Category: Katie Ganshert

3 C’s – It’s Friday!

Posted on by Katie Ganshert

Cares:
ACFW conference is in a week and a half, and in preparation, I’ve been talking to myself more than ever. In the shower. On my drive to work. While I brush my teeth. I keep pretending I’m talking to an agent or an editor. Most of the time Brogan is with me. He sort of cocks his head to one side and furrows his eyebrows at me. Does this mean he likes the pitch, or doesn’t like it? And at what point should my husband start to worry?

Concerns:
Headaches. Lots and lots of headaches. This has been an ongoing saga in my life. No fun. No fun at all.

I spent way too much time on this website yesterday looking for my celebrity look alike, hoping to post the picture here today. But for whatever reason, I can’t get it to work. My celebrity look alike is supposedly Jessica Biel, only we really don’t look anything alike. Then I uploaded my hubby’s picture to find his match. And his celebrity look alike is……Kat Deeley from So You Think You Can Dance. Yea…um…I forgot to change the sex option to male.

Celebrations:
Three day weekend! Who-hoo for Labor Day!

Question to Ponder: What are your cares, concerns, and celebrations on this pleasant Friday morning?removetweetmeme

Inner Conflict

Posted on by Katie Ganshert

A Test
Donald Maas says memorable characters are born from inner conflict. I decided to test this theory. Of all the characters I’ve read about, I chose the one that, for me, was the most memorable. And hands down, the answer was Hadassah, from Francine Rivers’ Mark of the Lion trilogy. I then examined Hadassah’s inner conflict, and WOW, does she have a lot. She’s falling in love with a Roman aristocrat, one who wants nothing to do with the Christian God she worships. Her heart is pulled in two very opposite directions. Love for the Lord and love for Marcus. But to add to the intensity is another inner conflict. Her desire to share her faith with the Valerians, but her consuming fear that doing so will get her killed. These two inner conflicts drive the story forward. I found myself thinking about Hadassah long after I turned the final page. Donald Maas hit the proverbial nail on the head. I remember Hadassah so well because of the inner conflict she faced throughout the course of the story.

How do we create inner conflict?

First, let’s establish an important point.
Inner conflict is not the same as inner turmoil. True inner conflict occurs when a character wants two mutually exclusive things. Inner conflict means our character is torn in two opposite directions. Let’s return to Hadassah. Letting herself fall in love with Marcus would mean forsaking God. And obeying God means rejecting Marcus’ love. Hadassah cannot have both. She just can’t. This is true inner conflict.

Answer the following questions:
– What does your protagonist want most in the world?
– What is opposite of this desire or goal?
– How can you make it so your protagonist wants both of these things?

The inner conflict from my WIP, Wishing on Willows:
My heroine wants to keep her husband’s memory alive. She thinks letting go of his memory and moving on with her life would negate what they had while he was alive. But at the same time, she finds herself falling in love with the man who’s trying to buy out her cafe (the same cafe she built in honor of her husband). She can’t have both. It’s impossible. She can’t stay loyal to her dead husband AND fall in love with this other man. She’s torn in two and it’s this inner conflict that drives the story.

My hero wants to build a successful string of condos and win the VP position at his dad’s company so he can regain a sense of worth and prove he’s not a failure. At the same time, he feels this strong desire to protect the heroine from hurt. There’s only one small problem. By buying out her cafe, he will cause her a great deal of hurt. So his inner conflict is huge. He has to prove to himself he’s not a failure and in his eyes, the only way to do this is by securing his promotion, and the only way to do that is by forcing the heroine to sell, which would hurt her – the one thing he doesn’t want to do. And so the story goes…

In Conclusion:
Spend a little time thinking about ways to increase the inner conflict within your characters. It’s a fail safe way to ensure that your readers will invest emotion into your story and remember your characters long after they close the book.

Question to Ponder:
What fictional character (movies or books) do you remember the most?removetweetmeme

Multidimensional Characters

Posted on by Katie Ganshert

In real life, humans are fascinating creatures filled with contradictions. Nobody (at least nobody I’ve ever met) is ALL kindhearted, or ALL confident, or ALL obnoxious, or ALL positive. So why do writers tend to write one-dimensional characters?

Donald Maas offers this answer:
Many writers create multidimensional characters in their head, but they fail to portray these dimensions on paper.

Dimension Check:
He suggests going through our manuscript and counting the different sides of our characters we show our readers. His prediction? We don’t show nearly as many dimensions as we think.

I did this exercise with my WIP. And guess what? He was right. While the characters in my head are multidimensional, these same characters on paper don’t measure up.

What does Maas recommend?
Increase the number of dimensions in your characters.

How?
Pinpoint your character’s defining quality. Now think of this quality’s opposite. In what ways can you show your character portraying this opposite? Repeat the exercise again with a secondary quality.

My Example:
My character’s dominant impression: devoted widow.

She’s devoted to her deceased husband, to her 4-year old son, to her cafe, to her music, to God, to her friends and family. She’s loyal and dedicated to all of these things.

What is the opposite of devotion? indifference or unfaithfulness

In what way can my heroine show this opposite side of herself?

Maybe at some point in the novel, she’s too exhausted and overwhelmed to care anymore. So she lets some of her commitments slide, like her Bible study, business at her cafe, her music at church, etc.

Maybe at some point in the novel, she commits to something with the hero (who is her antagonist) in order to gain the upper hand and she’d deliberately unfaithful with this particular commitment.

In Conclusion:
I highly recommend this exercise. It sure gets the creative juices percolating and opens up some exciting character possibilities.

Questions to Ponder: What is your defining quality? If you don’t know, ask a spouse, a best friend, a sibling, a parent, etc. What do they say? In what ways do you contradict this quality?removetweetmeme