Legend Author, Marie Lu
By Rachel Pyfrom
Originally published on Tween Girl Style Magazine
Everyone has dreams when they’re young. While some dreams are more realistic than others, I love when someone’s dream stays the same throughout life. This is particularly true for Marie Lu, bestselling author of Legend. From a young age, Lu would “publish” her own books, stapled pages that contained her handwritten masterpieces. She was also visually artistic and served as art director for a video game company after graduating from the University of Southern California. That visual background helped Lu write Prodigy, her latest action-filled book for tweens.
In an interview with Marie, she says Prodigy begins right where Legend, left off. Characters Day and June face a new conflict as Lu delves deeper into the Republic and how a group called the Patriots had emerged to prevent the Republic from taking over America. A disagreement also causes conflict between Day and June, and Lu allowed the characters to write their own story.
“The characters really get away from me, and they kind of take on a life of their own,” she says, describing these moments as a bad writing day. “Usually, my best solution is to stop writing and to start drawing. I notice that I can usually break a writer’s block if I stop and just start drawing my characters or the scene that I’m trying to write or some sort of landscape. I notice that switching the creative media will usually help me break that. And sometimes reading books helps a lot. I can usually like go and read something and then get inspiration from that.”
Since Legend was inspired by Les Miserables by Victor Hugo. reading the classic may have helped Marie get through some tough writing days. With Prodigy, Lu draws inspiration from modern-day issues.