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Seven years, 1 million words: How Veronica Roth found her next novel, Seek the Traitor’s Son

The Divergent author has grown a lot since that series came out, but she is still maybe not as organized as she'd like to be.

News by Trent Cannon, Senior Contributing writer

Published on Thu Nov 06 2025

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Here is a hard truth: writing a novel is hard. It usually takes years of work and, this is the important thing, multiple, sometimes painful edits and rewrites. Veronica Roth shared the extent of her edits for her upcoming book, Seek the Traitor’s Son, which is out next year – and the epic total number of words she wrote to get to the final draft.

Although Veronica Roth tries to plan her novels in advance, she admits that she finds her organizational skills somewhat lacking compared to those of other authors she knows.

During her panel at New York Comic Con 2025, Marie Lu said that many of her writer friends stick to the plan they had at the start, to which Roth replied, “What must that be like? To know things before you start.”

Then she shared how she overcomes her lack of planning – by writing a lot more.

“I compensate for my lack of organization with speed. So, I am a really fast writer, but I don’t do it right the first time, so I do it many times. So, I have one Scrivener file for [Seek the Traitor’s Son]. I looked at it a couple of weeks ago to see how many words I wrote before I got to this draft, and it was 1 million. I’ve been working on it for seven years, so it's not, like, crazy, but it’s a lot of wasted words.”

Lu helpfully reminded Roth – and every writer listening – that no words are truly wasted if they help your book get to where it needs to be, but that is still a lot of words on the cutting room floor.

Seek the Traitor’s Son by Veronica Roth goes on sale May 12, 2026.

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