Hello everyone and welcome back. You are listening to the Oh Draft! podcast with Maggie Ann Martin and this is our official second episode of the series where I write a book in 45 days. If you're actually watching on YouTube, you might see a little fluffy thing down here in the corner. That is my chihuahua, Millie. She might get up and move around. I noticed last time I didn't explain what that fluff ball in the background was so I wanted to make sure everyone was fully aware.
Maybe if you don't watch me on YouTube this will give you some motivation to watch there because she is very cute! As I said, my name is Maggie Ann Martin and I am a Young A,dult author. I have two books that are out. My first book, The Big F, was released in 2017 and my second book, To Be Honest, was released in 2018. Right now I do have a book out on submission with my agent. We are trying to find the perfect home for it.
But in the meantime, to keep myself accountable and to keep my writing flowing and my writing process moving forward, I wanted to challenge myself to write a book in 45 days. I'd like for you all to join me on that journey now. I know it's not going to be necessarily an easy journey, but I have built out the steps to help you all who are listening also write a book in that short time frame.
I'm really investing in creating these resources not only for myself but to hopefully help all of you who are listening. If you listened to the first episode, I walked through my character development guide I created. Really, that is kind of my Bible for creating characters. I had never really put it into a template form for other people to use and so it was really exciting to see those of who listened going back in downloading that resource and hopefully being able to use it while you are creating your own stories and coming up with your own characters.
If you are using that resource and you're working on your next book, please let me know either on the comments here on YouTube tag me on Twitter or Instagram. I'd love to see those of you using that template! I put a lot of time and effort into creating it, so I hope it's helpful to all of you that are listening.
If you haven't listened to episode one, I highly recommend to start there. This is going to be a series that progresses off of each other. I'm really giving you the foundation to go ahead and draft your book and 45 days. Last episode was character development. This episode is setting development and then my episode next will be outlining and figuring out, you know, exactly what's going to happen every step of the way in your plot.
Then after that I'm going to go into my goals and timeline and then the episodes after that will be me officially drafting the novel. My goal for those podcasts is to really dive in every 10,000 words and update you on my progress. I am going to take 10,000 divided by the 45-day time span- I haven't exactly figured out what my posting schedule is going to be when I get into that actual 45-day writing schedule- but I'm going to stick very closely to it because I want to be true to my word that I'm actually going to do the first draft of this book and 45 days.
Once I hit that point in the podcast journey, I will let you know exactly what days I'm going to be publishing those podcasts so you can hold me accountable. I'm planning on laying those out more as a kind of a diary of my writing process and going over how I'm using my different resources that I provided you when I'm doing my actual drafting process. Also, any tips or tricks that I come along when I'm actually putting, you know fingers to the keyboard and and really trying to get a good draft in.
Again, I just wanted to say a quick thank you to everyone who has downloaded the first resource and let you all know that the setting resource is now up and available in that same folder. All you need to do to access these resources is go to my website, which is Maggie Ann Martin. So that's Ann without an "e", MaggieAnnMartin.com/ohdraftpod and on that page you can subscribe to my newsletter. Once you're subscribed you'll get a link via email to download those resources, easy as that.
If you're having any trouble getting those downloaded just tweet me or send me a message on Instagram and I'll make sure that you get signed up for those.
Now that we have the base of who our characters are, now we want to explore the world that they are going to inhabit. We want to know more about the setting around them. I'm just going to put a full disclaimer out there that most of this advice really pertains to contemporary fiction that is based in reality. So if you're building a complete new world from scratch or if you're working on a fantasy novel I'm going to suggest that you use a more robust world building guide. One that really gets into the foundational elements of society, creating maps and things like that.
There's a professional editor named Ellen Brock and she has a resource on her website called Ellen Brock's world-building Bible template. I think she asks all the correct questions to kind of start fleshing out that world. So I'm going to leave a link to that in the podcast description and suggest if you are doing a huge fantasy world build that you explore either different resources or look at Ellen's resource.
Now onto my process for figuring out settings. As I mentioned, I write contemporary Young Adult and so all of my settings are based on some sort of real place. At least for the two books that I have published so far, they are both set in fictional suburban towns in the Midwest and I am from a suburban town in the Midwest. So a lot of it is really heavily based on where I've grown up and things that I've seen, but it's not an actual place that you need to tie back to actual landmarks and things that exist within the world.
For me when I am first thinking about where my characters are from I need to figure out their sense of place. This place that they are in the world. We need to figure out if the place that they're in is brand-new, if this place is somewhere they've been their whole life, if this place has recently undergone major changes that the character isn't happy about or uncomfortable with- we need to figure out all these things. So here's my four key questions that I asked to figure out a character's sense of place.
First is where does the character live when the story starts? If you're thinking of creating a prologue before the story that is out of the normal time frame that you're telling the rest of the story, I would say stick to where your character will be in the first chapter because that's going to be where they will inhabit the story for most of the time.
Second is how long have they lived there? We need to know if it's a new situation for them if it's an old situation that they might be growing sick of. I know for me since I write Young Adult a lot of times they're draining of where they're going to go next and that might be college or it might be traveling. So we need to figure out how long they've been there.
Along those lines, were they born there? And if they weren't born there, how does their birthplace differ from where they are now?
(If you hear scratching I am so sorry. That is my dog. Are you good Millie?)
Alright. So once you figure it out this general sense of place for your character, then you want to really dig into what their physical residence is like- their home, their apartment wherever they are staying for most of the story. When you're talking about their house, you're going to want to get into a lot of detail on what the exterior of their house looks like. How many rooms are in it? How many floors? Is there a basement? Is there a backyard? Do they have a sprawling front porch?
Really get into exactly what this character's home floor plan looks like. Then I like to think about if they have a favorite room in their house. A lot of times this can be the character's bedroom if that's the place where they feel the most comfortable. Or it could be if they have an art studio in their garage that they love to sculpt in- just figure out where their safe spot is because chances are they're going to be spending a few scenes in that place in your story.
Another big question that I ask is "Do your characters feel comfortable in their homes?" That could tie into if they're dreaming of leaving their home or leaving their situation that they're in right now. Why are they or aren't they comfortable in their current situation?
Once I have those basic questions figured out, from there I love to create inspiration boards. I mentioned in the last episode that I do really love to go on Pinterest for inspiration. And so where I mentioned in character development that I like to look at people who fit certain descriptions of you know, like red hair freckles middle-aged woman, etc., when I'm doing inspiration boards for their house I'm obviously looking for something like "green exterior" or "red front door" or like "messy living room with art supplies strewn about" to give me a visual representation of how I think that this person's home looks. I find it really helpful when I have those visuals to go back to and look at and say, oh, "I really like this element of this picture. I want to make this part of the scene or I want to play off of this book that I see on this coffee table in this picture and that could be my character's favorite book."
It's not always going to provide that level of detail for you, but I find it to be a helpful thing to come back to so I have that inspiration board example in the resource. For that board that I had in there, it's for one of my characters in the book that I'm writing. She is an only child and she has two moms and they are super creative and so you see throughout the house that they have a lot of artwork and art supplies kind of strewn about. And her room is kind of fun- things like that are going to help this character come to life.
Once I have the inspiration board created for the house, I like to then really think about the top 10 places that I believe this character is going to visit or inhabit during the story. If you have kind of a general idea of what your plot is you're going to have those places in mind for the top 10.
For example, my character is in high school. So she will go to school and school will be one of those top 10 places that I'm going to want to really build out in detail for her. Another place is her parents' job. She spends a lot of time after school helping them with their business, so she's going to need to describe their place of work really well as well.
So I'll brainstorm and go through those top 10 places. If you have more than 10 that you really want to get into detail with, by all means, write them out. I just think 10 is a solid place to start.
Once I have that top 10, I go through and fill out the same questions and create an inspiration board for all of those settings as well.
(Millie my Chihuahua is currently burrowing very heavily into some blankets. If you hear scratching, that is what that is. Sorry. This is becoming a mess. This is real Chihuahua dog mom life right here.)
As I was saying once you have those top 10 places, I'll go through and actually fill out another set of questions that are different from the house questions.
So I'll answer: How often does my character spend time here?
Then I will describe the exterior and I'll describe which rooms they spend the most time in.
I'll ask again if the character feels comfortable here. Why or why not?
Who do they interact with here? That plays into in the first episode of character development the resource where I had you fill out the character's friend map or friend bubbles. If you have people in those friend bubbles- if I had school and I had work in my friend bubbles, you could copy that information into this guide as well and kind of build out from there more and so just like with the house. I like to create a mood board. So you'll see in the guide. I created a mood board for my character’s high school.
I knew that I wanted some ugly, puke green lockers, and I was like, okay then I need to think of a school mascot that would be green that would make sense. And so I was doing some research and found the Spartans and so her school is going to be the Spartans. I really figure out those kinds of details I want to incorporate. I want to incorporate memorable things into the setting and so this is my way from the get-go to set myself up for success and make things unique.
Well, I think that really covers my big setting process!
Remember that this guide is available to download at my website MaggieAnnMartin.com/OhDraftPod if you subscribe to my newsletter. Once you're subscribed you'll get a link to download the resource, which I think will be super helpful when you're listening to this to walk through together with me.
I also wanted to make sure that I'm really listening to you all on feedback that you have. I know whenever I'm discovering a new person to follow or listen to it’s always valuable to me when they ask for feedback. And so I'm out here I am asking: Do you like this format of how this conversation is going right now?
I'm tossing around the idea of also interviewing other authors about their process. So I would have a segment, like maybe a five to ten minute segment, where I speak with another author about how they come up with the setting in their drafts. Let me know if that's something that sounds interesting to you.
Also let me know if you're having trouble finding the resources that I created. I just really want to make sure that everyone is getting the full experience on this and taking advantage of them since I did spend the time to create them. And while I find them very useful, I want to make sure that you all are finding them useful, too.
Like I mentioned earlier my next episode will be about outlining. That is either something that really excites authors or something that authors dread and so I'm going to try and convince you that it is something that should excite you. I have an outlining process that isn't super fancy. I don't use a super fancy program. I don't use Scrivener. I just use Microsoft Word, or in this case, what I'll give to you as a Google Doc. It'll be really simple to walk through and not not at all daunting. We're going to make it really user-friendly.
An easy way to make sure that you are notified when that episode goes up is if you subscribe anywhere that you're listening to this podcast. I know I'm on Spotify and a few other podcasting platforms right now, and I am also on YouTube. So if you're listening to this podcast just with sound, I also upload them to my YouTube channel where you can see my face and possibly my Chihuahua in the background. So feel free to subscribe to me there. Just search Maggie Ann Martin on YouTube and you'll find me.
Another good way to keep in touch with me is on social media. I'm pretty active on Instagram and Twitter and I'm @maggersann on both of those platforms. I'm also on Facebook. I'm not as active on there, but I do have a presence there if Facebook is your first place that you go to for info.
I hope that this was helpful to those of you who are joining me on this journey of writing a book in 45 days, and I hope it's a resource that you can come back to in the future for different projects that you work on and it can kind of just become this staple routine that you go through to help make drafting even easier and less daunting. My name is Maggie and Martin. Thank you for listening to Oh Draft! and I'll see you next time. Bye!