Collins rarely hands out writing advice in the way most authors do, in lists or manifestos. What she's offered instead are a handful of specific working principles, repeated across different interviews over more than a decade. Here's what she's actually said, not paraphrased into something tidier.
Structure Isn't Optional, and It's Supposed to Disappear
Collins has said she works out the key structural points of a book before she writes toward them: the inciting incident, the acts, the breaks, a mid-story reversal, the crisis, the climax. She's been explicit that she doesn't map everything, and that she leaves room between those fixed points for characters to develop, or for an unexpected door to open that she decides to walk through. The skeleton comes first. The discovery happens inside it.
That habit goes back further than her novels. Collins started as a playwright before she moved into children's television and then fiction, and she's said the three-act dramatic structure she learned in that first career has stayed with her for decades, applied across all ten of her novels.
I've worked with it for decades, so it's almost second nature, and that allows me to spend my energy elsewhere.
Suzanne Collins, Scholastic interview for Sunrise on the Reaping, 2025
Know Exactly Who You're Writing For
Collins writes about war, starvation, and children killing children, and she's said directly that the difficulty of that material doesn't excuse a writer from thinking hard about their reader. Her method is specific: she's described imagining how she'd explain a difficult event to her own children, figuring out exactly what detail they'd need to actually understand it, and cutting whatever would just be gratuitous.
That method exists to include hard material responsibly, matching every violent or painful detail to what a specific reader can actually process. Her stated position goes further: a writer who can't fully commit to a difficult idea is better off writing a different story. Half-measures on violence, in her framing, serve no one. For more on how this plays out across her books, see the full Suzanne Collins writing routine.
The Same Rules, Whatever the Age
Collins has also pushed back on the idea that writing for young readers calls for a fundamentally different toolkit than writing for adults. She started as a playwright working for adult audiences, moved into children's television, and later into middle grade and YA fiction, and she's said the technical approach barely changed across those shifts. Set up a world, stay true to its internal logic, and the same rules of plot, character, and theme apply no matter who's reading. A story built around cuddly animated animals probably isn't going to kill anyone off. A story built around giant flesh-and-blood rats with a grudge is. In her account, the age of the reader shapes which material you choose, not how seriously you build it.
What You Can Steal
- Fix your structural points before you draft. Know your inciting incident, your reversal, your crisis, your climax. Leave the rest open for discovery.
- Build one structural tool you trust completely. Collins leaned on a three-act shape from her playwriting years across a decade of novels. One well-worn tool beats reinventing your approach every book.
- Write hard material for a specific reader, not a vague one. Ask what that exact reader needs to understand, and cut what's only there to shock.
- If you can't fully commit to an idea, set it aside. Half-measures on difficult material read as worse than waiting until you can go all the way in.
- Don't downgrade your craft for a younger reader. Collins has said the same rules of plot, character, and theme apply regardless of audience age. Only the material changes, not the seriousness you bring to it.