Writing means not just staring ugliness in the face, but finding a way to embrace it.
Not writing is as important as writing - go out into the world and remember how interesting it, and the people in it, are.
I've done without doing things, like sleeping and eating, but I need to write.
I know that I'll be writing for young adults for a long time. Mostly because I just love the readers and the teachers and librarians that I interact with.
I used to go outside every day and invent these elaborate worlds and scenarios in my head, and when I grew too old for playing pretend, I started to write everything down instead.
I always appreciate people's opinions, but sometimes I have to take a step back and remember why I'm writing and what I want to do with it. Shutting out the voices is difficult but it's been good for me.
'Divergent' was my utopian world. I mean, that wasn't the plan. I never even set out to write dystopian fiction, that's just what I had when I was finished. At the beginning, I was just writing about a place I found interesting and a character with a compelling story, and as I began to build the world, I realized that it was my utopia.
I think romance is friendship and attraction sort of meeting together and that does influence what I'm writing a lot. I try to establish the attraction, obviously, but I also think it's important to show the characters having actual conversations about things other than their feelings for each other - and to develop their friendship on the page.
I started writing because I decided I was too old to play pretend in the backyard. Then I found that I could create those imaginary worlds on the page.
This concept could easily have gone awry. Stories about love tend to go that way sometimes. They wander into the realm of cheese and never return, which I think is a shame, because there is a way to write about romantic love without breaking out the Velveeta.
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 shouldn’t rely on it, because it’s not guaranteed and it’s not permanent and it’s not sufficient. So work hard, fall in love with the writing — the characters, the story, the words, the themes — and make sure that you are who you are regardless of your life circumstances. That way, when the good things come, they don’t warp you, and when the bad things hit you, you don’t fall apart.
