WATTMAG: June 2015 UNVEILING THE NEW GENERATION

The Fantasy World of Marie Lu

The Fantasy World of Marie Lu

Written by: forfatter

No book is ever going to please everybody. If you try to please everyone, you please nobody. You just have to write something that you like yourself. - Marie Lu

Technically, the first story I ever wrote was when I was five. It was about farm animals. (Laughs) My first real novel never got published. I wrote that when I was 14. That was a fantasy novel. I basically wrote a very bad version of Lord of the Rings. - Marie Lu when asked what was the first story she ever wrote.

One of the best things in being part of this generation is that we are free to be whoever we want. There is nothing wrong for claiming everything you're good at. But there will be certain moments in your life - like, when you need to decide what course to take in college - where you start to question what is it you really want to do. When you are stuck in at a crossroad of your career you can create an intersection of your interests and make a living out of it. Take for example the young adult writer Marie Lu.

Marie Lu, the best-selling author of the young adult dystopian thriller, sci-fi trilogy Legend - including Legend, Prodigy and Champion - that is described by Entertainment Weekly as "fine writing and excellent execution." was born in 1984 in Wuxi, China. She and her family moved to the United States when she was five. She attended the University of Southern California and interned at Disney Interactive Studios as a flash artist. Before becoming a writer, Marie worked at a video game company as an artist.

Even though she decided early on that she wanted to pursue a career in writing, she still explored the arts to save money to follow her dream. Now that she's a best-selling author, she uses her art skills to develop her characters "I find that I can't get into my characters' heads unless I see them on paper. It's a part of my writing process."

She was first inspired to write Legend while watching Les Miserables one afternoon, and wondered how the relationship between a famous criminal versus a prodigious detective might translate into a more modern story.

In the Legend trilogy, her favorite character was Kaede. "She was really fun for me to write. I call her my wish-fulfillment character. She's who I wish I could have been because she flies jets and I loved fighter jets when I was a kid."

In her new book Young Elites, follows the story of a young girl called Adelina, who goes on a journey to find her true identity and the truth about the society she's living in. According to her, when she first started writing the story, it was not Adelina's point of view, "-it was from a different character's point of view, who was a very good-hearted, very normal, very boring character and I wrote a hundred pages of that-" In the first version, Adelina was the villain that the rest of them were trying to overthrow or destroy. Her agent didn't like the main character and ask her to write more about Adelina who was more interesting. "That was the moment when I said to myself, 'I think the problem with this book is that I don't want to write a hero's story. I want to write a villain's story.'"

For her, it was a very interesting thing to explore a villain story. "Everyone thinks they're doing the right thing and I wanted to explore the other side of that - what it is like to be inside the head of Darth Vader, Magneto or Loki. They all feel like they're justified in what they're doing and so that's why she's (Adelina) the way she is and even though it could be unsettling, writing from her point of view, it was a good challenge."

Until now she uses her art skills to develop her characters like what she did to Young Elites. "Before I ever understood who Adelina was as a person, I drew her and I started playing with her appearance. I made it so that she had a missing eye and a scarred side of her face and once I drew that I thought, 'This is an interesting piece of this character's personality. Why is she missing an eye? What happened in the past? How did it make her change as a person?' It was part of the fluid and sometimes chaotic way of creating a character."

In her every novel, there was this sibling dynamic that plays a huge part in the story. The reason for this was that she has no siblings, "I'm an only child and for me it's always interesting to explore sibling dynamics because I don't have any. That's probably why they keep appearing."

In her writing process, she tends to write from 7 am to 1 pm. It doesn't really matter how much time she have in a day, that's all she can get before her creativity starts running out for a day. She tends to write at home because she was easily distracted when she go to coffee shops and to other public place. Her favorite place to write was on a train. "There's something about the movement of the train that is very conducive to writing. So, if I ever get a chance to be on a train again, I will try to write."

She also listens to music while writing, but she can't listen to music that has lyrics in it because the words will distract her so she listen to a lot of soundtracks, ambient noise or songs with lyrics that are in a language she don't understand. While writing Young Elites: "I listened to a ton of video game soundtracks: the Assassin's Creed soundtrack and one group called Two Steps from Hell. They do a lot of orchestral, trailer-type music. If you've seen a movie trailer, you've heard their music. They do a lot of epic soundtrack and scores and I listen to their stuff a lot."

When asked to give tips for young writers: "The one piece of advice I always give to aspiring writers is to don't be afraid to write something bad. A lot of young people feel the need to make it perfect. The more important thing to do is to finish something as long as a novel. It can be the worst writing on the face of the planet. But the word count has to be there. That's the biggest hurdle an aspiring novelist has to get over."

Source: Excerpt from Marie Lu's interview by the Philippine Star when she visited the Philippines to promote her books.