Veronica Roth: A Case Study in How Authors' Drafts Change

Veronica Roth: A Case Study in How Authors' Drafts Change

This article relates to Seek the Traitor's Son

Veronica Roth's latest novel, Seek the Traitor's Son, is a dystopian fantasy featuring extensive character development, a mysterious prophecy, and deep explorations of grief and guilt. Roth is an old hand at writing dystopian novels: she began drafting the dystopian YA novel Divergent in the early 2000s when she was a senior at Northwestern University. The debut was published in 2011, in the middle of the Hunger Games era of popular dystopian novels, and immediately landed on one of the New York Times bestseller lists; the book remained on one bestseller list or another for 47 weeks. By 2013, the Divergent trilogy had sold a combined 6.7 million copies, and a film adaptation of Divergent was released in 2014.

But the criticism of her books—that they had inconsistent worldbuilding, and were cheesy or too unrealistic—stuck with Roth, and although she wrote several standalones after that, it wasn't until the fall of 2019 that Roth began working on another dystopian novel. Roth's conception of this novel and the world it depicted didn't come to her fully formed but rather changed a lot over the six years and many drafts it took to complete; that process, which Roth wrote about in a Substack newsletter, is an interesting case study in how much can change between drafts and how a writer finds the "right" version of their story.

In the case of Seek the Traitor's Son, the novel started with "the idea of two people who are told they're destined to destroy each other, and what happens when love and loyalty complicate that prophecy," Roth said in an interview. Elegy, the novel's main female lead, was originally going to be a king seeking help from a dangerous man named Theren. This initial draft, only five pages long, mostly revolved around the dynamic between these two characters, but Roth found Theren's character more interesting, and so the second draft was his backstory, with very indistinct world building and no Elegy. It took four more drafts before Roth even began exploring Elegy; the subsequent two drafts revealed Elegy's character, especially through her interactions with Theren.

And yet having solved the issue of the characters, Roth said she realized that she "had no idea, really, where this story took place and how the setting impacted the characters and plot." Draft nine was thus set on a ruined and futuristic Earth, resulting from a previous suggestion from Roth's YA publisher that "they would prefer 'grounded' books (code in this case for 'set on Earth')." Roth ran with that and found that setting the book on Earth sparked lots of world-building ideas, including the idea of the Fever, a virus that kills everyone but resurrects half of the infected after a few days and grants them supernatural abilities, which allowed her to explain the magic that was in the earlier drafts. ("It is now my favorite aspect of the worldbuilding, and I can't believe I wrote EIGHT DRAFTS without it," she wrote.)

After 3,000 pages of writing, the tenth draft became the rough draft of what would become Seek the Traitor's Son; and writing all those drafts was a learning experience that taught the author more about what she wanted and what was right for the story. Roth contrasts Seek with her Divergent trilogy: with Divergent, she wrote in a different newsletter, "I was trying to make the book feel as big as the space it was taking up in my life. The scale had to be as grand as I could make it." Seek, on the other hand, is built on smaller moments; "Intimate moments between characters engage our emotions, and there are ways to make those intimate moments feel just as consequential as huge set pieces," she writes. The importance of that intimacy was revealed to Roth through extensive development and revision of the novel.

Filed under Books and Authors

This article relates to Seek the Traitor's Son. It first ran in the May 20, 2026 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.

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