From her brand-new – and bestselling – book, Seek The Traitor’s Son, to the incredibly exciting news that we’ll finally be returning to the Divergent universe later this year, it’s a great year to be a fan of Veronica Roth. With both books being the first in a duology, there’s plenty to look forward to.
But if you’ve ever wondered what goes into crafting such fantastical and innovative stories, or where she gets her inspiration from more generally, we had a chance to sit down with Veronica to talk about everything from this latest release to the goal that she accomplished simply by completing The Sixth Faction.
Plus, there’s not too long to wait until that upcoming release hits our shelves in October. You can certainly expect to find it in my monthly roundup of the best new books that month.
How would you describe Seek The Traitor’s Son for those who have yet to pick it up or start reading it?
Seek the Traitor’s Son is set far in the future, on an Earth that’s been devastated by a virus that kills everyone who gets it… and brings half of them back to life with supernatural gifts. On very rare occasions – we’re talking one out of every million people – it produces future seers.
One day a soldier, Elegy Ahn, is summoned to meet them, and they tell her she’s the subject of a prophecy that could either save her people or doom them to fall to their enemies. Regardless of the prophecy’s outcome, though, she’ll fall in love with a man who will bring her death.
And when did you first get the idea for it?
I started working on Seek in September 2019, and there’s no clear point of origin for it. I just had an instinct about a character: Theren, a failed Knight who’s just trying to piece himself back together. Over the course of about ten drafts, I tried to situate him – sometimes the drafts were more science fiction, sometimes more fantasy, sometimes I played with the genders of the characters or the exact dynamic between them. But it started working when I set it on Earth, with the Fever. Turning Earth into ruins – to the point where it started to feel like a fantasy landscape – felt like the right fit.
What is it about the dystopian genre that continues to draw you to it?
I write across the science fiction and fantasy spectrum – I’ve written space opera, contemporary fantasy, post-apocalyptic, urban fantasy – but I particularly like to build social systems, like governments or religions. Dystopian fiction usually prioritizes social systems, too, and it consistently offers the opportunity to keep your focus intimate even as you’re building a big world around a character. That’s the kind of writing I like best, so I think it’s a natural fit for me.
How did you find it blending dystopian, sci-fi, fantasy and romance into one (and so successfully at that)?
It was a blast, honestly! I’ve been calling this book a little self-indulgent, and what I mean is that I allowed myself to include so many of the things I love in genre fiction that it felt like a playground. I love sword fights and futuristic viruses, special abilities and space stations, romance and politics, so why not find a way to make them coexist? It took a lot of experimentation to build a world where those things feel natural together, but I tried to stay playful and curious throughout, and it felt so good that it’s become my new philosophy.
With a strange Fever featuring, did the pandemic inspire or influence this?
Oh, definitely. Taking something awful and turning it fantastical is a bit of an odd coping mechanism, I’ll admit, but that’s what I did. And dystopian fiction, at its best, offers us observations of our present reality. Looking closely at how people were reacting to the pandemic – some eager to let the virus run its course, or comparing it to a holy plague, others advocating for strict quarantines, etc. – was a huge part of the worldbuilding for this book.
The name Elegy is an interesting one. How or why did you come up with that for your lead?
Elegy’s people, the Cedrae, are focused on preserving old cultures and languages, so in an early draft of the book I thought they might use common nouns as names to keep their languages alive. That’s when I named her Elegy. I loved the idea of naming someone in a dying world after a lament.
Without sharing too many spoilers, what was your favourite moment or scene from this new book?
There’s a scene where, for various reasons, Theren offers up his memories to Elegy, and she experiences them as if she’s right alongside him. At that point they hardly know each other, and there’s this deep wound between them, so that level of vulnerability is really shocking and – I think – romantic. I loved writing it. It could have easily been twice as long.
And what was the most challenging scene or section for you to write?
The beginning! There’s a lot of worldbuilding to cover in this book, but I wanted it to stay character-focused and keep it moving, and juggling those three things is really tricky. I left a much longer beginning on the cutting room floor. And good thing I did.
Why did you choose to make this a duology, instead of say a standalone or a larger series?
I originally conceived of this as one long story, but when I started writing it I realized it would be prohibitively long and logistically difficult to manage. There was also a natural splitting point between the two halves, so it felt more practical this way. As for why it’s not a longer series, well, I’d actually love to write more in this universe, but for now I wanted to strive for a feeling of completion.
And I personally can’t get enough of the book cover. How much of a say did you have in this?
It’s always a collaborative process with the publisher (and the artist!) but this book was particularly tricky. We wanted something that said “fantasy” and “dystopia” and “romantic” and “big in scope but character driven,” and getting all those elements to come together was a huge challenge. But I’m a huge fan of Pablo Hurtado de Mendoza, the artist, and he’s worked on one of my other books, Arch-Conspirator, so when he came up as a possibility in our conversations, we agreed to just let him interpret the prompt and go from there. It worked out very well!
Those of us who have just finished Seek The Traitor’s Son will be eager to know what happens next. Is there anything you can tease about book two?
Oh, it’s so hard to do that without spoiling anything major! But let me put it this way: “the traitor’s son” can be interpreted in more than one way.
How has your writing process changed over the years?
Divergent was my debut, and it was the second book I’d ever finished writing, so I barely knew myself as a writer back then. For a while after that I tried to force myself to work the way other people work, or maybe the way I thought I should work. But what I’ve discovered recently is that while everyone can grow as a writer, they have to be themselves while they do it. And I’m an iterator. I learn by doing. I can’t force myself to fully develop an idea at the outline stage; I have to build it through experimentation.
Luckily, I write fast and I am one of the most eager revisers you’ll ever meet. So I’m thrilled to try something out, write fifty pages that don’t work, discover the one thing that does work, repurpose it, and try again, and again, and again. To some writers it probably sounds like an absurd waste of time and words, but to me, I delight in it. I enjoy myself a lot more now.
And where do you get your inspiration from, more generally?
I just try to be a curious person. I read about, watch, listen to whatever catches my attention, and eventually I find those things working their way into my writing, sometimes a decade later.
We obviously can’t chat to you without asking about The Sixth Faction, coming out later this year. Are there any sneak peeks or information that you can share about it?
The premise of The Sixth Faction is that Tris chooses a different faction at her Choosing Ceremony, of course, but it’s a little more complicated than that – Tris’s Choosing Ceremony is interrupted, to catastrophic effect, and that’s what sparks the change. The book goes into parts of dystopian Chicago that you didn’t see in the original Divergent series. It felt like building a new world inside the old one.
And how has it been returning to the Divergent universe?
For a long time, I’ve carried a lot of baggage about Divergent – the reaction to the series was mostly positive and I’m so grateful for its success, but I really internalized a lot of the negativity about it, probably because I was so young when it came out and unprepared for the scale of what I experienced. I returned to the universe to see if I could make the baggage a little lighter for myself.
Sometimes writing it was really difficult, and I was prepared for that. What I wasn’t expecting is how much fun I would have, and how much prouder I would become of the work I did back then. No matter how The Sixth Faction does or how it’s received, it’s already accomplished its goal, for me: I feel lighter now.
Ellis is a freelance journalist, based in the UK, with a love of all things books. She also routinely chairs bookish events up and down the country, getting the scoop from some of the biggest and bestselling authors to keep you in the know.