This Isn't Child's Play

Do your kids give you input on your books?
They don't. [She has a 14-year-old son and a 9-year-old daughter.]

What about your own favorite books?
There are so many. One was "A Wrinkle in Time." Another book that I just think is amazing, and this is less well known, is "Boris" by Jaap ter Haar, a Dutch writer. It's about a 12-year-old boy who's living through the Nazi siege of Leningrad. The people are being simultaneously starved out and bombed. We talked about my great love of Greek mythology books. I was attracted to the myths because the people and the gods experience such a wide range of human emotions in this magical world. Really terrible things happen. A king cooks up his son into a stew. A sorceress turns every guy who lands on her island into a pig. There are great loves and great acts of courage. The world is a very unstable place, but the characters get along as best they can, and sometimes they manage remarkable things.

How do you write?
I work on a laptop in a La-Z-Boy sort of chair. I get up, I grab some cereal, and I sit down to work as soon as possible. If I get in a solid three to five hours of writing, that's a fantastic day. I usually have worked out an overall structure of the story, but it's got a lot of blank spaces. In television, we had to outline in such detail. When you had written the outline, you felt you had almost written the script. I know the overall arc of the story, I know the main plot points. Within that, I then leave space for the relationships between the characters to develop.

Did you have other careers, too?
When I got out of undergrad, I had a degree in theater and telecommunications. My first job, I was a news reporter for the local stories for NPR. Then I was a country-western DJ. I did data entry for a yearbook company. In my mid-20s I went back to grad school at NYU, and I specialized in playwriting. I worked in development for a film producer for a year and a half or so, and then I got my first television-writing job, "Hi Honey, I'm Home!"

How did you get interested in these topics? You've described Gregory as a war story and "The Hunger Games" as a gladiator story.
I'm a military brat. My father was career Air Force. When I was 6, he was gone for a year because he was fighting in Vietnam. When he came back, it was important to him that we all  knew about war. Before he went to Vietnam, he taught at West Point. We spent a lot of vacations visiting battlefields. You had to understand how [the war] played out and what the consequences were. It was extremely important to him that we understood history and the history of war. He died in 2003, two weeks before the [Iraq] war began. He was strongly opposed to it.

So are your books a warning to kids?
I'd like to take topics like war and introduce them at an earlier age. If you look at "Gregor," it has all kinds of topics. There's biological warfare, there's genocide, there's military intelligence. But it's in a fantasy. It's played out with a combination of humans and rats and bats. But those topics are there. With "The Hunger Games," there's not only violence but the violence is all human on human, plus it's kids on kids. I want kids to be aware of these topics, to think about them, and really, the sooner the better.

© 2008