Kaylie Hoskins asked Veronica Roth:

What was your brainstorming process for developing your characters in divergent, specifically Tris?

Veronica Roth I'm just going to talk about Tris, because otherwise I'll ramble on and on, and each character is different.

In the beginning, I knew three things about Tris: I knew she was born in Abnegation, I knew she would choose Dauntless, and I knew what she sounded like.

The manuscript I wrote before Divergent was a little more "voicey," which for me meant WORDY, and an agent who ultimately rejected it did me the huge favor of marking up the writing in the first five pages to show me how I could improve my prose. (That agent signed me with Divergent, by the way, and we are still working together now.) My creative writing professor had made similar observations at around the same time, pointing out a particularly well-written passage in one of my assignments. After those two experiences, I realized that my natural voice as a writer is spare, not particularly poetic, and I wanted to make sure that my next manuscript embraced that as a strength instead of trying to change it. So I decided to write from the point of view of a character whose voice was as concise and clear as I wanted my writing to be.

This choice was about the style of prose in my manuscript, yes, but it was also about Tris. An Abnegation girl with a tight, sharp voice who chooses Dauntless -- that says a lot about her, doesn't it? It told me that she looked harmless, but she wasn't harmless at all. That her bravery would be surprising. That her insides didn't match her outsides. And really, that's a lot to know about a character at the start.

I got to know her better as I proceeded through her story, of course, and that's how I always build characters-- by seeing how they react to the world around them and by defining what they want in the midst of their situations. But it's good to have a starting point, and for Tris, her voice was mine. Each character has a little story like this, of the moment that I "got" them. For Tobias it was when he took Tris through his fear landscape. For Tris's mother it was when she told Tris to have a piece of cake. They're moments of oddness that surprise me, but also *don't* surprise me-- moments of insight when what I don't know collides with what I've always known.

This is the subconscious aspect of writing-- you put the words down, but you're still startled by them. The trick with characters, then, is to stay open to surprise. And I do that by just feeling my way through the necessary scenes. I plan the plot but I don't plan every moment. And sometimes that makes me go back and change the outline.

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