Opening the Mailbag with Marie Lu

First Draft Episode #231: Marie Lu and Sarah Enni open the
mailbag!

Marie Lu is is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of the
Legend trilogy, The Young Elites trilogy, the Warcross duology,
and more. Her newest book, a historical YA fantasy, The Kingdom
of Back, comes out March 3, and Skyhunter will be out in fall
2020!


The presenting sponsor for this episode is The Slow Novel Lab, a
six-week online writing and creativity course developed and
taught by bestselling and award-winning novelist Nina LaCour
(listen to her First Draft episodes here and here). The next
six-week session of The Slow Novel Lab begins on February 16th,
and you can enroll today by going to NinaLaCour.com.


 


Links and Topics Mentioned In This Episode




You can hear Marie talk about the inspiration for Kingdom of
Back in our very first interview back in 2014! (And don’t
miss her 2017 First Draft interview ahead of the release of
Warcross)




Marie’s agent is Kristin Nelson of Nelson Literary Agency LLC




Marie sold Kingdom of Back to an editor she’s worked with
before, Jenn Besser, Senior Vice President and Publishing
Director, Roaring Brook Press, Farrar Straus Giroux Books for
Young Readers, First Second Books




BTS’s performance on Saturday Night Live




Maurene Goo (hear her First Draft interviews here, here, and
here) is one of the people who inspired me to better quantify
my to-do list!




I love Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting hosted by
John August (listen to his First Draft interview here) and
Craig Mazin. On a recent episode, “How to Write a Movie,”
Craig walks through his structure for a story.




Marie and I talk about using documents, text conversations,
or other non-prose elements to explain things that your
first-person character may not know. An example I use is The
Chosen Ones, the new book by Veronica Roth (listen to her
First Draft interviews here and here), which uses government
documents to fill in world-building.


 




I want to hear from you!


Have a question about writing or creativity for Sarah Enni or her
guests to answer? To leave a voicemail, call (818) 533-1998.


 


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Every Tuesday, I speak to storytellers like Veronica Roth, author
of Divergent; Linda Holmes, author and host of NPR’s Pop Culture
Happy Hour podcast; Jonny Sun, internet superstar, illustrator of
Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Gmorning, Gnight! and author and illustrator
of Everyone’s an Aliebn When Ur a Aliebn Too;  Michael
Dante  DiMartino, co-creator of Avatar: The Last Airbender;
John August, screenwriter of Big Fish, Charlie’s Angels, and
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory; or Rhett Miller, musician and
frontman for The Old 97s. Together, we take deep dives on their
careers and creative works.


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