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A Q&A with Author Veronica Roth
Q: What advice would you offer to young aspiring writers, who long to live a success story like your own?
Roth: One piece of advice I have is: Want something else more than success. Success is a lovely thing, but your desire to say something, your worth, and your identity shouldnt rely on it, because its not guaranteed and its not permanent and its not sufficient. So work hard, fall in love with the writingthe characters, the story, the words, the themesand make sure that you are who you are regardless of your life circumstances. That way, when the good things come, they dont warp you, and when the bad things hit you, you dont fall apart.
Q: Youre a young author--is it your current adult perspective or not-so-recent teenage perspective that brought about the factions in the development of this story? Do you think that teens or adults are more likely to fit into categories in our current society?
Roth: Other aspects of my identity have more to do with the factions than my age. The faction system reflects my beliefs about human naturethat we can make even something as well-intentioned as virtue into an idol, or an evil thing. And that virtue as an end unto itself is worthless to us. I did spend a large portion of my adolescence trying to be as good as possible so that I could prove my worth to the people around me, to myself, to God, to everyone. Its only now that Im a little older that I realize I am unable to be truly good and that its my reasons for striving after virtue that need adjustment more than my behavior. In a sense, Divergent is me writing through that realizationeveryone in Beatrices society believes that virtue is the end, the answer. I think thats a little twisted.
I think we all secretly love and hate categorieslove to get a firm hold on our identities, but hate to be confinedand I never loved and hated them more than when I was a teenager. That said: Though we hear a lot about high school cliques, I believe that adults categorize each other just as often, just in subtler ways. It is a dangerous tendency of ours. And it begins in adolescence.
Q: If you could add one more faction to the world within Divergent, what would it be?
Roth: I tried to construct the factions so that they spanned a wide range of virtues. Abnegation, for example, includes five of the traditional seven heavenly virtues: chastity, temperance, charity, patience, and humility. That said, it would be interesting to have a faction centered on industriousness, in which diligence and hard work are valued most, and laziness is not allowed. They would be in constant motion, and would probably be happy to take over for the factionless. And hard-working people can certainly take their work too far, as all the factions do with their respective
