I read The Hunger Games a few months ago and jotted down some notes on what lessons I could pull from Suzanne Collins work. Here they are:
1. Speed is key. The faster people read, the more absorbed they are. By creating a plot outline before you write the novel, this can help you stay on course with what's happening (think event after event after event...) and create that tickle in the fingertips called "page-turniness" that so many blockbuster novels have. This is also related to Tension, No. 4, below.
2. Stereotypes and tropes have their uses and their surprises. The reader needs to get the character and their conflict as soon as possible. Within one word, within one sentence, if possible. If you need to use a stereotype or trope (such as a rundown, coal-mining community that reminds people of everything they've ever heard of—where else?—Appalachia) then use it, but know that you're using it.
3. At the end of a successful book, readers want to go back, reread and discuss. How to achieve this? Part of it lies in the character's attributes and in a story that draws people in. It's about developing a fan-base, a cult, a culture around what you've created. There may be a hundred answers to what lets (not makes) people opt-in to a story and into a character. Relevance, heroism, tension, and many, many more. But see No. 9 for my counterargument to this point.
3. At the end of a successful book, readers want to go back, reread and discuss. How to achieve this? Part of it lies in the character's attributes and in a story that draws people in. It's about developing a fan-base, a cult, a culture around what you've created. There may be a hundred answers to what lets (not makes) people opt-in to a story and into a character. Relevance, heroism, tension, and many, many more. But see No. 9 for my counterargument to this point.
4. Tension, that pull forward, that worry about the characters. In order to have this in your story there has to be danger for the character. There has to be frightening tension. In The Hunger Games it's the upfront prospect of the games themselves that the protagonist, Katniss, is throttling into.
5. When the plot gets going, keep it going. For a page-turner like The Hunger Games, there's that point in the book (somewhere after the setup of the character, setting, conflict, etc. but before the climax) where you, as the reader, are absorbed. You are in the story till the end. At this point, what you want is just the relevant facts and figures, the information that's going to get you to that end and denouement. It's a bit like fast food, drive thru, immediate satisfaction reading but it keeps those fingertips tingling. Then, once the loose strings of the plot begin to come together, after the climax, go ahead and write that denouement that the reader has earned.
6. Most people are reading for escapism and that's okay. Whether fantasy or science-fiction or thriller crime novels, a lot of what people are reading about involve subject matter that could never happen in the real world. And that's the allure. That's why I read books and that's why a lot of people, especially non-readers, pick up and read books. We want to be taken to a place we can't drive to. A place that lets us leave our everyday lives just for a few hours and live through fiction for a little while.
7. Games or competitions are easily understood. They can be fun, too. It's easy to get sucked into the rules, especially if those rules are something we can relate to—whether gladiator games or soccer-like matches or the game of life!
8. Violence has its purpose but needless violence is a turnoff. There is that gore in The Hunger Games which keeps us, as human beings, drawn in. And not only that, it's teenagers who are doing the goring or being gored. I don't know precisely what the allure of that is, to most people, but it's probably psychological and an important lesson to learn when learning to write and tell stories. Sometimes, the best way to build tension is to threaten the protagonist with a horrible, violent, gory death. This is something a lot of readers and non-readers can face-value understand and empathize with.
9. Philosophizing is a turnoff. Better to let the reader who wants to philosophize do it after they've read the book. This is about understanding your audience. You can write a story for people who want to be an escape-artist, or you can write a story for an editor at a publishing house. or for that lonely kid down the street, or for the rebel at work, or for the salivating movie-watcher audience always hungry for more action. Your audience can be as broad or as exclusive as you want. But people who want to read philosophical treatises read just that: philosophical treatises. Not novels. Not bestseller novels. But they might read your novel, if drawn into your story the same way a non-reader would pick up and read your story. Then they might go full-on philosopher on your stuff after buying and reading it. And that can deepen your fan-base significantly. But let your reader do what they want to do with your work.
10. Metaphors for actions, words, moral choices, scenery, rules of the game, of society, all of this is the background substance that separates relevant art from all the rest. There's a lot that can be extrapolated from The Hunger Games, even though it's not a very long book. There are ideas about social hierarchy and class consciousness, about economic exploitation (colonialism, anyone?), ethos and entertainment, fame and identity, and on.
11. A protagonist that people want to be. That has a cool skill. That has some sort of special power. That has spirit above all else. A character people can follow or who maybe they just would like to know, or who they would like to have on their own team. A character who wins in the end. A character who, you and I, and most anybody else, would be happy to root for. Who's got that moral, emotional something that makes us say, "Oh, that's my hero..."