Prisimpad: A Guide to Wattpad, Writing, and Whatever

ON WRITING: Passive Voice

I was struggling with trying to decide if I should write this chapter or not. Unlike other Achilles heels of mine, this is not one I know even a little how to solve without help. I cannot identify my passive voice on sight; I need the aid of Pro Writing Aid or Word to tell me when it's passive. When I find that passive voice I will probably rewrite that sentence multiple times until I find one that isn't passive that says what I meant. Other times I just can't figure it out so it's best to move on and worry about it in edits. Either way, for whatever reason, I flat out suck at not being passive.

I don't think I'd be doing a good job if I didn't at least mention this topic in the guide, even if it's short because I simply don't have the skill to show enough examples to fix it. At least by mentioning it you can become aware that it is something to look for when readying to rewrite or edit your MS.

Passive voice is the act of the subject receiving or having the action done to it instead of it doing the action. In creative writing, it is generally a good rule to keep your sentences active. That's not to say all passive voice must be killed, much like adverbs you can't always kill that passive voice. An example in Freelander is when Josh says where he was born. "I was born in Italy." That always gets flagged passive by PWA. But it's a perfectly acceptable way of phrasing it.

There are times when my passive voice gets flagged and I just leave it because there's simply no other way to say "I was born in Italy" and not have it sound unnatural to that character. But there are passive voices that should be killed. One that is routinely flagged by the editors is a sentence involving "has been" or "had been." With a little work I can usually get a sentence that says what I want and is still active. The use of "was" is also another good one to look for when trying to identify the passive voice.

Here's a couple samples I can think of that are passive and how to fix them, hopefully they'll help you identify your passive voice.

The flag was carried by Mandy.  This is the passive voice. Make it more active by saying Mandy carried the flag.

Pizza was eaten by Billy at dinner. Is passive. Billy ate Pizza at dinner. Is active.

Here's an actual example of a passive sentence in my FL second draft and how I rewrote it to fix it:

Passive: Her love for playing dress up had been exceeded by her love of horses.

Active (well my attempt to be more active) Her love of horses exceeded her love for playing dress up.

The reason passive voice is bad is because it's considered boring. Whereas more active sentences will engage the reader and keep them into the story. Passive voice often makes the sentence longer and full of useless words so it's also a good way to kill your word count if you can get your writing more active.

As much as I know I need to write more on this topic, this is unfortunately all I can say. It's a very real struggle for me so I'd be useless in trying to help you further. If you need to, google for passive voice in creative writing and all kinds of guides come up. That's what I've been doing to try to learn how to catch them on my own. I'll get there, I know I will, but it will take time. If you're a passive writer like me, try to work on breaking yourself of the habit one sentence at a time.

This will also conclude the ON WRITING portion of this guide. There are a couple of topics I'm putting in the ON WHATEVER section that could technically fit here, but decided to put them there. If there's anything about writing you feel I missed or have questions about, feel free to speak up. If I have an answer for you, I'll do my best to help!