I am almost totally deaf in one ear.  This means it is hard for me to tell how loud I am talking.  I make a conscious effort to keep my voice low, which means I end up repeating things a lot.  The flip side of that is that when I forget to keep my voice low, I end up with people thinking I’m stressed or angry because I speak louder than normal. And when I am stressed, my voice goes louder yet, which ends up with people perceiving me as angry when I’m not.

All this leads me to thinking about dialog.  We all know not to use dialog tags to get emotion across and to avoid things like ‘I will not,’ she shouted tempestuously.’ (I actually saw that one time.)  We all know that if we have to use a dialog tag to tell a reader what the character is feeling, the dialog is weak.

So I find myself wondering how to show an elevated tone of voice, such as me speaking louder than normal, without resorting to exclamation points, or having to tell the reader in narrative form that the character is hard of hearing.  You can describe a noisy setting and the reader assumes the character must speak up.  So using description can get the emotion behind the dialog across. You can use body language such as someone cupping a hand to their ear and the speaker then repeating their words.  But think about this.  Writing something like, ‘I knew I should have gone with you!’ implies emphasis, frustration, possibly anger, because of the exclamation point.  But if all I wanted to get across was that the character was speaking louder than appropriate and wasn’t frustrated, etc., the use of an exclamation point doesn’t work.

It all makes me curious.  How can dialog show the level of voice, without using tools such as narrative, setting, body language, or dialog tags?  I know those are all legitimate tools we have at hand, and I know they work well.  I’m just curious about how a writer could accomplish the same thing using simply dialog.  There’s the obvious dialog between two people, where one makes a statement and the other says, ‘Lower your voice’, but then it’s almost too late as the reader has already then has to re-process the first line of dialog in a louder tone.  Ah, now I’m getting off track with too many possibilities.  I’ll have to think on this a bit.

In the quiet space.

One of my weak points in writing is putting the sequel before the scene, or the reaction before the action.  A very basic example of this is having the person jump, startled, and then door slams open.  Rather than having the door slam open and then the person jump.  I think the reason for this is that subconsciously I feel I am startling the reader as well as the character, by not clueing the reader into what is happening.  In other words, if I have the character react first, I somehow think that is going to make the action have more impact.

Of course it doesn’t work that way.  Instead it is like those sudden moments when you are left thinking, ‘hey, what just happened?  what did I miss?’.  I certainly don’t want to leave a reader feeling like they’ve missed something.  So why do I consistently write this mistake into my stories, and then spend an inordinate amount of time editing them back out?

In my mind, the action has already happened, and I’m more interested in how the character is going to react, and what’s going to happen next.  My fingers can’t write as fast as my brain sees the action scene and so I skip ahead.  Well, that sounds good, but in reality I don’t even think about it.  I write blithely away, and then wait for my friend, fellow writer and editor, Susan, to point out the areas in her very gentle way.  She usually prefaces this with a compliment to make it hurt less.  But still, compliments aside, I cringe because I’m repeating the same mistake.

Will I learn?  Probably not while I’m in the midst of writing.  But hopefully my eye will be trained to start catching it before I send it off for a kind friend to find kind ways to say I did it again.  Meanwhile I’m going to return to that manuscript and do some editing.

What are your weak points in writing that you struggle with?  Why do you think you make those mistakes, and how do you plan to change?  And finally, are those mistakes truly mistakes or are they bending the rules to create a fresh new voice, add a unique twist, enhance your story, or build your character?  Sometimes breaking the rules benefits the story.  But I suppose that’s a subject for another day.

Many years ago I attended the Pacific Northwest Writer’s Conference.  This was shortly after starting to peek out of the closet and admit that I was a writer.  As anyone knows who has attended this conference, it is huge.  So there I was, a timid writer, listening to the crowds around me talking about their novels, their manuscripts, their synopses, the difficulty of making their pitches.  Right next to me was one young woman, very excited, telling a friend she had pitched a magazine article and it had been bought on the spot.

I sat in the back of the panel discussions, as close to the door as I could get, terrified I would be expected to produce something.  I felt like an imposter.  I left devastated.  I created O-Pen writer’s group shortly thereafter, in order to have a place that was safe and non-threatening for writers like me, just toddling out into the world. 

I didn’t attend another conference until a couple of years ago when I went to the Idaho Writer’s Conference that was held in Wallace, Idaho that year.  I went because I was writing a mystery set in Wallace, loved the town, and could add research to the time spent there.  I had tons of fun. 

What made the difference?  For starters, the size.  The Idaho conference was limited to a set number of participants.  The panel discussions felt intimate and safe.  No speakers demanded that you write something and read it out loud, like a few at the Pacific conference did.  The milling about in the lobby consisted of writers  anxious to talk to others about the excitement of writing, not their latest sale.  It felt like a supportive environment.  I’m sure the Pacific conference is like that, too, and my initial reaction was because of my newbie status and lack of self-confidence.  Some day I might attend again, just to see how I respond as the person I am now.  Although it is very expensive.

Stephen King, when talking about conferences in his book, On Writing, asked if we really need to have a name tag on our chest that reads ‘writer’ in order to feel like one.  I loved his comment, and it made me feel like I could be a writer even if I never went back to a conference.  In spite of that, though, these small ones can be beneficial.  Have you attended writer’s conferences, and what reactions did you have?  What benefits did you receive? 

Anyway, today I registered for the Write on the Sound conference, held in Edmonds, WA, in view of the Puget Sound.  Enrollment is limited to 200 people.  I am excited about going, even though it doesn’t happen until the end of September.  But I have learned that these small conferences work for me, that they don’t crush my writer’s self-esteem, and that I can relax and learn.  Not to mention visits with other writers.  Small, intimate, educational, and respectful of all level of writers.  That’s my recipe for being able to attend with confidence, and walk away excited to be part of the writing family.