Why First Scenes Work - The Hunger Games

The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins is the dystopian young adult fantasy that launched a thousand dystopian young adult fantasy ships. What sets it apart from a lot of similar books is the high standard of writing, which is very mature in tone and never patronising as some YA can be. It pulls no punches in its depiction of a revolution in a brutal alternate world where materialism and corruption rule over justice.

The title tells us this book will be one of jarring conflicts – hunger is not supposed to be a game, but then games are not supposed to be deadly. This story is a powerful one, but heavily conceptual as it asks the reader to imagine a world severely different from our own and one that is, for most of us, too extreme to be conceivable. For this reason, the story had to be told through a first person narrative. We had to see the personal, human impact of this dystopia close up, and who better to show us than Katniss Everdeen?

Essentially, Katniss is the everywoman, someone just normal enough that any teenage girl reading her story can relate to her, who just happens to have the particular skills that get her noticed, and then used to represent a campaign. She is also someone whose life has been warped more than others by the world she lives in. Her father was killed in the mines, which led her to become the provider for her family, a role that forced her to develop the hardiness, resourcefulness and archery skills she needs to survive the Hunger Games.

The first chapter starts with one of the most important ideas of any book: the protagonist’s motivation. Through the horror and madness of the Games and rebellion that follows in the third book, Katniss’s family are her reason. In fact, it is her love for Prim that is the catalyst for her journey since she takes the place of her sister as a tribute.

Collins could have chosen to start the book with the reaping, and worked the backstory in after that. She could have started the book with Katniss already entering the arena, but instead she chose to show Katniss at home first, to establish what it is she has to lose. After all, it is never just Katniss’s life at stake. It is her family, her village, even her entire society that hangs in the balance.

Katniss’s status as the everywoman begins in the first line ‘When I woke up, the other side of the bed was cold’. This sentence is neither particularly unusual nor striking. It could apply to any character, in any fictional world, but it immediately implies a sense of loneliness. The domestic normalcy that follows as she describes her sister and mother is quickly undermined by the sinister and grotesque details used to describe their cat. In these few first paragraphs Collins establishes a life of familial simplicity within a harsh, ugly world where death is never far away, neatly presaging the story to come.

To increase the sense of foreboding, the reaping is mentioned several times before we come to learn what this term means. This is a technique used often by writers to increase their reader’s anticipation and keep the pages turning. As the chapter continues, Collins explains the details of Katniss’s world from the nature and dangers of the districts to the fact that they are ruled from the Capitol with a light descriptive hand, revealing just enough detail to pique the reader’s interest but not so much to bog us down.

As well as introducing the motivations and settings of Katniss’s world, we meet main characters such as Gale and Effie Trinket and find the underlying theme of rebellion in Gale’s quiet suggestions that he and Katniss could run off and live in the woods in defiance of the laws of the land. Katniss states that she would rather get shot in the head than die of hunger, which foreshadows the future political unrest and her role in it.

Interestingly, we don’t meet Peeta in the first chapter. Although we later learn that Katniss and Peeta already know each other, they only become close because of the Games. The Games create their relationship, just as they create their relationship for the games, which is why he is all she has left when everything from home is destroyed or irreparably altered.

The first chapter ends with the reaping – the event that launches the story, the end to Katniss’s status quo. Every story has one, but by including that event in the first scene we have a complete arc from a difficult but loving domestic life to an alien, inhuman event in which people, like crops, are cut down in their prime at the command of an unseen callous ruling force.

 In that first chapter, we meet our heroine, learn enough of her upbringing to sympathise with her and cannot help but admire her for her bravery and self-sacrifice. This is a story all about sacrifice, the sacrifice of lives, and the refusal to sacrifice conscience and humanity to succeed. Ending the chapter on a shock cliff-hanger, Collins compels us to continue reading in order to find out how Katniss Everdeen will survive against the odds.

As writers we should remember that the first chapter of our books must encapsulate the book as a whole and that, ideally, we should treat each chapter as a story in itself with a clear beginning, middle, end, and driving force or antagonist. How do the first and last lines of the first chapter compare or contrast?

 Think about how you can establish what your main character cares about and their motivation in the story, and then sit back and enjoy getting in their way. :)

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