Passive Voice Is Used by Authors, Isn’t It? I Mean, Authors Use Passive Voice, Right?
It’s finals week at my university, so I’m fielding lots of grammar and sentence questions from computer science and marketing students. And here’s one that is also relevant to fiction writers too—what constitutes passive voice?
Passive voice is a sentence construction where the object of the action is in the subject position:
Subject is usually what commits the action (Paul, the hitter).
Verb or predicate is usually the action (hit).
Object is usually what the action is committed on (the ball).
(This is the usual construction for English sentences, as “SVO”—subject-verb-object.)
So an active order sentence is: Paul (subject) hit (verb) the ball (object).
Most of our sentences will be (or should be) in active voice, because most stories are about people like Paul DOING things like hitting the ball. Active voice reflects active characters doing action.
However, we might find ourselves using passive voice (and there are some ”legal” reasons to do this- more on that later).
Passive order is: The ball (object) was hit (verb) by Paul (subject).
Or just:
The ball was hit over the fence.
Or:
The ball would be found later in the ditch behind the park.
The problem with passive voice is that it obscures or minimizes the “subject” (the one that DOES). That’s a problem when who commits the action is important. Imagine a sportswriter summarizing the third inning of a World Series game: “Then the ball was hit over the fence.”
Well, every sports fan would ask, “WHO HIT THE BALL????”
However, in the last sentence:
=The ball would be found later in the ditch behind the park.
… most sports fans wouldn’t be particularly interested in WHO FOUND THE BALL? What was important was that it was hit so far that it wouldn’t be found till later.
Point is—Usually it’s important who or what is responsible for doing something… but not always.
Well, you might be asking, “So then what’s wrong with The ball was hit by Paul? After all, that is passive, but it identifies the hitter.” That’s true, but when we go passive with a sentence like that, we’re giving up the advantage of telling what’s important, and generally what’s important should go early in the sentence. Paul is important, the ball much less so.
Let’s go with a more interesting example than Paul and the ball!
As I was revising the McGuffin blog post, realized I’d used a passive sentence: The feud is only mentioned a couple times. I instinctively “went passive” because I was referring to the story mentioning it, or the writers… no one specific. So the feud was more important, and I started with that.
Then I revised the sentence before to mention “the two guys” who are seeking the McGuffin that was the solution to the feud. Suddenly there were actual subjects who were doing the mentioning, so I revised it to: They mention the feud only a couple times.
Let’s try a couple examples that show some aspect of passive voice.
First: “WAS” doesn’t make it passive.
- She was painting her nails blue. THIS IS NOT PASSIVE!
Some writers have been trained to look for the word “was” and assume that makes the sentence passive. But as with so common words in English, “was” does double duty. It can indeed be part of a verb in a passive sentence: The document was probably forged, to judge by the carefully drawn signature.
But in the blue nails example, “was” is part of a past progressive word. “Was” signifies the action happened in the past, and the “-ing” is the progressive marker indicating that this painting was an ongoing action. Usually we use the progressive form of a verb when the action is interrupted, like:
She was painting her nails blue when the fire alarm rang.
She was painting her nails blue, but she ran out of polish halfway through and had to switch to green.
But these are all “active” sentences, because “she” is the subject, and she’s the one doing the painting. The passive construction would be: The nails were painted blue by her. This is passive because the object (the nails) is put in that first position where the subject usually is.
Second, “was” isn’t the only way to make a verb passive. Almost any auxiliary verb (the helpers—must, might, can, could, would, should) can “passivate” a sentence. (Hey, if we can ‘activate’ a sentence, why can’t we passivate it?)
Victory could be snatched from our grasp!
Students cannot be drug-tested without cause.
Finally, I do want to stress that passive voice isn’t “illegal”. It’s often inappropriate, and often saps the energy out your prose and your story. But there are several circumstances where passive voice is inevitable and even appropriate—when for a good reason you want to put the emphasis on what was affected by this event or action. Let’s look at a few examples of "good passive"-
Passive works when the "who" is unknown:
The bank was robbed this weekend. (We don't know who robbed it; we just know it was robbed and when.)
Or the "who" is irrelevant:
Mrs. Ralston was buried Thursday. (We don't really care who dug the grave.)
Or you don’t want to “assign blame”:
This bill must have been forgotten for it hasn’t been paid. (I don’t want to accuse a good customer of stiffing me.)
Or this is a general trend and you don't want to focus on any one person or group:
Nature imagery in TV ads is associated with health and energy. (You might not want to say, "Real estate ads are using nature imagery in TV ads" if it's really more widespread than just real estate.)
So read over your sentences and look for instances of passive voice. Can you identify the “true subject”—the who or what that does the action? Experiment with putting that in front of the verb and the object after. Strive to make the sentence mean what you want, but also FEEL how you want, and that usually be active and vital. But sometimes you will want to soften and hedge, and in that case, the passive construction is a good tool in your sentence toolbox.
I find this page does a good job with laying out the basic parts of speech and sentence construction.
Parts of Speech | Grammar | EnglishClub https://www.englishclub.com › grammar › parts-of-speech
If you come across some knotty sentence problem, feel free to ask me to try to untie it!
Here’s an interesting review of the new Little Women film, where Jo’s writing of the book that becomes Little Women is the central metaphor. The review explains this “metafictional” plot structure and how it uses the motif of the book cover to “frame” the story:
Even more than the novel, Gerwig’s adaptation functions as a piece of metafiction—or, to be more precise, a poioumenon, the rhetorical term for a work of art that tells the story of its own making. The leather-bound edition of Little Women that serves as the movie’s opening title, its red leather cover stamped in gold with the name “L.M. Alcott,” reappears in identical form at the end—all except for the name, which has become “J.M. March.” https://slate.com/culture/2019/12/little-women-review-2019-movie-adaptation-greta-gerwig.html
Here's a site that lists "Editors for First Fiction"-- editors who have recently bought first books.
http://www.bookmarket.com/newnovels.html
plotblueprint@gmail.com
Alicia
Norman Rockwell: Triple Self-Portrait
(a man painting himself painting himself)