Veronica Roth's Blog, page 3

Hello!

Today is a very exciting day: Arch-Conspirator, my futuristic retelling of the Greek tragedy Antigone, is out today!

Did you read Antigone in high school? In my high school class, we read the trio of plays together: Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus, and Antigone. For those who don’t remember: Oedipus is the guy who unknowingly kills his own father and marries his own mother in a fulfillment of a tragic fate. Antigone is his daughter, the outcome of this so-called “cursed” union. In her play, her brother Polyneikes dies, and her uncle Kreon, the king, declares that anyone who gives Polyneikes a proper burial will be put to death. Antigone does it anyway. She suffers the consequences. (Again: it’s a tragedy.)

Arch-Conspirator follows that same rough outline, but instead of being the product of Oedipus’s relationship with his mother, she bears a different kind of curse: she was born with unedited genes. According to her society’s mysticism surrounding gene-editing, that means Antigone has no soul. It’s my version of the “curse” she bears.

Antigone is typically presented as a kind of ass-kicking feminist heroine, defying a system that devalues her. Those elements are certainly in the play. But what struck me when I first reread it to prepare for this retelling was Antigone’s vulnerability. She’s been told from birth that her life isn’t worth as much as other people’s because of the “curse” that she bears. In Oedipus at Colonus, she communicates some of that when she says she’d rather be buried with her father than continue on without him. And in Antigone, she’s quick to discard her life in favor of giving her brother proper burial rites.

In Arch-Conspirator, I wanted to explore this self-destructive tendency a little more than the play is able to. At one point in my retelling, Antigone tells her brother, “Sometimes I stare into the future and I don’t like anything I see.” Her struggle in the story is with how to give her life meaning—not the meaning that other people assign to it, but the meaning that she assigns to it. (“I could become something greater than my body simply by allowing myself to use it.”)

This play is a tragedy, yes. But it’s also about a young woman navigating the claustrophobic space that society allows her to the best of her ability, and finding a way to do something powerful despite being powerless.

So yeah, Antigone kicks ass. But maybe in a different way than you’d think.

I hope you love her. I know I do.

This week I’ll be on tour in Tampa, FL; Nashville, TN; Greenville, SC; and Austin, TX. More information about each stop is on this page here.

If you can’t make it out to any of those events, you can order a signed copy (before February 22nd!) here at Bookmarks.

Thank you so much to my team at Tor Books in the US and Titan Books in the UK for putting this book together and getting it out in the world! And to my editor Lindsey Hall for helping me shape it from the start. What a wonderful process this has been. <3

V

US Cover Art: Pablo Hurtado de Mendoza

Preorder Print Art: Nash Weerasekera

UK Cover Art: Julia Lloyd

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Before I get to the deleted scenes, a reminder that I’ll be going on tour this month for the release of Arch-Conspirator, my far future Antigone retelling that comes out on February 21st. If you preorder it, you can get a very cool art print. If you go to one of my tour stops, you’ll get a cool bit of swag— and a signed book, of course.

February 21st: Tampa, FL.

February 22nd: Nashville, TN.

February 23rd: Greenville, SC. (Just me, but with cocktails.)

February 26th: Austin, TX.

I honestly didn’t think I had any Divergent deleted material left after all the special editions, but I had forgotten to check my Scrivener file. There’s still not much— I don’t generally have a lot of deleted scenes, and what I do have is often just a slightly different iteration of what ended up in the books. But there is a little, and I’m excited to share with you!

Just to situate you a little bit: Insurgent came out in 2012, which was a particular moment in books. Basically, YA was hot hot hot, paranormal romance was petering out, and dystopia was at its peak. The pressure for me to deliver was high, and the timeline was tight.

I wrote a draft pretty quickly, and though there was some tumult in the editorial process, one note stuck out to me: my draft had Tris completely isolated, right from the start of the book. I think that’s because I was experiencing a kind of anxious paralysis, having Tris avoid decisions because I wasn’t sure what to decide, myself. To address this problem in revisions, I kept Tris’s grief, but I saved the divisions in her relationships for a little bit later in the book, and I dug a little deeper into how the characters would actually relate to each other, beyond surface-level drama.

These deleted bits are relics of that old draft. Tris and Tobias begin the second installment of their story in conflict: he’s just told her that he loves her, and she hasn’t said it back, and it’s creating all kinds of tension for them right from the start.

Also worth noting: I love a dramatic haircut almost as much as I love an arena fight.

I wake to the sound of buzzing, and swat at the air around my head. Sometimes bees find their way into the Amity sleeping quarters, and after getting stung on the hand last week, I am adding them to the list of reasons why I hate it here.

The buzzing doesn’t stop, and stays at a constant volume, which means it is not a bee. I open my eyes and see the faction symbols drawn in black ink on Tobias’s spine, Dauntless at the top and Amity at the bottom. He holds a pair of electric clippers to his head, which explains the buzzing.

I sit up and watch him. I should have recognized the sound. My father cut my brother’s hair every two weeks, and my mother did the same for my father, so I woke to the buzz of clippers every second Wednesday and Thursday. No one in Abnegation cuts their own hair.

I feel tears coming, and as always, these days, they seem to have no connection to how I actually feel. I blink them away, not wanting Tobias to see me cry for no reason. And as quickly as they came, they are gone.

He brings the clippers too close to his ear, and nicks the skin. Air hisses between his teeth as he turns the clippers off and leans close to the mirror to survey the damage. A bright spot of blood appears on the top of his ear, but it seems to be minor. I stand, my bare feet sticking to the floorboards, and walk into the bathroom.

“I’ve been doing this for two years on my own,” he says, “so you would think I wouldn’t cut myself anymore.”

I pick up the clippers and turn them back on. My mother never taught me how to do this, but it isn’t difficult to figure out. I stand on my tiptoes and bend his ear forward to protect it, running the clippers over his hair in straight lines, going over the uneven places at the back of his head.

His eyes catch mine in the mirror, and he has a strange look on his face, eyebrows furrowed, mouth faintly turned up at the corners. I open my mouth to ask him why he’s looking at me like that, and then I realize.

In Abnegation, offering to cut a man’s hair in place of his parents means behaving like a spouse. It’s the closest thing to a courtship ritual Abnegation has.

I sink back onto my heels, my eyes wide with fear, and switch the clippers off. The faint smile disappears from Tobias’s face, and he takes the clippers from me, a little too roughly.

“You don’t have to look so terrified,” he says. “I know it doesn’t mean anything.”

“I do not look terrified,” I say, scowling at his reflection. “I was just surprised. You know, that I didn’t remember…what that meant.”

“Right,” he says, rolling his eyes. “Just get out, Tris.”

“Don’t be mean,” I say.

“I’ll stop being mean when you stop being a liar,” he says.

I stare at him for a second, my blood running hot with anger, and he stares defiantly back. Then I turn and walk out of the room.

But it’s hard to stay angry, because if he knew how much of a liar I was, he would do more than roll his eyes at me.

ACCIDENTAL COURTSHIP RITUAL is my new band name.

All right, here’s the breakup:

I do not say anything, and neither does he. He turns and walks toward the elevators, and I follow him, because I know that’s what he wants. We stand in the elevator, side by side, in silence. I hear ringing in my ears and blame it on the serum, but I think it’s more that everything is about to fall apart and I know it.

The elevator sinks to the ground floor, and I start to shake. It starts with my hands, but travels to my arms and my chest, until little shudders go through my entire body and I have no way to stop them. I follow him into the lobby and we stand between the elevators, right above the symbol of Candor, the uneven scales. That symbol is also drawn on the middle of his spine.

He doesn’t look at me for a long time. He stands with his arms crossed and his head down until I can’t stand it anymore, until I feel like I might scream. I should say something, but I don’t know what to say. I can’t apologize, because I only told the truth, and I can’t change the truth into a lie. I can’t give excuses.

“So you shot Will.”

“Yeah,” I say. “Those nightmares I was having…they were about him.”

And this isn’t something you felt like telling me?” His voice is quiet and under control. That’s good. Maybe he isn’t as angry as I thought.

“It wasn’t something I felt like telling anyone,” I say.

“Here I was thinking I wasn’t just ‘anyone’ to you,” he says. He laughs harshly. “Guess not.”

He isn’t yelling, but he is on the verge of it, his voice quaking with the effort of keeping it under control. He glares at me, and in his stare is an accusation, but I don’t know what he’s accusing me of. Lying? Keeping things from him? Murdering one of my friends? Not being in love with him?

I don’t know where the anger comes from, because a few seconds ago, I was terrified of losing him. But my face is boiling hot and the creature that has been clawing at my chest since Will died gnashes its teeth. “I’m sorry, was I inconsiderate? How terrible of me, not to think of your feelings when both my parents are dead and I can’t sleep without nightmares about armies of mindless Dauntless and almost drowning in a glass box and shooting my friend in the head!”

“Don’t even pretend that I am being petty,” he snaps. “You know as well as I do that this is just the start of the things that you refuse to tell me. Of the things that you lie to me about.”

He is right. I do know. Anger drains from my body abruptly. It isn’t just Will. It’s all the faces that haunt me. It’s what happened to my parents. What the Erudite did to me. What my nightmares are about every night. How I really feel about him. How I really feel about anything. I keep it all inside because it’s the mortar keeping me from collapsing.

“I’ve been deluding myself,” he says, “because I thought the reason you couldn’t kill me that day—the reason you almost died for me—was that you loved me. And that maybe you couldn’t admit it yet because you’re young and your parents just died and it just wasn’t the time. But that’s not why you did it.”

“I did it because it was you. I couldn’t bear the thought of killing—“

“Because it was me. Right.” He snorts. “I could have been anyone. It could have been anyone in that control room, it had nothing to do with me. You did it because you believed it was the right thing. Out of…duty.”

“That isn’t true!” I shudder again, but this time more with anger than fear. “I killed people. I killed one of my best friends. But I couldn’t kill you! What does that tell you?”

“It tells me that you don’t have the stomach to shoot an unarmed person in the head,” he says. “But that you can shoot people who are shooting at you. That’s all. That’s all it tells me.”

“I don’t understand why this is so crucial for you,” I say. “I couldn’t shoot you, so I didn’t. It was one moment, one single moment. And every other day I’ve been with you, I have done everything because I cared about you. Don’t all those days count for more than one instant?”

“No,” he says. “God, Tris! Sacrificing yourself for me…it’s meaningless if you don’t love me, it’s empty.” He lets out a frustrated yell. “The only reason I could tell you how I felt…the only reason I trusted you—and it’s just a delusion of mine.”

“I did the best I could. I saved your life. It is not my fault that you told me you loved me because of something I did. It’s not my fault!”

“I am not saying it’s your fault,” he says, quietly. “I am telling you why this is over.”

Over. The word takes up all the space in my head, space that was just full of arguments and excuses and reasons a moment ago. I stare blankly at him like I’ve forgotten what it means. And then it breaks into me and drives a crack into me.

“Over,” I say. “You…” I breathe too quickly, like I’ve just been running. Vaguely, I wonder why. “You’re breaking up with me because, after a few weeks of dating, I’m not in love with you?”

“I let you see everything about me. And now I find out I can’t trust you? That I barely know you?” He sounds perfectly steady now. His arms fall to his sides. Resigned. “You’re impenetrable, Beatrice. And that won’t change.”

“Impenetrable,” I say, because I hope that saying it will make it sink in.

“I mean, look at you,” he says. “You’re arguing with me about the logic of what I’m saying. You’re angry because you don’t think my reasons make sense. You aren’t emotional. You aren’t heartbroken. You’ll be just fine without me.”

“I…” I feel like my brain is stuck in one place, on one word—over.

“Good-bye, Beatrice.”

Tobias: kind of an asshole in this version! Geez.

Lastly, because I don’t want to leave you with such strife, here was their original reconciliation. It’s the same as in the final version, with I think one paragraph different. It’s interesting to see, though, how I stumbled into a scene that I still really like as a result of some choices that I ultimately really didn’t like. That’s one of the amazing things about writing: making the wrong choices is sometimes the only way to get to the right ones.

I pick up the bar of soap and turn it in my hands until my skin is coated with white lather. I kneel next to him and run my hands over his feet and ankles, slowly, making sure I get everything. It feels good to do something, to clean something, and to have my hands on him again.

We get water all over the bathroom floor as we both splash it on our legs to get the soap off. We get water all over ourselves, and it makes me cold, but I shiver and I don’t care. He gets a towel and starts to dry my hands.

“I don’t…” I sound like I am being strangled. “My family is…they’re all dead, or traitors, I don’t…how can I…”

I am not making any sense. The sobs take over my body, my mind, everything. He gathers me to him, and bath water soaks my legs. His hold is tight. I listen to his heartbeat and, after awhile, find a way to let the rhythm calm me.

“I’ll be your family now,” he says.

And it is simple.

I don’t know what I was so afraid of. I thought that telling him I loved him would give him power over me, maybe, or that I would want to take it back. I was afraid to trust him with something so personal as my devotion. But instead, saying it is just an acknowledgement of what already exists between us, and the gift of telling him, finally, that I trust him.

I am his, and he is mine, and it has been that way all along.

“I love you,” I say.

He stares at me. I wait with my hands clutching my water-soaked knees for stability as he considers his response.

He frowns at me. “Say it again.”

“Tobias,” I say, “I love you.”

His skin is slippery with water and he smells like sweat and my shirt sticks to his arms when he slides them around me. He presses his face to my neck and kisses me right above the collarbone, kisses my cheek, kisses my lips.

“I love you too,” he says.

Ultimately, I know I made the right call— Tobias doesn’t actually seem like the sort of person to get that bent out of shape about not hearing exactly what he wants to hear when he wants to hear it…from someone who’s just endured some terrible shit, no less. They still have conflict in the final version of Insurgent, but it feels more organic to their experience of each other, the growing pains of learning to communicate even in the midst of trauma. Not this more petty, surface-level stuff that would make more sense if they were, you know, in high school band instead of fighting for their lives, or something.

I’ll keep digging around for deleted scenes, but I hope you enjoyed this! <4

-V

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Whew. I meant to send a newsletter last month but it felt like November just melted away. Before December also melts, I have a 2022 wrap up for you.

My Stuff

Poster Girl came out this year! Hurrah! And some amazing things happened with it. It got two starred reviews, an array of amazing blurbs, and it was featured in the New York Times and People magazine. And in the UK, it was a Sunday Times bestseller! Hot damn!

I also went on tour and finally got to meet with readers in person, which was really lovely. Thank you to everyone who bought the book, came out to meet me, or otherwise supported me in 2022. I so appreciate it.

And you don’t have to wait long for another story from me— Arch-Conspirator, a far future retelling of the Greek tragedy Antigone, comes out on February 23rd!

You can preorder it here and receive an exclusive (and awesome) art print!

Some Recs

I made a little video of my favorite SFF reads of 2022 here.

But let me recap them quickly for you:

The “Alternate Universe” Group: White Cat by Holly Black, The Women Could Fly by Megan Giddings, The Atlas Six by Olivie Blake

These are all books that are set on Earth, but with magic. This alters the way each world functions in profound ways. The Women Could Fly is on the more “dystopian” end of the spectrum, whereas The Atlas Six is more fantastical, with White Cat a little closer to the latter. White Cat is an oldie but a goodie, published in 2010, but this was my first encounter with it and it holds up— it’s concerned with a kind of criminal underworld, and it’s YA, whereas the other two are adult.

The “Big Science Fiction Universe” Group: The Immortality Thief by Taran Hunt, The Stars Undying by Emery Robin, and Light From Uncommon Stars by Ryka Aoki

If you want fast, fun action (without losing emotional heft), go with The Immortality Thief— it’s heist-y. If you want to really dive into some gripping world-building, go with The Stars Undying (Cleopatra…in spaaaace!). And if you want something that plays with both science fiction and fantasy (there’s deals with the devil AND a donut shop run by intergalactic travelers in this one), go with Light From Uncommon Stars.

The “Future Tech” Group: Upgrade by Blake Crouch and The World Gives Way by Marissa Levien

Upgrade is a thriller for people who like science fiction, and science fiction for people who like thrillers—especially the “shady government” kind. The World Gives Way is technically a cat and mouse style detective-y story, but it’s set on a generation spaceship that’s catastrophically breaking apart, which…complicates matters. To say the least. (I think I technically read it last year, along with Light from Uncommon Stars, but WHAT IS TIME! TIME IS MEANINGLESS! ET CETERA!)

And Last But Not Least: Spirits Abroad by Zen Cho

Did I read this in 2022 or 2021? OH WELL. This is a collection of short stories that is perfect for a cozy day when you want to read in short bursts. Or any other day.

Non-Book Recs

WATCH SEVERANCE! JUST DO IT! I DON’T WANT TO HAVE TO TELL YOU THIS AGAIN!

I’ve been behind with anything on Disney Plus (a gal can’t subscribe to EVERYTHING, and I’m sort of off the superhero train), but a friend of mine pressured me to watch Andor and I did and it was great. My favorite Star Wars movie is Rogue One— that’s right, I said it— and the show struck a similar tone, which really worked for me.

Also good: Everything Everywhere All at Once (duh), and I discovered Killjoys this year, which was a delight.

Share your own recs in the comments, if you’d like, and otherwise have a safe and warm and happy end-of-2022!

V

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She was on the Delegation’s propaganda posters when she was young. She fled when the Delegation was toppled, but she was caught, then sentenced to prison along with all its other favored children. Ten years later, an old enemy presents her with a deal: find a missing girl, and she can earn her freedom.

But Sonya’s family was full of secrets, and secrets can be dangerous.

The missing girl is the biggest secret of all.

I started writing this book in October 2020, in a sunny home office in Los Angeles, across the desk from my husband. I had just decided to take a six month break from social media to write it.

My main character, Sonya, had lived most of her life observed by a mandatory implant in her eye known as an Insight. But she was fond of the Insight, as I’m fond of my smartphone. It opened up the world for her. Answered her questions all throughout her childhood, like another parent. Played music and movies for her. Connected her to other people. And beyond all those things, it rewarded her for even the smallest good behavior. Posture. Manners. Stillness.

But when the uprising destroyed the old regime, the Insight went silent. No more rewards, no more connection, no more of anything.

            “You have my sympathy. Everyone else in this city has the option of getting that thing removed, free of charge. But you don’t.” His head tilts. “I suppose I shouldn’t assume that you would, if you could.”

He folds his hands over his knee.

            “Would you?”

            Sonya doesn’t know how to answer. She doesn’t know what he’s trying to do, what he’s getting at, what he wants.

            “I don’t know,” she says. “It used to speak to me. Now it’s just there.”

            “And you liked it,” he supplies. “When it spoke to you?”

            “Yes.”

            “Why?”

            “Why?” Heat rushes into her cheeks as she searches for the words. “Because it…it made the world feel—richer. Everything I looked at had history and complexity that was in my grasp. Everything I did had meaning.”

            “No,” he says, softly. “Everything you did was quantified. There’s a difference.”

Taking a break from social media felt a little like that, to me. What would I do, without the influx of photos from Instagram? That sounds silly, but I mean it— I followed cute puppies and kittens, NASA and the New York Times, King Arthur Flour and travel photos. The stream of images in my Instagram feed was beautiful and uplifting, interesting and educational. It added richness to my life.

Then suddenly it was gone. And I was left with an itch that I couldn’t scratch. A twitch of my fingers toward my phone to check something, anything. I started to realize that twitch only happened when I was uncomfortable. Bored. Worried. Sad. I started to realize that I checked things to avoid feelings—to feel numb, when numbness was preferable to discomfort.

Without social media, I had to sit with myself. I had to lean on people. I had to let hard moments pass in their own time. Eventually, I settled into the quiet. I started to make things. Lots of things. I wrote Become of Me. I wrote a novella. And I wrote Poster Girl.

Poster Girl is about a woman wrestling with herself. I wrote it while I was wrestling with myself. It’s gotten some career-best reviews, including two starred ones, and that’s fucking awesome. But let me tell you a secret: what you’re left with, after reviews have come and gone, and book tour is over, and the fever of having a new book out breaks, is always how you feel about the work you produce.

This book made me a better writer, and a wiser person. I am so proud of it.

I hope you love it.

I’m on book tour this week! I’ll be in…

New York City (with Elena Nicolau!)

Boston

Fairfield, CT (with my agent, Joanna Volpe! This one will also be virtual, if you want to attend online!)

Cincinnati (with Gwenda Bond!)

St. Louis (with Taran Hunt!)

San Diego (with Cindy Pon!)

Palo Alto (with Yohanca Delgado!)

Beaverton, OR

Edmond, OK

Click this link for the whole tour round up. To my knowledge, most of the stores that are graciously hosting me will fill orders online and ship. (Inquire with the store about international shipping; I’m not sure.) So please consider ordering a book from one of them! If you get your order in ASAP, I’ll sign it for you, too!

Looking forward to seeing you all IN REAL LIFE!!!

<3 to you and yours, and thank you for supporting my work,

V

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In the earliest draft of Divergent that I have saved to my computer, the very first page is a quote from the book Dune by Frank Herbert. Here is a screenshot:

This is the Bene Gesserit Litany Against Fear, an oft-quoted prayer of sorts, useful for focusing the mind in times of great stress. I’ve made no secret of the impact Dune had on me as a writer. Though imperfect (to say the least), it was one of those reading experiences that expanded my understanding of what books could do, particularly science fiction and fantasy.

It probably comes as no surprise, then, that I leaned on one of my favorite quotes about fear when I decided to write about a young woman who was hell bent on facing it. Tris’s initiation doesn’t involve shoving her hand into a box of pain, of course, as it is for Paul Atreides; but she does willingly go into the most difficult parts of her mind, over and over again, and the litany against fear seemed like a nice fit for that.

The epigraph disappeared in later drafts. This isn’t the last time this happened to me. Most recently, it happened with Poster Girl. This is the quote that used to open my draft of Poster Girl:

I haven’t actually seen the movie Stalker, directed by Andrei Tarkovsky (not sure why I spelled it with a “y” in the screenshot above, sorry about that) and written by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, who wrote Roadside Picnic, the novel on which the movie is (loosely) based. The basic premise of the movie is this: there’s a “zone” on Earth where the laws of physics don’t apply. In that zone there’s a room that grants the desires of those who enter it. A “stalker” helps to lead people through the “zone” to the room. My husband spent an evening telling me all about this movie, once, in such detail that I feel like I know it. I haven’t watched it because I struggle with old movies and, frankly…it’s very slow. There’s a single shot that’s just the back of a guy’s head as he rides a train, and if I recall correctly from my husband’s retelling, it’s five minutes long.

He did talk to me a lot about this quote, the one I used for my epigraph. My husband loved it when he watched the movie; I love it now, even though I haven’t. The full text is this:

May everything come true. May they believe. And may they laugh at their own passions. For what they call passion is not really the energy of the soul, but merely friction between the soul and the outside world. But, above all, may they believe in themselves and become as helpless as children. For softness is great and strength is worthless. When a man is born, he is soft and pliable. When he dies, he is strong and hard. When a tree grows, it is soft and pliable, but when it is dry and hard, it dies. Hardness and strength are death’s companions. Flexibility and softness are the embodiment of life. That which has become hard shall not triumph.

I think it takes tremendous strength to remain pliable as you get older. It’s much easier to decide that it’s too late to change, you’re set in your ways and you’re stuck the way you are, everyone else be damned. What a sad thing, if you think about it— to decide that you’re done growing.

In Poster Girl, near the beginning of this story, there’s this quote: “Sonya’s mind often feels, to her, like clay hardened by the sun, left out too long to take a new shape.” Sonya believes she’s hardened; she believes she’s stuck. Over the course of the novel she begins to soften. That doesn’t mean she becomes mushy and sentimental; it means she starts to believe in change, perhaps not in the world around her, but in herself. That’s why I chose this quote for the epigraph.

In Poster Girl, as in Divergent, once I reached the later drafts of the book, I removed the epigraph. A good epigraph in a final book helps to shape the reader’s mind to prepare them for the story ahead. My epigraphs served that purpose for me as a writer, but by the time I reached later drafts, I no longer needed them, and I didn’t think they would be particularly helpful for readers, either.

Sometimes in writing you need a touchstone—something to remind you what you care about in your writing, what you’re aiming for, what you’d like to return to every time your mind starts to stray. And it’s okay to let those touchstones go, as the story changes and grows and takes its new shape.

-V

P.S. - this is happening TODAY, FYI!

(Click the above for 25% off your Poster Girl preorder at Barnes and Noble! Use code PREORDER25 at checkout.)

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To start: the first 40 pages of Poster Girl are available for you to read right now; check them out here.

I’m going to be talking about favorites today, so let me start with my favorite page of that excerpt:

These two characters know each other from a long time ago— and they hate each other now. I like this page because I like how their history bleeds through everywhere— he may hate her, but he’s comfortable enough in her space to go through her cabinets; she may hate him, but she knows what that ring he’s wearing means.

As to other favorites, I’ve noticed in the past two Instagram Q&As I’ve done (I do them somewhat regularly, follow me here if you don’t want to miss the next one) that a lot of questions center around favorites and least favorites— favorite character in X book, least favorite part of the writing process, favorite book I’ve written, least favorite tropes, favorite book I’ve read recently, etc. So I thought I would do a little round-up for you.

The thing about an author’s favorites, though, is that they’re probably not going to align with a reader’s favorites. My relationship to my work is as the creator, so I remember what was challenging, what was rewarding, what came easily and what didn’t, what required multiple rounds of editing, etc. What I love are things that are hard-won or that appeared in the book with unexpected power or brilliance, and if I do my job correctly, you actually can’t tell what those things are by the time the book makes it to you, because I will have integrated them well into the story. Just something to keep in mind when you hear authors talk about their favorites.

Faves

Book I’ve Written: this is actually a hard question, and the more I think about it, the less sense it even makes. Favorite in what way, is my question in response. No book will ever feel quite like your first, so does that make Divergent my favorite? What about the book that I worked the hardest on (Poster Girl)? Or the one that came together the most effortlessly (The Fates Divide)? The one that gave me the biggest rush of creative joy (Carve the Mark) or the one with the main character and world-building I was most proud of (Chosen Ones)? You get the idea. So no, I can’t pick one, but hopefully that list gives you some more insights.

Favorite Character I’ve Written: Tris, Cyra, Sloane, Sonya. (Yes I do love an “s” sound.) This answer may seem sort of boring, since they’re the main characters of my novels, but it’s true: I wouldn’t write about these women if I didn’t find them to be the most interesting, the most compelling. That’s not to discount the interestingness of other central characters, like Akos and Cisi from Carve the Mark, but these are the characters that carried me through the writing of each book with their interestingness.

Okay, Fine, But Aside From Them: I really, really love a complicated mother figure. (Evelyn, Sifa.) And a friend who’s not here for your bullshit. (Teka, Esther.) And I can’t wait for you to meet Knox, from Poster Girl. I can’t wait.

Book I’ve Read: seriously, can anyone answer this question?! I’m an author; I love books. I love a lot of books.

Book I Read This Year: okay, now we’re getting somewhere.

Refugee, criminal and linguist Sean Wren is made an offer he knows he can’t refuse: life in prison, “voluntary” military service – or salvaging data in a long-dead language from an abandoned ship filled with traps and monsters, just days before it’s destroyed in a supernova. Data connected to the Philosopher’s Stone experiments, into unlocking the secrets of immortality.

And he’s not the only one looking for the derelict ship. The Ministers, mysterious undying aliens that have ruled over humanity for centuries, want the data – as does The Republic, humanity’s last free government. And time is running out.

In the bowels of the derelict ship, surrounded by horrors and dead men, Sean slowly uncovers the truth of what happened on the ship, in its final days… and the terrible secret it’s hiding.
(More info here.)

As you can tell by the tiny quote on the cover there, I blurbed this book. In a nutshell, The Immortality Thief is a good time, full stop. I know I need that so much these days, and I’m sure you do, too. The voice was funny and immersive, the world was interesting, the action was nonstop, and yet somehow I still developed these really strong feelings for the characters, especially Sean, who must be protected at all costs. I really devoured this one. It’s out October 11th.

Okay, I think that’s enough favorites for now—I hope you enjoy the excerpt from Poster Girl!

-V

P.S. Also, don’t forget I’m going on tour soon! I’ll be in Winnetka, IL; New York, NY; Boston, MA; Cincinnati, OH; St. Louis, MO; San Diego, CA; Palo Alto, CA; Beaverton, OR; and Edmond, OK. More info about each stop here!

I’m very pleased to announce that I will be going on book tour for the release of Poster Girl (out October 18th)! My last book tour, for Chosen Ones, would have been the very first week of lockdown in the early days of the pandemic, so…yeah, we had to cancel it, obviously. I am beyond happy to be going out to talk to readers in person after a few years of only communicating through screens, so if you can make it out to one of these events, I’ll be very pleased to meet you (or see you again, as the case may be).

If you have questions— such as whether you can bring outside books to be signed, or get more than one book signed, etc.— please first consult each store’s event page for more information, and if they don’t answer your question, contact them to ask it, because I defer to each individual store’s policies, given that they’re being kind enough to host us.

I look forward to seeing you all! <3

The rundown:

The details:

October 16

Chicago, IL

5:30pm CT

The Book Stall: 811 Elm Street, Winnetka, IL 60093

Click Here to Get Tickets/Pre-order a Personalized Copy

October 18

New York, NY

7:00pm ET

Strand Book Store: 828 Broadway, 3rd Floor, Rare Book Room, New York, NY 10003

Click Here to Get Tickets

Click Here to Pre-order a Personalized Copy

October 19

Boston, MA

7:00pm ET

Porter Square Books: Boston Location: 50 Liberty Dr, Boston, MA02215

Click Here to Get Tickets

Click Here to Pre-order a Personalized Copy

October 21

Cincinnati, OH

7:00pm ET

Joseph-Beth Booksellers: 2692 Madison Road, Cincinnati, OH 45208

Click Here to Get Tickets/Pre-order a Personalized Copy

October 22

St. Louis, MO

7:00pm CT

Main Street Books: 307 S. Main Street St. Charles, MO 63301

Click Here to Get Tickets

Click Here to Pre-order a Personalized Copy

October 24

San Diego, CA

7:00pm PT

Mysterious Galaxy Bookstore: 3555 Rosecrans St #107 San Diego, CA 92110

Click Here to Get Tickets/Pre-order a Personalized Copy

October 25

Palo Alto, CA

7:00pm PT

Kepler's Books: 1010 El Camino Real, #100, Menlo Park, CA 94025

Click Here to Get Tickets/Pre-order a Personalized Copy

October 26

Beaverton, OR

7:00pm PT

Powell's Books: 3415 SW Cedar Hills Blvd, Beaverton, OR 97005

Click Here for Event Information
*This event is not ticketed.

*Please note that readers will be able to preorder a signed copy, but not a personalized copy. Event guests will be able to have their book personalized live.

October 30

Edmond, OK

3:00pm CT

Best of Books: UCO Liberal Arts Lecture Hall

Click Here to Get Tickets

Click Here to Pre-order a Personalized Copy

!!!

V

I gave a talk at a high school a few weeks ago, my first one in a long time. When I do school visits these days, my talk is usually about brainstorming. The reason for this is that where do you get your ideas? is one of the first questions young writers ask me. Or they tell me I like to write, but I don’t know what to write about. Or they tell me, I have an idea for a scene or a piece of a story, but I don’t know how to figure out the rest. All of these questions and concerns can be addressed with brainstorming.

“Brainstorming” is one of those practices that we think we know how to do, but actually we have a narrow understanding of how it can work. Before I became a full-time writer, I thought of brainstorming as me at a desk with a blank piece of paper, waiting for an idea to come along.

And if that’s how you think about it, no wonder it sounds intimidating to young writers. You and the blankness and the pressure to fill it with genius.

Hmm. No thank you.

I have a lot of different brainstorming strategies, and today I’m going to outline one for you. If you’re a writer, or really any kind of creative person, this could be helpful to you. As with any writing advice, this is just one of many things you can try if you’re stuck. Use it if it works; discard it if it doesn’t. If you’re not a creative person, well, then you’re about to get some insights into my process, so sit back and enjoy this little jaunt through my brain.

This exercise is inspired by M.A.S.H. The game, not the show.

Remember MASH? MASH is a fortune-telling game I used to play as a kid. You basically fill out a little sheet like this:

Some options for every category, and then you pick a random number (there are some methods for how this occurs; let’s not get into that) and go through the entire list, crossing off the item every time you hit your number until you have only one option left in each category. For the record, with this MASH card I will be living with a Man-Sized Pigeon in an apartment in California, driving a Tesla, and producing 75 pigeon-human hybrid offspring.

Great.

In the brainstorming game version of this, you make lists of your recent favorites in slightly different categories. The four categories are:

SETTING

MAIN CHARACTER

WANTS

OBSTACLES

Setting and main character are obvious here: write down four places you’d like to set a story sometime. They can be specific or broad. Mine are “faraway planet,” “post-apocalyptic Los Angeles,” “fantasy realm,” and “spaceship.” List as many as you’d like, as long as you are sincerely interested in living there in your mind for the duration of a story.

For your main characters, list characters you have recently liked and found interesting. Their gender and context doesn’t matter—those things can be changed. All you need are four characters you like. Mine are “Anthony Bridgerton” (the show version), “Whit” (from Brazen and the Beast by Sarah MacLean), “Lady Jessica” (Dune), and “Yennefer” (The Witcher, the game version).

WANTS and OBSTACLES are a little more complicated. These categories are based on my extremely basic breakdown of what a story is. Essentially, every single story is:

A character wants something

Something gets in their way before they can get it.

Here, you boil down what each main character you listed wants in as basic a way as possible. It doesn’t need to be perfectly accurate to the entire story, just something they want at some point or in some way. So for “Anthony Bridgerton,” I wrote “to fulfill their duty to family.” For “Whit,” I wrote “to protect what they’ve built.” Lady Jessica: “To attain greatness.” (I mean. She tries to produce the Kwisatz Haderach.) Yennefer: “To save a child.” You can also just list a bunch of things that characters generally want: to go on an adventure, to escape a bad situation, to go hunting for treasure, to seek revenge.

For “obstacles,” you basically do the same thing. What’s the thing that gets in your character’s way? Mine are “PSTD” (let’s face it, Anthony’s getting in his own damn way), “an old enemy surfaces to threaten them,” “a political conspiracy,” and “monsters.” Other ideas: a curse, a horrible family member, a lack of funds, a world-ending comet, surprise vampires.

Now go here and generate a random number for yourself. And start crossing things off, buddy.

If this seems silly: good! It should. This is a playful exercise. It’s meant to fill a blank page with something, and I promise you it can lead you to a more serious place. Let me show you.

Here are my results:

In Post-Apocalyptic Los Angeles, Lady Jessica wants to attain greatness. Unfortunately, though, PTSD gets in the way.

All right. Let me break down Lady Jessica for you. Lady Jessica is one of my favorite characters in Dune, by Frank Herbert. She’s a space witch who is a concubine in an important man’s house— she loves him, but she can’t marry him because he has to be free to enter a politically advantageous marriage. She disobeys the instructions of her order of space witches in an attempt to produce a child of destiny. She is a certified badass, but she’s manipulative and strategic, too. If you strip away the context of her behavior, what you’re left with is a woman lonely in her own power, operating under severe constraints, who breaks those constraints for the purpose of achieving greatness (through her son, of course) and bringing about a better world. These are qualities that can easily transfer to another context. She won’t look like Lady Jessica anymore, but the inspiration is there.

“Attaining greatness” is vague and has transferred over from Lady Jessica’s original context, so I’ll skip it for now and move to the obstacles. PTSD. Whew. This is a tough one, actually, but let’s go for it. In order to have PTSD getting in a character’s way, you need a traumatic incident to occur in their past that continues to haunt them. In a post apocalyptic landscape, the first thing that occurs to me is: maybe she’s got PTSD from witnessing the apocalypse. Which means, of course, that it had to be a destructive event that could be witnessed yet survived. What if she is immune to a plague and watches everyone around her die? What if, thanks to some privileged background, she gets ferried away to a nuclear shelter before a bomb hits? What if she’s still a witch, and the aliens taking over her planet spare her because of her unique gifts? You get the idea.

Let’s go with that last one, for fun. In this scenario, our Lady Jessica finds favor with alien overlords because she is capable of doing magic. Maybe magic on Earth was rare and hidden before the alien takeover, and it was what drew the aliens here to destroy us and make use of our magical resources. Lady Jessica is now a prisoner in alien custody, and in order to escape and become great by freeing what’s left of the planet, she has to make use of her magic. But there’s one problem: her magic is buried somewhere within her, inaccessible, because of trauma. Who can help her process this trauma? One of the aliens? A fellow magic-user? Someone in the city outside? If it’s the latter, how does she find them? How does she keep getting to them without her jailers noticing?

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but what we have here…is a story. Not all of it is figured out, but it’s begun to take shape.

Ideas can feel like the hardest part of writing when you’re stuck. But ideas, as they say, are cheap. (Execution is what’s expensive.) Your brain is actually bursting with them. Some of them are good; some of them are not. But when you’re stuck, your only task is to try to unlock them.

Godspeed!

P.S. If you actually do this exercise, tag me on Instagram (if you’re there)! I want to see your results.

Hey!

Yesterday the cover for my next book, Poster Girl, was finally released! Please check out the interview I did at Today.com, and read an excerpt from the book, too.

Here’s a little more about the story, from that article:

"'Poster Girl' is about what happens after a dystopian regime falls," Roth told TODAY in an email interview.

Instead of watching civil liberties get chipped away, "Poster Girl" charts the process of a society healing — and Sonya Kantor, the book's main character, is the kind of person who stands in the way of that healing. Her face is an uncomfortable reminder of the Delegation, the surveillance state that had once ruled over the Seattle-Portland area: Sonya was literally a poster girl for the regime's propaganda posters. The Delegation monitored its citizens through the use of Insight, an ocular implant that tracked a user's words (think a portable and inescapable Big Brother).

The story starts when an old enemy offers Sonya a deal: If she can find a missing child, she can earn her freedom from the prison she's lived in for years. In doing so, Sonya learns more about her family and the extent to which both she and they were complicit in the old regime. Roth said that the novel sees Sonya "wake up again."

And of course, the cover:

The art comes to us courtesy of Jaya Miceli, who did a lovely job with this cover. Last year I sent my publisher a big document full of cover ideas, and in it was a pile of old propaganda posters, just to give them an idea of the range of art styles that were used. Here’s a selection of them, to show you what I mean:

This cover is such a striking interpretation of that idea. I feel like Sonya is straight up judging me, which is perfect, because at the point in her life that she posed for this poster, she probably was. I can’t wait to see it on the hardcover.

Writing this book was slow, steady, and careful. I learned new ways to be patient. I’ve never written a book quite like it. It comes out October 18th. More info about where to find it here.

<3,

V

During lockdown, I got into tennis. 

Oh, I’d watched it here and there, before. I knew five tennis players: Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, Novak Djokovic, Serena Williams, and Naomi Osaka. I watched the finals of the biggest tournaments, always at my husband’s prompting. But something changed during the 2020 US Open, on the men’s side—Nadal and Federer weren’t playing, and Djokovic got defaulted for that line judge thing. Suddenly, the field was wide open, and we would have a new Grand Slam champion outside the “Big 3” for the first time in a number of years, and one of the younger guys, almost certainly…so the energy was suddenly frantic. Shapovalov almost vibrated out of his skin in the quarterfinals, he was bouncing up and down like a rubber ball. Sucked in by the drama, I started watching it by myself, no husband to be found. I collected a whole array of favorites, and I knew all their head-to-heads, all their r/tennis memes, all of it. 

In that time, I started watching Daniil Medvedev, who the year before had famously trolled his way to the final (where he lost) and somehow managed to turn the unruly New York crowd that had been booing him earlier in the week into his biggest fans. Medvedev is 6’6”, and his game is weird. There’s really nothing beautiful about it. When he hits a forehand, his racquet ends up wrapped around his neck. When he hits a backhand, he sometimes folds in on himself like one of those plastic donkey toys held up by elastic bands that collapses when you push the button underneath it. His fellow players call him “octopus” and “spider”; Twitter calls him Squidward; I call him Wacky Waving Inflatable Arm Flailing Tube Man. His game is absurd nonsense that commentators often seem to despise because it wouldn’t work for anyone on the planet except him. At his best, he is a wall, a confounding force of nature that renders his opponents frustrated and confused. Peak Meddy is inevitable as the tide.
 
Naturally, he is my favorite player.
 
This year he won the US Open against world #1 and arguably the best player of all time, Novak Djokovic, causing me to very nearly burst into tears and also to hurl a pillow across the room in a fit of joy. My dog was not amused.

After this victory, I read an old interview with his coach, Gilles Cervara, which said this:

Cervara explains that Medvedev does have ambitions to reach the top of the rankings. But it’s not that the 25-year-old is making that a particular goal; it’s simply that his results are naturally taking him in that direction.
“When we worked together, we were both unsure if he could get to this level,” Cervara reflected. “He’s not saying, ‘I want to win this tournament and be at this level.’ He’s saying, ‘I want to be the best I can be,’ whether it’s in the next practice session or on the next point. These are the small details that bring results.”
 

This struck me hard. It’s how I think of my career, too. I am not someone who defines “achievement” goals. There’s an obvious reason for this: Divergent catapulted me through a lot of career milestones very quickly, God bless it, when I was too young to have even articulated to myself what I wanted beyond “book on shelf in bookstore, please.” What that means is that I know what it feels like to reach a lot of very specific external goals—and I know that the feeling, for me, was a confusing mess of joy and profound fear, and I know that reaching them didn’t fix all the things in me that I was struggling with, didn’t correct low self regard or heal anxiety or solve self doubt. So while I appreciate the many good things that have come my way, and I wouldn’t trade them…they have limits. And I have felt the very edges of them.
 

The sudden absence of goals was jarring for me, at first, like stepping into an anechoic chamber only to discover that in that profound silence you are the only thing that makes noise. Your heartbeat. Your lungs. Your gurgling stomach—

your hunger.
 

I am no longer interested in goals, if I here define “goals” as the clear articulation of a theoretically achievable aim. Hunger, though—that interests me.
 

The Cervara quote tells us that Daniil Medvedev, world #2, Fifa-playing skinny nerd man, first of his generation to beat one of the Big 3 in a Grand Slam final, focuses not on achievements but on improvement. If you improve, the logic goes, the achievements will come—not always in the scoreline, but in the moment. A point, a game. One match, and then the next one. It’s not quite a “goal” because it’s not something he can ever reach. Instead, it’s a commitment to constant striving.
 

If you’ve ever watched Medvedev, you know he barely celebrates on court. He won the ATP Finals tournament last year and greeted his victory with a shrug. Even his US Open win involved a seemingly calculated “dead fish” maneuver (something from Fifa, I don’t know) rather than a sincere outpouring of relief and joy. And in interviews, he and Gilles are both very nonchalant about things. “Does this US Open win change things for you?” No. “Did you approach the match with Djokovic differently than other matches?” No. “Do you feel pressure now that you’ve won a Grand Slam?” No. Both men are always focused on the same thing today as they were yesterday as they were years ago, when neither of them was sure how good Medvedev could even get at tennis: growth. Striving. Hunger.
 

At the start of this year I saved a quote from Nietzsche in my phone. Not because I was like, reading Nietzsche—but because I was reading GRIT by Angela Duckworth, and she quoted Nietzsche. Here, just read it:
 

“Do not talk about giftedness, inborn talents! One can name great men of all kinds who were very little gifted....They all possessed that seriousness of the efficient workman which first learns to construct the parts properly before it ventures to fashion a great whole; they allowed themselves time for it...because they took more pleasure in making the little, secondary things well than in the effect of a dazzling whole.”
 

There’s a lot to unpack there, but damn, the end of it: they took more pleasure in making the little, secondary things well than in the effect of a dazzling whole.
 

If you ask Meddy about his game, he’ll probably tell you his main goal at any given time is to get the ball in the court. I’ve heard him say it several times. Which sounds like a joke, maybe, but it’s also, somehow, brilliant. And you can see it in his game—at any given time, he just does his best to get the ball in the court, sometimes twisting his entire body into knots, sometimes sliding farther than you’d think a giant man could slide without breaking in half. He does it one moment, and then the next. Doing the little things well, and not fixating on the dazzling whole.
 

Writing books is not about the dazzling whole. It’s about letting go of the dazzling whole, over and over again. Your idea of the book before you started writing—it’s not worth much to you once you get going. It’ll hang over you as you work, taunting you, because nothing you’re making will measure up to what you might have made. Or it’ll make you incapable of seeing the strongest parts of your work, the inspired parts that came out of nowhere, the unintentional, accidental, instinctual parts that are worth saving.
 

The business of writing books isn’t about the dazzling whole, either. Bestseller lists and TV appearances and movie adaptations and starred reviews and awards—they aren’t things you can control. They rely on two things: a complex system of publisher support and bookseller support that primes your book for success, and timing. You can influence those things, but you can’t control them. And even if they come to you once, they may never come again. They’re wonderful, but ephemeral. Dazzling but insubstantial. They won’t sustain you in the long term.
 

So shed them like old skin. Let something new emerge. Former Cubs manager Joe Maddon used to say “be present, not perfect.” He’s right. Writing books happens line by line, a career is built book by book, so be in the midst of both.
 

Hot take: stop dreaming so much. Emphasis on the “so much.” Dreams are wonderful and they can guide you and make you believe…but God, let them go when they’re no longer useful. Stop dreaming, and hunger instead. Find the goal that can never be reached; find the craving that drives you. Be there in your writing, in your life; be honest with yourself about what you have, about what you ought to make of it instead of the perfect thing it can never be. If you do that, you will get somewhere you never thought of. You’ll get somewhere that your work led you without you even knowing it. “It’s simply that his results are naturally taking him in this direction.”
 

“Work, work, it takes work. Work, work, tons of work,” is currently my favorite quote, spoken by Stefanos Tsitsipas, men’s tennis world #4, in a low moment, to motivate himself to perform better. I say it to myself almost daily. I say it when things don’t go my way and I get morose about the future. Work, work, lots of work—work happens right now, in the moment, in this sentence, and god, God, I love to do it, I really fucking do. If I do it now, if I do it over and over again, I’ll grow, like a house plant stretching toward a window, so slowly the naked eye can’t see it until the vine is clinging to the glass.