Category: Katie Ganshert

Dialogue Tips

Posted on by Katie Ganshert

Your best friend. Your worst enemy. However you see dialogue, every writer must concede to its importance.

As a reader, nothing turns me off more than shoddy, unrealistic, poorly-written dialogue. On the flip side, nothing pulls me in more than snappy, intriguing, conflict-ridden dialogue.

Love it or hate, let’s admit we all need to learn how to write it.

In A Novel Idea, a book for writers, James Scott Bell has a few things to say in the area of dialogue that I found helpful.

Agendas:
Before writing dialogue, know your characters’ agendas and put them in conflict. No matter if its a comedic scene or a tragic scene. Find a way to put conflicting agendas in the hearts of the conversing characters and watch your dialogue explode off the page. It can be something as simple as Character A wants to unload about her day but Character B is late for work. Voila. Agendas in conflict.

Personal Equilibrium
Every character, most especially the protagonist, needs to be in a state of disequilibrium. The characters are striving for peace, and dialogue can be the means to which they reach for it. Bell suggests that before writing the dialogue in a scene, we should ask ourselves: Why are the characters in a state of discomfort? What is really going on beneath the surface? Once we figure out those answers, we write from that deep place and watch our dialogue fill with depth and hidden currents (every heard of subtexting? If not, you can read about it here.)

Dialogue as Weapon
Think of dialogue as a battle, and the characters’ words as bullets, a weapon the characters fire at one another in an attempt to win the figurative (or literal) war. This is most applicable during those intense scenes.

So there you have it. Three ways to liven up the dialogue in your writing.

Questions to Ponder: Do you have any dialogue pet peeves? Or perhaps some dialogue quick tips to share?removetweetmeme

3 C’s – It’s Friday

Posted on by Katie Ganshert

Cares:
I have a working title for my WIP. I say working title, because it’s never a good idea to get attached to any one title, since they could change once published. But regardless, I still like to give my manuscripts a name. There’s something so unmagical about calling them by number. So I’ve decided to call novel #5, A Broken Kind of Beautiful. It fits the story really well. I googled the title, like I always do when one pops into my head, and the closest thing in existence is a book called A Beautiful Kind of Broken, which is close in an eerie sort of way, but different enough that I’m okay with using it.

Concerns:
Bubba’s elbows. Phooey. I took him to the vet yesterday and they’re still pretty bad. He’s only six! That’s too young for elbow dysplasia. He can’t run around and play fetch like the other dogs and it makes me sad.

Celebrations:
My story took a fun, expected twist this week. A twist that managed to do three very wonderful things: strengthen my heroine’s story goal and motivation, put my hero and heroine’s goals in greater conflict, and add some much-needed glue between my hero and heroine. I was so excited about it, that when hubby got home from work, I was bouncing around with a smile on my face and I think he thought, for just a second, that I’d gotten a call from my agent about my book. I set the record straight and explained that when that glorious day comes, he will receive a very high-pitched, incoherent phone call and instead of jumping around, I’ll probably do something crazy, like a back flip.

Question to Ponder: How are you? What are your 3 C’s today?removetweetmeme

How do you Deal with a Saggy Middle?

Posted on by Katie Ganshert

I’m in such a state of turmoil. If only my angst could drip onto the pages of my current WIP (work in progress). I’m writing this rough draft partially blind, which terrifies this plotter. I plotted the beginning. I also plotted the end. The black moment, the epiphany, the climax, and denouement. But the middle? Getting from here to there? I didn’t do much with that except write out some scattered scene ideas. So as I plod through the middle, with only snatches of the path visible in my mind, I find myself prone to panic.

You see, this is so much different from the way I went about writing my last novel. I plotted every single scene before I wrote that novel. Complete with a scene goal, motivation, and conflict. Writing that novel took very little thought. I just had to discipline myself to sit and type the words. And it came together so beautifully. The conflict saturated every scene and oozed onto every page. It was inherent to the plot. The hero and heroine had diametrically opposed story goals. The conflict in this story isn’t so obvious. I have to dig a little deeper to bring it out.

And in the midst of my searching and writing through the uncertainty, I find myself struggling, for the first time, with what many writers call the “sagging middle”. I used to read about this before and think (with a smidge of pride), “I don’t really struggle with that. My middles are pretty solid.” Not so confident with this one.

My friend T. Anne tweeted a great idea. She said to write a list of the ten worst things that could happen to my character right now. I took her advice and the story took an unexpected twist. So while not having everything completely plotted out scares me, it’s also sort of exhilarating.

Here’s what I want to know….

Do you struggle with sagging middles? How do you go about giving your manuscript a tummy tuck? And what kind of writer are you? Not just a plotter or a pantser. Give me levels. Like how much of a plotter are you? Or how much of a pantser? How do you go about creating and crafting a story?removetweetmeme