How Veronica Roth Sits Down & Writes
Veronica Roth's New York Times Bestselling adult debut 'Chosen Ones' is a stunning, magical, and masterful must-read.
Fifteen years ago, five ordinary teenagers were singled out by a prophecy to take down an impossibly powerful entity wreaking havoc across North America. He was known as the Dark One, and his weapon of choice—catastrophic events known as Drains—leveled cities and claimed thousands of lives. Chosen Ones, as the teens were known, gave everything they had to defeat him.
After the Dark One fell, the world went back to normal . . . for everyone but them. After all, what do you do when you’re the most famous people on Earth, your only education was in magical destruction, and your purpose in life is now fulfilled?
Of the five, Sloane has had the hardest time adjusting. Everyone else blames the PTSD—and her huge attitude problem—but really, she’s hiding secrets from them . . . secrets that keep her tied to the past and alienate her from the only four people in the world who understand her.
On the tenth anniversary of the Dark One’s defeat, something unthinkable happens: one of the Chosen Ones dies. When the others gather for the funeral, they discover the Dark One’s ultimate goal was much bigger than they, the government, or even prophecy could have foretold—bigger than the world itself.
And this time, fighting back might take more than Sloane has to give.
Chosen Ones is for adults who grew up loving stories about chosen ones like Divergent, The Hunger Games, or Harry Potter.
We chatted with Veronica about her writing process, doing research, and cultivating curiosity as writer.
Q: Where and when do you like to write the most?
I like to write in my office, which is in a sun room with a lot of plants, so it’s a really calm, pleasant space. And I am a night owl, so I like when I get into a good writing groove at night. Bonus points if it’s raining.
Q: Stephen King has a great line in On Writing that says “the scariest moment is always right before you start. After that, things can only get better.” That scary pre-start moment often inspires procrastination in writers. Suddenly, you have to clean your entire house, do the laundry and play Candy Crush for an hour before you can actually start writing. Is there anything you need to do before you can actually sit down and work?
I have to eat breakfast, because I wake up really hungry. Other than that, I am a big believer in the “butt in chair” method. I just sit down and make myself get started. There’s nothing in my life that can’t wait for me to dip a toe in. If something is really urgent or necessary, I write a paragraph, and then I do whatever that thing is—it’s easier to come back later if you already have a foothold.
Q: Since all of your books involve other worlds, what inspires your world-building? Where do you normally begin?
I am not someone who does a lot of preliminary world-building work. I get started with the story, and I start making decisions about world-building then and there. There are drawbacks to this method. My rough drafts are often thin on the world-building side, and require huge changes in revisions, for example. But I never feel like I know what I need or what I want until I’ve felt my way into the story, so this is what works for me. It helps that I really thrive in revisions. You have to play to your strengths! Don’t fight the writer you are—compensate for your weaknesses instead.
As for inspiration, I think the most important quality to cultivate in yourself, as a writer, is curiosity. The world around us is fascinating. When I’m interested in any part of it, I let myself lean into that interest. I get into phases where I am researching something for no apparent reason, and then about a year later, that thing will find its way into a book. But I find my curiosity is usually sparked most by science and psychology.
Q: It's clear you did a ton of research, especially for the government reports and journal entries in between chapters. What was the most interesting thing you learned in your research?
I did a lot of research on SONAR that didn’t end up mattering much for the book except to justify the alternate history aspects of it, but I was particularly fascinated by the SOFAR (Sound Fixing and Ranging) channel, which is a particular depth of the ocean at which sounds can travel long distances. Basically, sound waves pinball around in this channel because of how they continually refract. I don’t have a sophisticated grasp of sound waves, or anything, but I found that fascinating.
Relatedly, there was this recording from the Mariana Trench that sounded eerie and metallic called the “Western Pacific Biotwang”—if you look it up, you can find the recording easily—and apparently that sound comes from a minke whale, but I have no idea how any creature makes that sound. It sounds like a robot, or alternately, it is the exact sound that my existential dread makes.
Q: Chosen Ones is your first novel for adults. How was your approach to writing for adults different than your approach to writing for a younger audience?
I didn’t think that much about the category switch while I was working, honestly. Chosen Ones is, at a very basic level, concerned with questions about navigating adulthood—it’s about the weightless feeling that happens after you’ve reached the goal you were working toward for your adolescent life. So I just tried to engage with that idea specifically, and the psychology of older characters who are trying to grow past their fame-induced arrested development. Every book presents its author with a unique set of demands, and I met those demands with the skill I’ve developed over the last five novels—so whether Chosen Ones is distinct from my other work just because it’s a different kind of book, or because of its audience, or because I’ve improved as a writer over time, I’m not quite sure.
Q: Chosen Ones deals with themes of trauma, mental health, and addiction. What kind of research did you do for those portions? What was something interesting you learned from it?
I’ve written characters coping with the aftermath of trauma before, so I came into Sloane’s character with a little foundation in place already. However, what I had written before involved the more immediate aftermath of trauma, and Sloane’s is more distant. She’s ten years removed. She’s also older, so the way it manifests in her life is different than it would be for a teenager. So my research—which primarily came from articles and psychological studies—was focused on that. The key with researching anything psychology-related is to skip the public-facing stuff, because the way studies are presented in media is often oversimplified or exaggerated, and read the actual studies themselves. They’re denser and take more time, but you’re more likely to find accurate information that way. They also include case studies, which are useful for seeing how a list of symptoms plays out in an actual person’s life.
What was interesting to me, and particularly relevant to Chosen Ones, was learning about triggers. The word “trigger” has entered casual use in the last few years, so we think of triggers as more general categories that you can warn against. But in addition to those general categories, triggers are also neutral, specific things that you can’t predict with a trigger warning—a particular object, or smell, or location associated with the trauma. Avoidance of those things can reinforce the trauma response, so trigger warnings may be useful for short term coping but not necessarily long term recovery, which is why things like exposure therapy and EMDR (which involves re-experiencing traumatic memories as part of its process) have proven effective in treating PTSD. That cycle of avoidance and reinforcement was interesting to me. It’s something that presents itself with my anxiety disorder, too, even though I don’t struggle with PTSD, so learning about this was useful for my mental health as well as my writing life!
Q: What's the last book that kept you up past your bedtime?
I don’t usually read at night, because reading winds me up instead of helping me wind down—so the last book that made me break the rules was Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir.
Pick up your copy of Chosen Ones from bookshop.org, IndieBound, or Barnes & Noble. Happy reading!
Photo: Nelson Fitch ©
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