Use these questions or activities to help gauge students’ familiarity with and spark their interest in the context of the work, giving them an entry point into the text itself.

Short Answer

1. How can authors use their real-life experiences to communicate important messages in fantasy novels? What storytelling techniques might they use in worldbuilding and plotting?

Teaching Suggestion: These questions will prepare students to discuss Suzanne Collins’s inspirations for Gregor the Overlander. The novel’s topics include the realities of war and conflict, inspired by Collins’s experience of growing up with her father, a veteran of the Vietnam War. Through her father, Collins gained an early understanding of war’s consequences and long-term impacts, and it affected the messages she wished to convey through depicting wars in her novels. In addition, Collins used her own experience reading Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland to inspire the setting of Gregor the Overlander. She wanted to answer the question of how “falling down a rabbit hole” might be different if translated to an urban setting, likely one that would be more familiar to contemporary audiences.

• In the 2011 article “Suzanne Collins’s War Stories for Kids“ from The New York Times, Collins discusses in an interview how her family’s experience with war influenced the kinds of stories she wanted to tell about its realities.