Hey everyone! My name is Maggie Ann Martin and I am the Young Adult author of To Be Honest and The Big F. I have started a podcast! I am going to be writing a book in 45 days and I want you all to be along with me on this journey. I don't normally try to set myself to quick deadlines like this, but I think in order to stay accountable and in order to get things done in a timely manner, I am super helped out by sharing my goals, deadlines, and process with others. I'm hoping that you all will come along for the ride and be my accountability buddies. I'll get into quite a few things throughout this whole series but I will cover first in today's episode: character development.
Really, I'm going to get to the root of what makes all of my characters tick and what I do in preparation for writing a story so I can know a character as well as I can before I start actually diving in and drafting.
The next episode will be on setting development. We'll be really diving into what makes a place a home, what makes a place a comfortable spot for your characters, what makes a place somewhere that an inciting incident could happen, etc. A lot of that revolves around the details that you pull out ahead of time and have prepared.
My next episode is going to be about outlining, the dreaded task for a lot of authors. Some authors enjoy really heavily outlining and some like to be pantsers or fly by the seat of their pants. I used to totally be a pantser and believe that you know, the story will flow and it will come to you but since I have published books and been on deadlines to get drafts with these books turned in I have learned that I absolutely need an outline to keep me on track and it is super helpful in keeping the drafting process quick and efficient.
I'm going to go over what I do to outline. it's not going to be as fancy as people who use Scrivener. Like I just use Microsoft Word. I'm really basic and how I outline but I still like to have that reference point so that when I'm drafting I have something to look back to.
My next episode will be around goals and timing. So as I alluded to earlier being on a 45 day writing schedule is really tight. I'm going to have to be really strict on the goals that I set for myself and have you guys really keep me accountable to those goals. So we'll work on those elements together and how we can keep each other accountable and then I don't know how many episodes will come after that of me actually writing the draft I plan on kind of “podcast journaling” my experience of writing throughout drafting the book.
I would like to have each episode be like a 10,000 word chunk. Depending on how long it is, I write Young Adult novels primarily, that's going to be about anywhere between 60,000 to 80,000 words. So, you know, there could be like six to eight episodes of me actually writing the book. We will see when that time arrives again a little bit of background about me if you haven't ever listened to me before or seen my face before if you're watching on YouTube.
My name is Maggie Ann Martin and I'm a young adult author. I have two books that have been released by Swoon Reads, which is an imprint of Macmillan. My first book is The Big F and that came out in 2017 and my second book is To Be Honest which came out in 2018. I currently have a book that is out on submission. So we are trying to find, my agent and I, are trying to find a home for that book.
In the meantime I'm going to write this other book that I can have in my back pocket or if the book that's on submission doesn't sell we can start trying to sell this one I'm working on right now.
I had kind of a non-traditional route to being traditionally published. For those of you who aren't aware of what Swoon Reads is, Swoon Reads is a crowdsourced imprint of Macmillan, or was, unfortunately they're not accepting any new submissions anymore, but in its in prime, hundreds of authors would upload their books to SwooReads.com for consideration for publication and their editors would go through that site and choose three to four typically every quarter to actually move forward and publish. And so I had a friend named Lydia Albano be selected to publish her book through Swoon Reads, her book Finding You, and once I saw her success with that I thought hmm.....
I was in the process of querying for agents and was having a few people that were interested but no one really biting or giving an offer of representation. And so I thought hey, why don't I just upload The Big F, or what was The Big F to Swoon Reads and see what happens. Nothing could hurt at this point because I was ready to put the book away in a drawer and about three months two to three months after I uploaded it to Swoon Reads.
I got an email from my editor for both The Big F and To Be Honest, Emily, and they wanted to talk about the book and the book deal came shortly after that. It was a whirlwind but I did that all first without an agent which is not typically what happens when you publish a book from a traditional publisher. And so now I do have an agent and she is fabulous and we are working together to get more books published by me out into the world.
So hopefully once this series is over we can do a series about the publishing process once any kind of news comes up. So stay tuned for that.
You might be wondering why I start with character development. For me once I have an idea or a general idea for a book I have to figure out who is going to inhabit this world and bring the story to life. Without that I can't start writing a story at my work is really character-driven versus plot driven and so character development always comes first for me. I'm excited to be able to tell you all of that. Each episode of this podcast will come with some type of resource that you will be able to download. And so for this one, I have a really customizable character development guide that I use that you all will be able to download and make your own.
Be sure to stick around to the end of the podcast to figure out how to download it. It's pretty simple just go to my website and sign up for my newsletter and you'll get access to those character development. So once I come up with this general story plot line idea, and I'm trying to figure out what characters inhabit these books. I really go to Pinterest or kind of if I have kind of an inkling of what someone might look like. I'll Google like red hair freckles middle-aged woman, like things like that that will be keyword searches that images will pop up that will be similar and I really scour through those images until I find someone that I'm like that is that sort of along the lines of what I'm thinking and so once I find those character images then I will slap them into my character development guide that you all will be able to download by visiting MaggieAnnMartin.com/OhDraftPod and signing up for my podcast newsletter on that page.
So once I have that character image or what I envisioned the character to be similar to I'll figure out their basic defining characteristics, how old they are, what their birthday is... because I don't know if you're like me, I believe a lot in astrology. And so I like to kind of figure out when their birthday would be and what their sign might be and how that would influence more aspects or parts of their character. Then I will do the same thing for the character and kind of build out their family tree because that is another thing that I really focus on quite a bit in my stories is family dynamics and figuring out about what makes people tick.
A lot of times where you come from and what your background is growing up speaks a lot about how you process things and how you are motivated by things like that. So I really try to build out the main character or the few main characters' family trees so I can get a better sense of who they are. And then after that I go into their friendship circles.
You don't have to get quite as detailed. I don't think in these friendship characters unless you anticipate them being a huge main character throughout the book, but I like to figure out you know who are their contacts at school since I write Young Adult if they have a job, who are they close to it work? I also have you know, that maybe they could have friends in the neighborhood that they connect with and this kind of gives you an overall picture of you know, who they might be talking to and creating memories with and being in scenes with in the future.
Now the part that excites me the most about character development is figuring out what is at that character's deepest sense of their self. And so I use something that I've learned through like professional development courses at my like day job about: your Personal Iceberg.
I don't know if anyone's heard of this method to figure out the true inner workings of yourself. On your Iceberg, you're only going to see the very tip on the top of the water if you see it at all. And so really what your Personal Iceberg is like what you see above the water line is very minimal and it's what people see on the surface of you and then below the water line is is the depth of the iceberg where thoughts, feelings, expectations, values, yearnings, and then you're like core sense of self live underneath that water line of the Iceberg.
I like to go through with all of my main characters, especially if I'm going to be writing first person. I like to figure out what their Iceberg is and really try and dig down into what that deepest sense of self is for them.
The first element in that is behavior. Behavior obviously covers our actions and expressions that your character puts out into the world physically, what they say to other characters and how they interact with others. There could be someone that is more standoffish and comes off as kind of angry or rude to characters, but you can dive deeper into why they are behaving this way and come to a realization of what's at their core and what is motivating them to act this way? So really when you're exploring behaviors, you're exploring kind of on the surface level. What do people think about this character? And how is this character perceived by others?
The next level is thoughts. For this one, I think about what the character thinks about the world that they inhabit and how do they feel like they fit into the world around them? What do they think about themselves in respect to the people around them and any thoughts that they might have running through their head that would influence their behaviors.
Next we have feelings. This is where you start getting a little bit deeper down. So how would your character's life situation make them feel? How did their emotions affect their day-to-day life? So this is where you're getting more into, you know, what feelings would impact the thoughts that they have which would lead to the behavior that they present to the world.
The next level is expectations. And so a lot of this shows why I like to do family trees first. You can learn a lot about what someone expects out of life based on where they came from or how they grew up as far as expectations go. What does your character believe they deserve from life and why do they believe that? So if their expectation is "I'm going to stay in this town forever because that is what everyone in my past has done," why is that their expectation and what's holding them back from thinking about a different expectation for their life?
The next level beneath that is values. So again, this goes into kind of the moral compass of how your character was raised. You can explore if morally they have deviated from what they believed in when they grew up or what they were taught as they grew up and then what they value the most: things that they hold near and dear to their heart.
The next level underneath that is yearning. A lot of times you'll hear people ask, "What is the motivation?" "What is motivating your character in every single scene?" I think in order to have a really strong book your character has clear motivations every step of the way, even if they change and evolve. Everyone should be aware of what your character's motivations are throughout your story. Yearnings to me are really important to establish so that you can figure out how to create the storyline and the story arc of your character throughout the book. For this I just say what your character wants the most. This is usually the driving force for them in the story. You can have multiple yearnings that the character wants but really I do like to try and narrow it down to one thing they really, really want and kind of try to unpack what is standing in their way from fulfilling that yearning.
Then finally once you have discovered their yearnings you're going to be at their sense of self. What is at the core of your character? And what is that like that gooey gooey center that they are not going to share with anyone else but themselves or someone that they feel extremely close to. These can be personal very personal beliefs and details that they keep really close to their heart that they might not even want to admit to themselves. And so once you hit this level of the Iceberg, I think you have a really great idea about how this character is going to react in certain situations and what their interactions with people around them are going to be like and what kind of journey they're going to go on throughout your story in order to reach what they're yearning for. What they're motivated to learn or do Etc.
So that is really how I go about character development. There are a ton of different ways that you can go about it. I know some people don't like to do character development first, they like to figure out plot first, which is totally fair, but I think there is no plot if you don't have characters that are driving it. My method is characters first and so you can take that or leave that.
Thank you guys so much for tuning in and listening to this the whole way through. This is a learning curve for me. I have never recorded one of these before and it's been a while since I've been on video, truth be told, so if the audio is weird or if the video is weird, please let me know and I will figure out what is going on.
If you're interested in diving deeper into the character development guide that I have made you can access those at Maggie Ann Martin, and that's Ann with no "e", MaggieAnnMartin.com/OhDraftPod no spaces or hyphens with Oh Draft Pod. When you're on that page, there will be a newsletter section that you can sign up for which, once you sign up for it, you'll get the link sent to you via email.
Please help me out as well and subscribe on any podcast platforms that you're listening to this on. I could really use the help getting some stars and getting some recognition because that's how you get discovered. If you're not watching on YouTube, I have a video recording of this podcast session that you can watch and that's on my personal YouTube Maggie Ann Martin.
I'll also be doing some behind-the-scenes content and keeping you up to date on how this process of writing a book in 45 days is going on my social media, probably mostly Instagram. I'm @maggersann on Instagram and Twitter if you would like to follow along on that journey outside of just listening to the podcast.
Thank you so much for tuning in and I hope you continue to follow me on this journey and we can write a book together in 45 days. All right, let's do it. Thank you.