Marie Lu’s fantasy world

MANILA, Philippines - Stemming from occasional outlinings at a coffee shop, six-hour-long bursts of creativity, drawings filled with imagination and the suspense-filled soundtrack of the video game Assassin’s Creed, comes the first book of Marie Lu’s fantasy series, The Young Elites. Known for her science-fiction series, Legend, Marie takes us back to a time before the Renaissance in Italy. Occuring a decade after the Blood Fever (an equivalent of the Black Death) struck, we are introduced to Adelina Amouteru, a 16-year-old girl with silver hair, and her decent into darkness.

I sat down with her for a chat about writing (and drawing) her characters.

PHILIPPINE STAR: Why did you choose to write a novel that was set in the past? What inspired you to do so?

MARIE LU: I’ve always liked writing and reading fantasy novels and most fantasy is set in some sort of historic setting. So I never questioned that I would write a fantasy series someday, set in some historical time period. I was specifically looking for a period of time where some sort of huge, world-wide epidemic had happened, either the 1920s Spanish Flu or the Black Death that happened right before the Renaissance. It was a part of the plot that I needed to happen in order to have superpowers for the kids. So I decided to write about the Renaissance because it was a very romantic, historic time and I love Italy. I’m a big fan of the Assassin’s Creed games and Assassin’s Creed 2 is all set in Italy. That, combined with the plague, was what made me choose that time period.

What inspired you to delve into such a dark protagonist/antagonist, in contrast to Day and June from the Legend series who were good at heart?

When I first started writing the story, it was not from 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 and I gave it to my agent. My agent got back to me and told me, “This is not working, I don’t like this main character, you’re going to have to rethink this.” So I asked her if there was anything she did like about the pages that I gave her and she said, “You’ve got this side character named Adelina. She’s kind of interesting — she’s the only interesting thing to me and I want you to tell me more about her.” In the first version, Adelina was the villian that the rest of them were trying to overthrow or destroy. 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 villian’s story.”

That’s so interesting! What made you want to write a villian’s story?

I thought it was a very interesting thing to explore because heroes and villians are so subjective. 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 the way she is and even though it could be unsettling, writing from her point of view, it was a good challenge.

Every child who survived the Blood Fever had some sort of mark that led people to believe they were malfettos and potentially part of the society referred to as the Young Elites. What inspired Adelina’s image and why did you choose to give her only one eye?

I thought it was an interesting piece of who she is. Before I ever start drafting a book, I will draw my characters just to try to understand who they are. It’s actually a huge part of my writing process and the two are basically inseparable. I actually cannot start writing a story until I’ve drawn my characters and sketch the world that they live in to get a sense of what that place is like. So, 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.

Would you call Adelina a strong female character?

I like to think of her as just a character and she has her weaknesses and she has her complexities. I do think that she is strong in the sense that she completely owns the fact that she knows she does inappropriate things but she owns it, she knows that this is the way she is. She will do things that are selfish and I think there is a certain strength to that, to do things and not care if people like it or to do things for yourself and not worry about being called selfish. She’s not a self-sacrificing person. She will do things for people she loves but she has no issue with doing things for herself and I think there is a certain strength to that.

I noticed a prominent sibling dymanic within the novel that plays a huge part in what Adelina calls “kindness with no strings attached.” What inspired you to put this in the novel?

Yeah, I’ve noticed that I have a tendency to put sibling relationships into all of my books. I think a part of it is because I don’t have any 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.

If you were a character in the novel, what power would you give yourself?

This is going to sound really nerdy but I would love the power to stop time so that I would have more time to do stuff and be productive. It’s so horribly nerdy! But I feel like that would be a very useful power! You stop time, you write a book and you turn it on again and it’s back to where it was!

Since you mentioned a yearning for more time, what is your writing process like? Where do you draw inspiration from?

I am a morning person so I tend to write from 7 a.m. to 1 p.m. It doesn’t really matter how much time I have in a day, that’s all I can get before my creativity starts running out for the day. That’s my basic schedule. I tend to write at home — I get distracted when I go to coffee shops and things like that. I will occassionally write in coffee shops but it will only be to do outlining or editing or something like that. I also have to listen to music while I’m working — I have trouble working in a completely silent environment. I also can’t listen to music that has lyrics in it because the words will distract me so I listen to a lot of soundtracks, ambient noise or songs with lyrics that are in a language I don’t understand — I’m okay cause I don’t understand what they’re saying! My favorite place to write is on a train. I’ve only done it once in my life but I can see why authors like J.K. Rowling come up with stuff while on the 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. 

What soundtracks do you listen to?

For the Young Elites, I listened to a ton of video games 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. Otherwise, I listen to ambient noise like rain or water or something like that.

You’re in the process of writing the next book, right? When is that likely to come out?

Yeah, there’s no set date yet but I’m hoping for next fall!