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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