PlaceToHide.net Interview with Madden

Interviews by Fans
Title:	PlaceToHide.net Interview with Madden
Interviewer:	Bethany
Interviewee:	Madden
Date(s):	October 2013
Medium:	online
Fandom(s):	Hanson
External Links:	October 2013 Author: Madden – Spotlights, Archived version
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In 2013, Madden was interviewed by Bethany for the spotlights section of her website PlaceToHide.net.

See others in the series at PlaceToHide.net Interview Series.

Some Excerpts

I started writing in 10th grade (14 years ago, I was 16) with my best friend, Charlotte. I honestly don’t remember what prompted us to start it up. I remember having a lot of typical teenybopper fangirl Hanson conversations with her that started out like “What if this happened?” and stuff like that. I imagine that’s how Yesterday began because that’s essentially how TYAM began, except that when I came up with the idea to do TYAM, my characters already existed so it wasn’t difficult to imagine. I’d LIKE to say I’ve been writing for 14 consecutive years, but I haven’t. Yesterday was our prequel that never got finished since life got in the way. I started writing a couple more Hanfics since then but my heart just wasn’t in it and I couldn’t commit past more than maybe ten chapters so I abandoned them. I tried one with Grey’s Anatomy, too, but that never was finished, either. I have sort of an addictive personality and I think I was just so stuck on the whole Mel and Drew thing that anything else felt weird to write.

Yesterday was written in high school. And you can TELL!! With Yesterday, Charlotte and I literally had spiral notebooks that we passed back and forth. I wrote Mel and she wrote Drew, all in first person. I think we only maybe let one other person read it. We passed it back and forth for so long that I think we accumulated maybe three notebooks? And then, of course, as we got older, life got in the way and Yesterday sort of just faded away. The story got separated. I have the entire first notebook…I don’t think I have the second one, I think maybe she has the rest. I’ve had several requests to put it online and we’re currently discussing it. I think it might be fun to post, compare the differences. There are definite differences in background because when I discussed backgrounds in TYAM I was already 14 chapters in before I decided to revisit Yesterday and discovered that I’d changed some of the background–and I liked the new stuff better so I kept it.

In a nutshell, my writing process is get an idea, write it up, Google what needs to be Googled, feverishly reread and edit, email it to Charlotte, get her opinion, and then post it after even more feverish rereading and editing. Lately, though I’ve been getting impatient and posting before she gets a chance to read it. Oops!

When we started Yesterday, I wanted something fun to write. Something not so typical. I was head over heels in love with Isaac at the time but when I sat and thought about it and I thought about what we knew of their personalities, I just HAD to write Taylor, no questions asked.