Divergent (Divergent, #1)

by Veronica Roth

THERE IS ONE mirror in my house. It is behind a sliding panel in the hallway upstairs. Our faction allows me to stand in front of it on the second day of every third month, the day my mother cuts my hair.

I’ve noticed a pattern, which is that I often enter a story, as a writer, from a male character’s perspective—and then about fifty pages in, I discover that the story is not really his at all. The earliest version of Divergent was written from Tobias’s perspective. He was the one born in Abnegation, who chose Dauntless because he couldn’t stand to stay where he was. His story ultimately changed anyway—you can see that in the short stories I wrote from his perspective in Four: A Divergent Collection—but when I gave that emotional arc, not to him, but to a small, meek girl instead, the story really came to life. The same thing happened to me with my new series, Carve the Mark, which begins as the story of a gentle, quiet boy who gets kidnapped and has to fight to get back home—and then turns into a story about a fierce young woman with supernatural chronic pain who realizes she has a responsibility to take down her own brother. Writers don’t always control how they find their way into their stories. I certainly don’t. But I do try to save everything I can, even if I end up deleting it. I still have the first few pages of Divergent from Tobias’s perspective! In that early version, the first two paragraphs were: “Every third Saturday of the month, Tobias and his brother took turns sitting on a stool in their father’s bathroom. The man held the clippers in one hand and a towel in the other, ready to brush stray hairs from whichever son’s neck happened to be sprinkled with them at that particular moment. The other brother stood off to the side, watching, and waiting for his own turn. It took about twenty minutes. Twenty minutes, every third Saturday. Every third Saturday of the month, Tobias stared at his reflection in the mirror and hated his father for cutting off his hair. He hated the sound of the clippers buzzing in the silent bathroom. He hated the itchy sprinkling of tiny, fine black hairs that dusted the back of his neck. He hated Caleb’s passive face as he regarded the ritual, like it was unimportant, like it didn’t matter. And there was something else that he hated, something less tangible, more indescribable. He hated feeling like he had no choice."