Yesterday (Sunday, November 23, 2014), I met New York Times Best Selling Author, Marie Lu. I was invited by National Bookstore to attend the Bloggers' Forum for an exclusive Q and A with the lovely author of Legend, Prodigy, Champion and Young Elites. She was absolutely pretty!
Marie Lu exudes elegance. She's a little short but her legs are to swoon for! Plus, she was wearing this blouse which was a little low at the back thus, I got a glimpse of her tattoo! It was huge! The creepy stalker that I was, I stared at the details of it while I was standing behind her! Well, I saw swirls and feathers! (Sorry, Marie Lu! can't help but stare!)
Chad Dee, the lovely host, didn't beat around the bush. He went straight to the Q and A and I stood near the speaker so I can record everything crystal clear. You ready? Here are the bits and pieces! (I WAS SPOILED THOOOOOO!)
Lyra: What made you decide to write books for young adults?
ML: I actually didn't know that I was writing books for young adults until I was writing Legend and gave it to my agent. I pitched Legend to my agent as just science fiction and it was my agent who was the one who told me "this actually fits into a category called "young adult"" and I never really heard of young adult until that point. So I kinda fell into it by accident because my writing style apparently fitted really well. But looking back, am not surprised because you know, when I was in high school, I read almost exclusively fantasy and science fiction, and a lot of those books, even though they're categorized as adult fiction, tend to have teenage protagonists, so I've always kinda thought of stories in that way with teenage characters at the center of it. I think the process of growing up, you know, the buildings roaming story line falls where in really well with fantasy and science fiction because you're like, you're growing up and also, the world is ending and it just makes everything more extreme, and I think that's what makes it fun for me to write about. And I love reading young adult now. I read almost exclusively young adult.
Michelle: You are now a Best Selling Author but do you have other goals you think you have yet to accomplish?
ML: Yeah, I hope so. There's definitely still things I wanna do. I would love to do a picture book someday. Before I was a full time writer, I was an artist in the game industry and I would love to be able to do something again that involves artwork of some kind and I would love to do something with video games again, if I could.
Alyanna: What or who inspired the personalities and names of your characters June and Day?
ML: For June and Day, let's see. Day's street name was inspired by his personality. I wanted to find a name that symbolized his very optimistic view on life, you know, his motto is "to walk in the light". He is somebody who is always seeking the truth and looking for the positive so I thought that the name "Day" fit him really well. June was named after the month of June, because I thought her personality fits that of a Geminis. Geminis are kind of known for being intelligent and ambitious and logical and I've felt like that fit June really well so that's why she's named that. June's personality was inspired by Sherlock Holmes, so she's kinda like a teen girl Sherlock Holmes, she and I probably had the least in common out of all of my characters because she's so left-brained, I am not left-brained at all. And Day's personality was inspired by combination of characters that I've always loved, you know, the thief with a heart of gold. Hans Solo and Robin Hood, that type of character.. I've always had a soft spot for characters like that so I think that's were it came from for Day.
Sab: Was the plot for Legend inspired by the social issues we're experiencing today?
ML: That's a great question. It actually was inspired very much by the social climate especially back in 2009 of the United States because that's when I was writing Legend. Back in 2009, that was right after Obama had been elected and in the States, our two main political parties absolutely hated each other. They don't usually like each other but they really did not like each other in 2009, to the point where it was a little bit unsettling to watch. That was an inspiration behind splitting the US in to two countries physically and assigning characteristics of the two political parties to one of each country and pushing them both to their absolute extremes. You know, I don't think "extreme anything" is good. So that was my little token to what was happening in the States at that time. So yeah, it was very much inspired by that. The world of Legend is all inspired by real life dystopias so I read a lot about you know, North Korea and The Holocaust..just things that have happened in our history..Like the Japanese Internment Camps in the US that could put into this made up dystopia.
Maricar: It is easier to write the plot (Young Elites) when you have visual images in mind?
ML: Yeah, that's a huge part of my writing process. I actually cannot start writing a story until I've drawn my characters physically out by hand. So before I even start drafting a story, like with Legend or Young Elites, I draw my main characters to figure out who they are and what their personalities are and I will sketch the world to get a sense of what that place is like. I find that I have trouble connecting with my characters if I don't actually know what they look like. And a lot of their personalities are drawn from what I end up coming up with in their sketches. The two are pretty much inseparable for me and as I write you know, there are times where I will get lazy or I have writer's block or something and I'll stop writing and turn to drawing to help get my inspiration back.
Hazel: From writing dystopian series, you've transitioned into writing fantasy. What sparked your decision to switch things up?
ML: A part of it is because, when I was growing up, I read nothing but fantasy and science fiction. So now that I had a science fiction series done, I knew that I wanted to do a fantasy series. It was something that I didn't even question. I knew that that was going to be the next genre that I would tackle. Am not sure if I would ever be able to move out of those two genres because I love them so much. What's funny is, when I was writing The Young Elites, I turned in an original hundred pages to my agent that is nothing like what's published now. and my agent hated it. She said to verbatim by email, "I don't think you're cut out to write fantasy" and I had to actually call her back and say, "no, no, no, you have to give me a second chance. I cannot live in world where I am not allowed to write fantasy series". So that was a little bit of a struggle for me at first but I always knew that I wanted to make it to fantasy.
Lea: Definitely, you have a lot of fans for the Legend series, was there any part of the sequels Prodigy and Champion that was sort of influenced by a fan wish or speculation after reading Legend?
ML: I don't think there's anything in the Legend series that was inspired by a fan reaction. Part of the reason is because everything is staggered out by a year, so by the time I start hearing fan reactions to a book, I've already finished writing the next book. So it's already too late to put in that stuff, so I can just sort of watch helplessly as fans react to certain things, am like "oh God, I don't even know what's coming in the next book". So no, I don't think there is anything specifically that was influenced by a fan.
Chyna: In your last book Champion, how you feel about writing that finale, do you think it did justice to the story or do you regret doing it?
ML: Champion was by far the hardest book of the Legend series for me to write. I had a lot of late nights eating chocolates, felt very angsty writing that book. I was very concerned about how people would react to the ending. I have a tendency to like bittersweet endings in books that I read and movies that I watch. I have a tendency to put that in my stuff. But I felt like there was no other good way of ending it. that was the ending I've always wanted to have for the series. I wrote it and turn it to my editor and she wrote back and said "this is great. I don't know how your fans are gonna react" and I was like, "I know this is gonna be a trip, let's brace ourselves and see what happens". So I've been very lucky that most emails that I've gotten from readers seem to be positive. It's you know, something I have to do for the characters and for the storyline if it fits, and try to not consider what to might happen outside of that. For me, it was the ending that I wanted and I felt satisfied with how it ended and hopefully, most readers do as well.
Algel: Do you have any odd rituals before or while writing?
ML: I do have to listen to music while I write. I cannot write in total silence. But I also cannot listen to anything with lyrics because the words distract me. So I can either listen to just sound tracks or ambient noise like rain or water sounds or I can listen to songs with lyrics in a language I don't understand, them I'm okay 'cause I don't know what they're saying. That's probably the strangest ritual that I have. My favorite place to write is on a train. I've only done it once in my life but I can see why JK Rowling enjoyed coming up with stuff while on a train. There's something about the movement of a train that is very conducive to me writing. If I ever get a chance to be on a train again, I will try to write.
Mary Ann: Who is more like you, Day or June?
ML: If I answer that question in the beginning of the series, I would say Day. And if I said it at the end of the series, I would say June. I started off writing June as a character that I thought I had absolutely nothing in common with. She is incredibly left-brained and she's also smarter than I am which is very hard to write a character that is smarter than you are. I would constantly have to stop and research stuff for her. She just knows stuff on top of her head and I don't know anything about. In Prodigy, there's a scene where she starts going on about paper clips, you know, they are made of titanium alloy and all these stuff, and I don't know stuff about paper clip! So I had to stop and go online, go to Wikipedia and read like the history of paper clips for like an hour just to write that one line or dialogue for June. It was very difficult to write about her. She is very logical and I'm not logical at all. She's incredibly practical and I'm not terribly practical. So I guess I related more to Day in the beginning. he wears his heart on his sleeve, he's very emotionally driven, he's a little bit paranoid sometimes, he's very much June's opposite. But as I was writing the series, I started to notice bits and pieces of June's personality that was drawn from my own. Like, we deal with certain things in the same way. We deal with panic in the same way, grief and romance in the same way. And that she sucks at dealing with romance. I started noticing those bits and pieces of myself in her. So by the end of the series, I came to identify more with June and I think, there's a little bit of me in both of those characters.
Precious: You write in such a way that is cinematic, how do you manage this effect specially for the actin scenes?
ML: Thank you! I think it goes back to my art background, I'm just a very visual person so as I'm writing, I'd see thing playing in my head as if it was a movie. So I just try to write what I see. I guess, that's the only way I can describe it. I don't know how else to work, you know, I have to draw everything out before I write it. Everything is very, very visual for me.
Jello (Marie Lu PH): Why did you choose villains to be the protagonists in The Young Elites?
ML: So going back to my story of giving that hundred pages story to my agent and she hated it, she didn't like it because the main character in that early version of Young Elites was a very, very bland, good hearted, totally normal guy. He was perfectly fine but he was like a Clark Kent sort of way, he's just good about everything and just loved everyone, nobody wants to read a book about people like that. I wrote this character and my agent said that he was kind of boring and uninteresting. And I asked her if there was anything that she did like about the first hundred pages that I've given her, and she said, "well, I liked this character named Adelina. She's currently your villain in the original version but she's kind of interesting. Can you tell me more about her?" So, I told her a little bit more about Adelina and said that Adelina was the most interesting character for me to write. She's manipulative and cunning. She doesn't seem to care about other people's emotions to get to her or whatever and I thought that was interesting and different to explore. My agent said, "Well, maybe you should make her your main character!". And that was what got me originally thinking that I wanted to write not a hero's story but a villain's story. It was interesting to explore inside the head of somebody who is essentially gonna be like Darth Vader..a female version of Darth Vader. Everyone thinks they're doing the right thing, everyone thinks they're the hero..Darth Vader and Magneto and Loki, they all have their reasons for doing what they do, they think they're justified and I thought it would be interesting to write from that point of view. What does the world actually look like from there and how could they think that everyone else is wrong that goes against them. That's the part of the inspiration why I wrote The Young Elites the way I did.
Kayla: (THE SPOILER QUESTION HAHA) June's part in the murder of Day's family leads to some serious friction in their relationship. Regardless of Champion's ending, will June eventually redeem herself in Day's eyes or will he see her as his family's killer?
ML: That definitely is a stumbling block for their relationship. It's funny for me to talk about the ending of Champion because I honestly don't know what happens to them after the epilogue of Champion. So I can't really say how they will eventually react to each other.. you know if they go back to their old problems or whatever. So, all I can really say is that I have very good feelings about what happens today in June, so whatever it is people think is the best case scenario for them to have. that's probably what happens. And I feel like they had a good ten years apart, and I feel like that was crucial to their development and growing up. I hope I'm not spoiling anyone! (ME ON THE BACKGROUD: NO SPOILERS) Okay, so before I spoil anyone more, I'll stop. But I feel very optimistic.
Leslie: How hard was it to switch writing from one character to another in a story with alternating point of views? Do you feel biased at times with a particular character?
ML: For Legend, it wasn't that hard only because I've been writing books in that style since I was in high school. One of my favorite books from high school was
The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver and in that book, there are four alternation first person points of view. She does such a good job with it, it was the first book I've ever read in a format like that. So that inspired a high school novel that I wrote to be on the alternating first person point of view perspective and it was a terrible novel but I've been writing in that kind of style for ten years ever since then. I was very used to being in two different character's heads in that way once I got to writing Legend. It was a little trickier with The Young Elites because The Young Elites is mostly told from Adelina's first person point of view but there are like a couple of third person views scattered through out the book. That was a little bit weird for me to switch between and I found myself constantly having to go back and edit it because I would accidentally switch to first person or part tense by accident. I wanted to keep that short and the difference is in The Young Elites, the third person points of view are all complementing Adelina's, so everything is still pointing back to Adelina's. The only reason why the other points of view exist is to reinforce people's opinions about Adelina whereas with Legend, I wanted to have their two first person points of view equal and opposite so that we could see things from across the tracks, Day's from the slums and June's from the wealthy sector and I wanted to show both of those worlds equally. That was the reason behind them and they both have their challenges but I think it helped that I've been writing like that for a very long time.
Jeselle: If the world in the Legend Trilogy was real, which country would you choose to live in: The Republic of The Colonies and why?
ML: Ha, I hope that never happens. I think both of The Republic and The Colonies kind of suck for different reasons and they had their good points for different reasons, too. I don't know what I would pick, I mean honestly, I would rather live in New Antarctica. That was like, my favorite thing to write in Champion, exploring the society where everything is literally a video game. And I know that's probably a dystopian in some sense. It's not the greatest society but I think it'll be a more fun society to be in. At least everything is super colorful.
Elisa: Who is the greater rebel, Day or June and what does rebellion mean for both of them?
ML: That's a great and difficult question. I think Day is the more obvious rebel because of what he does, he's America's Most Wanted Criminal. But I think, I'm gonna go with June being the greater rebel. She has to absolutely change her entire life, a hundred and eighty degrees starting from Legend. I think that's pretty difficult thing to do especially in her position, where everything was great. She could have done nothing and lived a great life, she was in the wealthy sector, she had everything going for her. So in that sense, I think she was by far the bigger rebel of the two of them.
Kai: In Legend, Day and June were basically each other's antagonists and in The Young Elites, Adelina is quite the evil character, what's the experience like in writing in a point of view of a villain and how different is it from writing from Adelina's point of view compared to writing Day and June's?
ML: That's a great question. The biggest difference is, Legend is a very dark world. Day and June are surrounded by darkness and by evil. Even though they were antagonists to each other, they were always good people at heart. They grew up with good families, they had good mothers and fathers and siblings to take care of them and guide them so it was never a problem for me to be in their headspace because they knew what was wrong, they can look at something evil and say, "that's messed up! you should not do that!" and it was not the case with Adelina. She has a very twisted view on life and what she thinks is justified is kind of crazy sometimes. It was very difficult for me to sit down and force myself into her first person point of view for that. What I had to force myself to write I would never think in real life. But what even more unsettling when I wrote something that I thought I can kind of see where she's coming from, and then I would have a moment where I'm like, "whoa! that's not cool! I shouldn't think like that!". I just had to draw from those moments in life where we all have those little moments of like, villainy in us. I live in LA so my first thought is always traffic. So if I'm stuck in traffic for like eight hours and someone cuts in front of me and I just want to see Godzilla come out of the sky and step on their car and destroy them! I'm like, I don't care if you have a family or kids to take care of, I want you to die right now! So thank God I don't have superpowers because I feel like if I was Adelina, and I have the power to do something terrible to somebody that really made me angry, I could do a lot of things that I would regret later. I would draw on those kinds of thoughts when I'm writing Adelina. It was very. very disturbing to be inside that headspace sometimes, for months on end! To the point where you know, I will finish writing one of her chapters and I have to stop and go pet my dogs to remind myself that I'm not actually Darth Vader, that I'm a normal human being who does not normally think like this. So it was a very different experience writing her point of view but also a very challenging experience to explore that headspace.
The signing started after the Q and! It went by quickly and some of my friends had their books doodled on by Marie. I was supposed to get my copy of Champion doodled on as well but someone cut the line! Hmmmp!
After the forum, we had lunch in the food court and talked about books and blogs and people and our lives. We then went to the public book signing and I was so happy to see so many book lovers out there! What's crazy (in a good way) was some people started camping out a day and a half before the actual signing! I adore them for their dedication! There were over around 800 people registered, if I have my numbers right!
Note: I was supposed to take photos for Kayla's blog feature but I failed. Am so sorry, hun.
