Focus on Young Adult Fiction: The Dystopia Game
Last week I took a look at the John Green craze that’s overtaken Young Adult fiction, and found that this craze has a lot to do with the consistent personality of his work, the almost exclusive club of quirky and interesting people that he invites his readers to be part of whenever they open one of his books.
This time, another YA craze has caught my attention. With the recent and upcoming releases of movies like The Maze Runner and the next in The Hunger Games series, dystopia continues to be all the rage. Just as John Green has won over a generation of fans with his emotional but kind-of-cerebral prose, the dystopian novels invite readers in with high-stakes predicaments that the characters find themselves in.
By looking at a trio of the current most popular dystopian books, I’m hoping to find out a little more about how and why this sub-genre of YA is so enthralling and what we can learn from it:
The Maze Runner by James Dashner
The premise of The Maze Runner is a post-apocolyptic world, where children (or young adults, really) arrive in an enclosed community nicknamed The Glade, but have no recollection of their lives before their arrival. Beyond The Glade is a maze, a predatory, game-like labyrinth of which the children must understand the rules and enigmas if they are to survive.
It is the strength of this premise that carries The Maze Runner and enables Dashner to continue the story through two sequel, and two prequel, novels. The maze, a nightmarish, simplistic society, but a society nonetheless, is so gripping because it is both highly structured and highly disordered – what should be comforting becomes dangerous; the young characters come of age before our eyes and in the harshest way possible.
Writing lesson: It is amazing what a powerful visual idea can do for a story. The book’s front cover, film trailers, posters, all exploit the potency of the image of the maze, and for good reason. Readers love having a clear crucible in which to explore the themes and character arcs and to feel enclosed and immersed in the action.
Divergent by Veronica Roth
While The Maze Runner creates its immersive effect by placing its characters in a restricted, game-like environment, Divergent plays with a more expansive world, using a “factions” system to split characters into opposing teams (the game-like structure remains). This more expansive environment creates the impression of a fully-formed society, and the implication of a whole political history lying behind the present action. But although this implication is there, the author’s focus is so much on the present action plot, and her main character Tris’ navigation of the faction system and her own identity, that the detail and atmosphere of the Divergent Universe isn’t as rich and full as it might be. Still, Roth’s use of structure and chaos, just like in The Maze Runner, provides a winning formula for an action-packed plot.
Writing lesson: Just like the house system in the Harry Potter books, Roth’s factions provide the opportunity for team spirit, choice, and character development, and, most importantly, they invite the reader in to the world of the story – “Which faction would I choose? What is my dominant character trait?” readers wonder.
The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
In The Hunger Games series, in my view, the best elements of Divergent and The Maze Runner combine and created is an extensive, fully-realized dystopian world, with both game-like rules and terrifying chaos disrupting those rules. With this backdrop, Collins’ characters are pushed to the limit and become many-layered and developed as their strengths, weaknesses and loyalties are exposed.
Like Divergent, The Hunger Games follows a plucky heroine most centrally, and part of the dystopia of the environment is the heroine finding herself alone for the first time, separated from the warmth and familiarity of her family (not to mention at the center of a gruesome gladiatorial ritual). Along with great writing, fulfilling a gripping life-and-death plot as well as enriching a unique environment, The Hunger Games series portrays a journey from adolescenthood to adulthood and several romantic subplots, providing readers with tons of ways in to the story that they can relate to as well as the escapism that a dystopian novel should always deliver.
Writing lesson: Collins uses game structure really well, making her characters’ predicament seem both incredibly futile and ridiculous and at the same time, absolutely terrifying. A combination of rules and chaos, strength and helplessness, creates an inevitable bond between characters that makes The Hunger Games so emotionally compelling; this is a great tactic to keep in mind, even if your setting is not at all dystopian.
The journey through Young Adult Fiction continues next time, when I explore some lesser known YA novels, to find out more about the genre away from its blockbuster persona.
