Let’s talk about passive and active voice and why it’s so important.
Anyway, let’s talk about active versus passive voice. As always, I want to add a very important caveat. Do everything in moderation, including taking advice. You can find a lot of people on the internet who are going to tell you how to write. It isn’t necessarily good for you to follow all of the advice, especially since a lot of the advice is contradictory. It’s contradictory because we all write differently. We all have our own voice. We all have our own ways of writing.
For instance, some people are really into perspective and what tense they’re writing in. I, on the other hand, am not. I like to call the way I write ‘third-person lazy’ because that’s sort of what it is. But it really serves the narrative that I am trying to tell. It works for my books and it works for my audience.
You are going to have your own path to walk when it comes to writing. You’re going to have your own voice to develop, to find. And following every single rule about grammar or about good writing isn’t going to get you there. It’s only when you start to understand which rules you specifically want to break and why you want to break them that you are going to be able to find your voice.
You know, this should have probably been a blog post on finding your voice. But anyway, let’s talk about active versus passive. So what is the difference? Well, an active voice is just a character doing something, whereas passive voice is just something happening to a character.
This is one of those things where it’s really easy to fall into passive voice because of something called the narrator bias. That is to say, when you are telling a story, especially as a new writer, sometimes you can fall into this trap of telling the story, literally explaining everything that’s happening. And that results in passive voice. That’s how we grow up telling stories to our parents.
Active voice, on the other hand, is narrating from within the story. It is demonstrating action or showing the characters doing rather than having things happen. Now, there are a few ways to sort of get around this. One of them is through writing in first person because writing in first person really forces you into a more active voice, and it becomes immediately apparent when you are not using active voice in first person.
But what about those of us who don’t like first person like me? I actually don’t like first person at all. It really annoys me, and I typically don’t finish stories that are in first person. Having said that, I’ll probably try writing a first person story again at some point. I used to almost exclusively write in first person because it felt really easy and good, and then it just became a little bit too constricted for me, and that’s when I switched over to third person lazy.
But the question is, why is it so important to understand the difference between active and passive voice? That’s because our stories need energy, and energy is derived from not only the flow of the words and the cadence of the sentences, but from the voice that we are using to tell the story. Active voice is going to inject a little bit more energy, a little bit more vibrancy into the story, and it’s especially good if you have action scenes.
However, should we all use active voice all of the time? No. Passive voice has its place too. If you want to slow a story down, then passive voice might be the right choice. Active voice, passive voice, tenses, all of this stuff, it’s just tools for your toolbox to help you communicate the story you want to communicate. And so while it’s important to pay attention to it, it’s really not that important in the grand scheme of things.
If you are successfully communicating the story that you want to tell to your readers, then you’re doing the right thing. If you’re worried about your active or your passive voice, there are some things that can help. Hemingway app or Grammarly are both tools that can help you check your text for active and passive voice. Additionally, a good editor is going to call it out when it doesn’t fit the flow of the story.
Remember, not all passive voice is bad, and not all active voice is good. It just depends on what you’re trying to do at that point in the story. The more you write, the more comfortable you’re going to be with these different tools and applying them where appropriate.
So as you’re thinking about this issue for yourself, as you’re examining your own writing, just use that general guideline. Is my character doing something, or is something happening to them? And as shorthand, look for ‘is’ and ‘are’. ‘They ran’ is active. ‘They are running’ is passive. See, ‘they ran’ is them doing something. ‘They are running’ is something happening to them. That’s a very simple way to look through your text and see whether you’re falling into one or the other. If you are, never fear. You can always go back and edit. That’s the beauty about writing.
YouTube Video Link: https://youtu.be/r2DphN9wKrQ
Thanks for reading and watching.
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