No, I’m not referring to that sag over the jeans waistband, but the slowing down of a story.  Last Thursday the writer’s group that I attend talked about the common problem of how a story starts to lose pace and ‘sag’ about the mid-way point when writing.  We talked about common reasons, such as giving away too much, too soon, solving sub-plots too soon, boredom on the part of the author.  We also talked about common solutions such as adding more conflict, adding new subplots that build on the main plot and create more difficult situations for the protagonist, and so forth.

One thing came up, however, that some members were surprised about.  I mentioned that a sagging middle doesn’t just refer to the middle of a story.  None of us had really thought about this before, and so I figured it was worth repeating here to see what other opinions might be.  A slowing down of pace, a lag in the story, a loss of the sense of the story, all those things are commonly associated with a sagging middle of a story as a whole.  And yet they can happen in the middle of a paragraph, a page, even a sentence.

A problem with a middle of a paragraph or a sentence though, is harder to spot than in the story as a whole.  I think it’s because those are smaller sags, almost something that needs to be seen with a microscope.  It requires us writers to lean in a little closer to those words in order to spot the problem.  I’ve found in a paragraph with a sag, I spot it only because my mind starts to wander, to skip ahead, or even to start revising the previous paragraph.  I have to stop myself and ask what’s wrong with what I’m writing that it isn’t keeping my attention.  I actually just had this happen about an hour ago.  Typing away, the story flowing, and all of a sudden my mind is wandering away on its own.  Sure enough, I was bored.  I went back a few paragraphs to where my interest still lie, deleted all that followed, and started over.  Great cure for that middle sag – cut it out and run off in a new direction.

Finally, a problem in the middle of a sentence needs even closer scrutiny because I’ve found the issue is usually a single word.  Or, in my case, usually because I’ve flipped the order of the sentence in the wrong direction.  Flipping it back is a quick and easy fix, but one that I have a hard time doing because I have a hard time spotting the initial problem.

Anyway, just some meandering thoughts on those sags.  What do you think?

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.