Artist Profile: The Defiantly Optimistic Storytelling of Marie Lu

Marie Lu is a superstar in YA fiction. With over 12 books under her belt, she’s gone from a newcomer in the genre to one of its veterans. But for Lu, writing is more than a job: It’s about the act of creating, something that she has pursued for most of her life.

Lu didn’t always know she was going to be a writer. She majored in Biology and Political Science at the University of Southern California, thinking that she was going to be either a doctor or a lawyer. After graduation, Lu was preparing to go to law school, but something about it didn’t feel right. Instead, she applied for an internship with Disney Interactive Studios. She recounted, laughingly, how she broke the news to her mother over a phone call.

“I called my mom and was like, ‘Mom, I’m not going to law school anymore. I’m going to go to Disney and work for the video game division for six months.’” she said. “And I could tell in her voice, she was just like, ‘Oh, god, she’s going to be living in our basement forever.’”

Working in the video game industry gave Lu a different perspective on creating. “As with film and most of the creative media, there's a group of people that you're working with,” she said. “You're not just alone in a room writing. You have other people to answer to.”

Her time working with visual media also influenced her interest in storytelling in different mediums. Beyond her own novels, Lu illustrated “Gemina” by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff, providing sketches that propelled the protagonist’s narrative. But Lu always finds herself returning to writing as her favorite way to create.

“Books are just such a pure form of storytelling,” she said. “There's nothing particularly fancy about it. It’s not big budget, it's not flashy, but it's just you. And you’re creating alone in a cave.”

Though the YA community has come a long way in terms of diversity, Lu was one of the few Asian Americans in the publishing industry when she started out. Having immigrated to the US when she was five years old, Lu said, “I think as an immigrant, you always have one foot in each place that you’ve been in. And so both China and America have felt like home to me at different points, and both have also felt like strange lands.”

The feeling of being an outsider permeates Lu’s stories. Her characters often find themselves plunged in unfamiliar worlds and environments that they fight to stay grounded in. Talin Kanami, the heroine in Lu’s “Skyhunter” duology, is a refugee in a country that discriminates against her. And in her latest novel, “Stars and Smoke,” a superstar singer is thrust into a foreign, “Mission Impossible”-esque world of espionage and spies.

In the beginning, Lu struggled with showcasing her true self in an industry that didn’t always feel so welcoming. “I remember, in 2011, feeling incredibly intimidated by the fact that Day in ‘Legend’ is partly Asian,” she said. “At the time, the New York Times list was almost exclusively white and straight. I think I could count on one hand the number of other Asian American authors that I knew.”

Lu remembers how she seemed forced to choose between authenticity and commercial success, wondering, “Should I be writing authentically to who I am and potentially end my career? Do I end up getting shoved into some corner of the bookstore about diversity, or do I hide that and become successful?”

Lu’s experience was emblematic of a larger problem within YA and children’s books at the time. In 2014, in response to an all-white, all-male panel at BookCon, #WeNeedDiverseBooks was launched to address the problem of a homogenous literary scene where the de facto story told seemed to be that of a white person’s. Perhaps it was no wonder that Lu, like so many other authors of color, did not feel at home in the industry.

It’s evident in Lu’s extensive repertoire that she’s become more confident in celebrating her identity as time goes by. In “Warcross,” published in 2017, the main characters Emika Chen and Hideo Tanaka are Chinese-American and Japanese. When reading the familial interactions between Emika and her father and between Hideo and his parents, the attention and care that Lu has paid to the backgrounds of her protagonists stands out.

The authenticity of the characters that Lu creates allows her to make the most imaginative and fantastical settings feel startlingly familiar. The “Legend” series takes place in a futuristic, dystopian America deep in civil war; “The Young Elites” duology is set in a bleak, Renaissance Italy-inspired land. Yet despite these grim settings, the characters are refreshingly idealistic, motivated by a common goal: to do the right thing.

A common criticism of the YA genre is that it feels contrived. There always is a happy ending, the couple always ends up together. Yet this is part of what makes a Marie Lu novel so comforting — there’s a palpable belief in the goodness of human nature and the agency of a single person to effect change, no matter how dark their situation gets.

The characters in her books choose to take control of their fates and change the narrative, and in a sense, Lu does so too. The choice to believe in happy endings is defiant in the face of the dystopian-like realities of the 2020s, and for Lu, it's a comforting one.

“It's one of my favorite things about YA, that no matter how dark the stories are — and a lot of them get very, very dark — there is always a thread of hope in it,” she said. “I know that when I go into one, I'm probably going to get some kind of good ending and that the good guys are going to, in some way, win. And I've always appreciated that about YA fiction. I find it tremendously comforting to write.”

Her teen characters’ optimism isn’t entirely unbelievable either. Lu reflected on how she’s inspired by the current generation of youth, and of the news stories of young people fighting for sweeping, global change.

“It’s kind of heartbreaking to me because you should be able to worry about exams, and prom, and these things that come with being a young person, and yet you’re taking on these big, huge things in life,” she said. “I’ve always found that incredibly inspiring. I find myself writing about that all the time in my stories as a result.”

The characters in Lu’s books often seem superhuman, and sometimes they literally are. But the vast majority of her characters are simply teenagers unwittingly thrust into the spotlight, trying their best to follow their moral compasses and fighting against injustices that they see — a relatable message that transcends fantasy. The very human struggles of her superhuman protagonists ground them back to reality and make Lu’s message clear: You don’t have to be the Chosen One — you just have to be a good person.

The stories that Lu writes are intensely personal — a quality that allows her novels to resonate deeply with her readers. But these deeply confessional stories come with their own difficulties — it’s a more vulnerable form of storytelling, too. As a writer, Lu has to navigate the balance of writing authentically and separating herself from her art once it's released into the world — that is, separating criticism of her book from criticism of herself.

“I think it's really difficult in all the creative industries, actually, to put your work out there, because you have to put a little piece of your soul into your writing — into whatever it is you're creating — but you also have to commodify it,” she said. “You have to sell a piece of your heart in order to make it work. And it's a strange feeling, but over time, I've learned to be at peace with the idea that I am not a book. I am a person.”

Ultimately, Lu wants to continue creating and telling stories, and she’s enthusiastic about exploring other mediums. “Legend” is in the midst of a TV adaptation; Lu is developing the series with Lindsay Sturman and has a hand in writing the pilot as well. She’s excited about writing more in the Hollywood world and practicing screenwriting in general. But no matter what Lu pursues in the future, she’ll always be a creator, trying to tell a good story.