3 Key Takeaways: The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

This is part of my ongoing video series of Three Key Takeaways from books I’ve read – the lessons we should take as authors from what worked and what didn’t work. You can view the original video here with the transcript below: https://www.tiktok.com/@rhiannondaverc/video/7361810214993005857

I’m a professional ghostwriter and these are my three key takeaways from The Hunger Games. Now, just to be clear, when I say The Hunger Games, I mean all three books. Yes.

I have two editions of The Hunger Games, the original book, and one in French, just in case you were doubting my nerd credentials until this point. So this series is actually really important to me because before this series came out, I mostly read classic literature. I was reading Dostoevsky, I was reading Dickens, lots of other authors whose names also don’t begin with D, but I wasn’t really reading contemporary literature.

I started to read Haruki Murakami a couple of years before this came out, but Young Adult, to me, was something that was to be scorned and scoffed at and I wasn’t interested in reading it. Then I went and saw The Hunger Games in the cinema. I loved it.

I thought, I want to read this book. I read the book and the world of young adult books basically opened up for me and it’s now one of my top genres to read. And in a wider sense, it allowed me to get back into things like fantasy, currently romantasy, and just be a bit broader with my reading and not try and limit myself because I was under the impression that current literature was somehow not as good as it used to be in the past.

It’s just simply not true. There’s lots of good books out there and you just have to know which ones to go for. So my first key takeaway from The Hunger Games is this.

One of us must die. And this is something that I actually first learned from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but it applies really well here as well. And the rule is nothing matters if it doesn’t happen to our main favourite characters.

So in this series, in the very first book, and by the way, there’s going to be a lot of spoilers for the whole series throughout this, one of the things that happens in the first book is that we really get to know Rue. And Rue becomes part of the group that we consider to be the good guys, the main characters with Katniss and later on with Peeta. So when Rue dies, that’s a big moment that tells us that death is possible in this universe for good people.

Because until that happens, we’re not quite sure. Sometimes when you’re reading books, when you’re watching TV shows, watching films, whatever it is, the good guys are kind of immortal. You know, they’re saved from every possible thing that could possibly happen to them.

By actually killing off a character, you’re showing the audience that there are real stakes in this. And you’re not afraid to kill off one of their favourite characters, which means that anytime something happens that looks like it risks somebody’s life, there is a possibility that they will lose their favourite character. We see it happen again and again throughout the series.

We lose Finnick, who was definitely a big fan favourite. And of course, in the last book, we lose Prim, which is devastating because the whole catalyst for the series even happening in the first place is Katniss’s desire to keep Prim alive and safe. So make sure that you are not afraid to kill off one of your key characters.

And even if the threat they are facing is not death, you know, it could be something else. There could be a disease that’s going around, like the zombie virus. One member of your character group should have that disease.

They should become infected. Maybe the risk is that they’re all at school and they’re constantly under threat of being expelled. Okay, so one of your characters should get expelled.

You need to show the audience that the stakes are real, make them care about it more. And the thing is, you can show that the stakes are real by killing off or getting rid of a character who is not one of your main group. It could just be someone they know peripherally.

That’s fine, but it doesn’t have the same level of impact. So to reference the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode that I first heard this theory in relation to, it’s in the first season when Xander gets turned into, I think it was a hyena, like a hyena boy. And because he’s a member of our group of protagonists, our main characters, we’re really concerned about him and we want him to survive and get better.

If it was just a bunch of boys from their school that turned into hyenas, you know, maybe they save them, maybe they don’t. So long as Buffy’s okay, we’re fine with it, you know? So by making it one of our own characters, it really raises the stakes, makes people care a lot more, and it has so much more impact. My second key takeaway from the Hunger Games series is twist your formula.

When you have a great formula in place, as in two tributes from each district going to the Hunger Games and only one person can emerge victorious, it’s really tempting to just do that same template over and over again, okay? So in the second book they could have just gone into the Hunger Games and won again, and in the third book they could have just gone into the Hunger Games and won again. But the fact that they change and twist this by taking the formula that we know and then turning it into that moment of revolution, and then having the third book be about something completely different entirely, not at all based around the structure of the Hunger Games that we’ve come to know, makes it much more compelling and much more interesting, it’s more surprising for the reader, and taking that kind of risk is something that a best-selling author does. Rather than playing it safe and just doing the same formula again and again and again, there’s technically no problem with doing the same formula again and again if it makes you money, but why not take a risk, be a brave storyteller, and break the formula? This also ties into another TV show that I’ve seen that I loved, which is iZombie.

If anyone has seen iZombie, the first season or couple of seasons, I can’t quite remember, the format is very well set out. It is basically that zombies are amongst us but they are hidden, nobody knows about them, one of them is working with a police detective to solve crimes because when she eats brains she has visions of what the victim last saw. That’s a great formula, it’s played for laughs a lot because she takes on the personality of the brain that she’s eating as well, it works every time, it’s a great quirky show.

They could have left it there and carried on for several seasons doing the same thing over and over again but instead what they did was break the mould and have the zombie virus actually overrun the people of the city. Then it becomes this fight for freedom, this fight for revolution. She becomes a trafficker who is getting people out of the city to safety and bringing in people to the city who want to take the zombie virus in order to be cured of a lethal disease.

So it really completely changes the format of the show and in my opinion it is much better for taking that risk and taking us on that journey and doing something more with the storytelling rather than just keeping the same old formula. However much it was working in the first place, it would eventually grow stale, it would eventually see the show toppling from its former heights and being boring and getting cancelled. Whereas this way they actually get to play the story out to the conclusion and make a really great story out of it.

My third key takeaway from the Hunger Games trilogy is trauma creates mental health problems. How many times have you seen a series and even some of my favourite series are guilty of this, especially in Young Adult, where someone goes through the worst possible time and then they’re just fine afterwards and they don’t have nightmares and they don’t wake up screaming and they don’t have PTSD and they’re not paranoid and they don’t have a fear of the dark? So many times we’re given these, especially supernatural series, where a person from our normal world is thrust into this supernatural world and all this stuff happens to and then they have absolutely no reaction to it.

They win the final battle, victory, everyone’s saved, hooray, they get married, the end. Whereas in this series they actually show the ramifications of trauma and how it can break people and also how people can use that trauma to bond and also how you can live on a happy and fulfilled life with trauma and how you can go on to be something more than you used to be, even if you’re carrying trauma. And I really like the fact that it is actually done in this book.

It shows that it can be done in Young Adult, you don’t need to be afraid of it and stay away from it and it shows that, I think, it makes for a much more realistic and compelling ending to the story. If Katniss and Peeta were just deliriously happy at the end and married with 52 children and laughing and joking about the old times in The Hunger Games, that would be completely unrealistic and it would have me rolling my eyes so hard. Instead, even though they have moved on and had a family, they are fragile, they are broken and they are holding each other together and that is so much more appropriate and so much better of an ending.

So think about the ramifications of what you’re doing to your characters and where they would actually realistically end up because they’re not just going to be riding off into the sunset with the prince and having a happy ever after. That’s only for fairy tales. So those are my three key takeaways from The Hunger Games.

If you have any other Young Adult or popular series from recent years that you would like to see my take on, let me know and I will do my best to either give my thoughts on it or, if I haven’t yet read it, get my hands on it and then let you know. And if you have any questions for me as a professional ghostwriter, let me know in the comments.