Greetings Faithful Readers:
In my quest to further my writing abilities, as well as improving my editing skills, I have taken into consideration the age-old struggle of finding all my passive voice material and transform them into active voice.
What is the difference between passive voice and active voice you might ask? Well, it’s all about the subject. Is your subject performing an action, or is it merely letting everything happen to it?
Ask yourself, “is ‘the man barricading up his house’? or ‘was his house barricaded’?” If you want an active voice, then your subject should be the one doing the action: i.e. the man should be barricading the house.
Just like ‘I am writing this blog’, the ‘blog is not simply being written’.
Why should we care?
But why do we want an active voice instead of passive? What makes passive sentences so disliked? I asked these very same questions myself (mostly because I didn’t want to have to go back and find and edit all my passive voice sentences).
Simply put, active voice can be more concise or direct, and tends to be a stronger sentence choice. Whereas the passive voice can be unnecessarily wordy or awkward. However, at times a passive voice is the right choice: i.e. if there is a mystery about our subject:
“My zombie repellent was stolen.”
We don’t know whodunit, so the subject can’t be present to do the action.
We want strong characters!
In writing, you want your main characters to be active, you want them to be doing the things in the story, not the story happening all around your character, that’s just boring. (Though I’m sure there’s an interesting pretense that could be conceived of to have a whole story happen around your subject in passive voice, but I digress.)
Tricks for spotting passive voice:
A few easy to spot indicators of a passive sentence are looking for certain ‘auxiliary’ verbs or ‘helping’ verbs such as: are, was, were, being, been, etc… If your sentence has ‘was *VERBED* by…’ in it, its a passive voice.
But where are the zombies?
Here’s a neat little trick: if your sentence can be performed ‘by zombies’, it is passive voice. In other words, if the phrase, ‘by zombies’ can be inserted after the verb and it makes sense, then it is a passive voice.
“The whole town was eaten (by zombies).”
“My car was stolen (by zombies).”
“The children were fed (by zombies…or just really tired parents).”
If you are using an active voice, the phrase ‘by zombies’ won’t work.
“I am laying in my bed (by zombies)” The phrase doesn’t fit, even though it is true that the sleeping children laying next to me in my bed are very zombie-like at times.
If I changed the sentence to, “My bed was being laid upon (by zombies) with me in it,” then we have a passive sentence, and I might be in trouble.
So remember, when writing for your stories and for strong characters, make sure you have a zombie-free environment by using the active voice!
Now, to go kill me some zombies, I need to go do some editing.
And as always: “Raise a glass to inspiration!”
~SMFreehand
It took me many years to figure it out, but it was so simple once I really sat myself down to do it. The secret to being a successful writer. (Though I’m not published yet, I am someone who writes on a consistent basis on projects that are gaining speed in a productive way)
SMFreehand 