional. And he can scare the bejesus out of you even when something not-so-intense is happening: I literally got chills the first time that Quint appeared on the roof in Turn of the Screw. Think of all of the missed opportunities for suspense in THG!
But you know what you’re good at that Henry James isn’t? Writing action. I mean, come on Hank, there’s only so much time I can spend in your protagonist’s head, thinking things over and over and over again. What’s gonna HAPPEN!? James could write the story and all of the internal monologue, while you, Suzanne Collins, tell him what’s gonna happen next. It’d be perfect!
And then, I think, The Hunger Games could be 50% as good as Harry Potter, as opposed to 10%. (Twilight is at about .0000000000000001%).
May the Odds Be Ever in Your Favor,
Livia
©Livia Nelson & Yeah Write! 2012
Is she reading Order of the Phoenix?Jennifer Lawrence reads (on the set of The Hunger Games).
WHAT is she reading!?!?
The girl playing a girl from a book reads a book… infinityyy
Katniss Everdeen, A New Type of Female Warrior [NY Times]
Interesting contextualization of the movie, if a bit over-analytical/serious for what it is, in my opinion. The gender roles or lack thereof aren’t what’s interesting to me about The Hunger Games, so much as the social commentary and cautionary tale aspects. But this is still interesting, and I agree about Jennifer Lawrence being miscast (although I still love her).
GUESS WHO’S GOING TO THE LONDON PREMIERE OF THE HUNGER GAMES TOMORROW!?
MEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!
So I listened to the entirety of Hunger Games on my drive down to North Carolina last weekend. I’m trying to read more popular and current bestsellers so that I can be more in the know, especially now that I’m not taking 4 English classes (see: last semester).
Anyway, I’ve been thinking about it for the last couple of days and thought I’d share some things I liked and didn’t about it.
Liked:
- The setting. I love me some futuristic world building. But what I especially liked about Panam is that it’s believable—even though it’s the future, there are a lot of primitive elements to Katniss’ world, like the fact that she has to hunt and that oil is precious. I only wish the history and world had been fleshed out a little more (though I’m wondering if it’s done in the second and third books?).
- The food descriptions. You just can’t have a book titled “The Hunger Games” that doesn’t focus on food a lot.
- The names. While they’re unique names, they’re not absurd, and they compliment the mood of the story well: Prim, Haymidge, Kato, Thresh, Synna. And she doesn’t overdo it, using more traditional/”our world” names like Gayle, Effie, Portia, “The Capital”, the districts, and so on. Not everything had an over the top originality/weirdness.
- Katniss in general. She’s a badass character, and someone to be respected. She stands up for what is right, she’s independent and self-sufficient, and she’ll do anything for the people she loves. These types of people should be our literary heroes. And she has believable flaws, too: she’s mad at her mother, confused about her feelings, makes some mistakes in the arena. When I think about her in comparison to, ahem, some other popular female heroines in other popular YA scifi/fantasy books, it makes me feel better.
- While I wasn’t convinced about most of the love story (I’ll get to that), one thing did make a lot of sense to me: that maybe the reason Katniss didn’t realize her feelings for Gayle (or Peeta) is because she’s only 16. Not only is she in the early stages of coming into her sexuality, but she’s been to busy to sit around and dwell about why she feels certain ways about boys (the way that many of us have, haha!). I’m not sure if Collins intended that, but that’s what I read it as.
Didn’t like:
- Too many cliches. If one more character’s dialogue contained a switch from present to past tense when talking about someone dead (“Roo is a great girl. I mean, she was”), I was going to scream. And I don’t know what everyone is talking about, but I’ve sucked blood off of cuts I’ve had and had nosebleeds that have gone into my mouth and so on, and blood does NOT taste metallic.
- Adverb usage. I HATE ADVERBS. “I drank thirstily.” REALLY? When does someone NOT drink thirstily?? We KNOW she’s thirsty, she’s been talking about it for like 8 million pages! And “thirstily” is such a ridiculous sounding word that it takes away from the severity of the situation in that scene. Rrrrr. There were others but I can’t remember them.
- Katniss’ blindess about Peeta. Sorry, but I’m just not convinced. Maybe it’s because I seem to have a 6th sense about people liking other people, but how could a girl so smart as Katniss seems to be NOT see that Peeta liked her? Not just in the arena, but before? I just feel like she would know.
- The characters. I mean, they were likable. But they could have been developed a LOT more, and I felt they were a little stereotypical. Haymidge reminded me too much of Madeye Moody and Peeta was the archetypical blonde cutie pie sweetheart boy. Kato would have been far more interesting if he had a weakness or any compassion for anything. I also think the game makers should have been actual characters instead of just a nebulous blob of people, so that the reader has someone specific to hate when all of the terrible things happen in the area.
- The narrative structure. How do books that start with someone waking up even get publishing deals anymore? Literally everything Katniss experiences is described chronologically back to back. I don’t need to hear about her falling asleep. I don’t need to hear about the process of putting her makeup on. There’s a liiiittle bit of flashing back in the beginning, but how much more thrilling would it have been to start the book when she gets up into the arena?? Then, when there’s all that down time—when she’s wounded in the pond, when she’s lying around in the cave, and so on—we could have had flashbacks to the outside world. I would have been SO much more intrigued and read so much faster (well, I was listening so I couldn’t really control that, but still) if I’d been wanting to know more about just what the hell this chick was doing and where she was. There’s a little bit of this in the beginning when she’s up in the woods talking about the Reaping—I was like, wtf is the Reaping??—but more would’ve really upped the pacing. And then we could have had flashbacks to fill in the back story. She sees Roo? Flashback to Prim. Talks to Peeta? Flashback to Gayle. Shoots something with her bow? Flashback to her dad. I’m biased toward nonlinear narrative structures, and they can be done very seamlessly.
Disclaimers: I’ve only read the first one, so things I was left wondering about might be left to be explained. I listened to it on audio, and I feel like the people who read it always make it sort of corny, especially the dialogue. Sometimes they read it with inflections that I wouldn’t imagine were I reading those same words. (And so also excuse me if I spell names wrong!) And finally, I’m REALLY critical. As an English major, I’ve read classic after classic after classic, great after great after great. And then, as a Creative Writing minor, I pick apart not only the stuff my classmates write, but fantastic pieces of writing that have been published. So what I have to say about The Hunger Games shouldn’t be taken as what the majority of people might think.
