I am a writer.  This is the word I use most often to describe myself to others.  Lately, I’ve also been helping to edit some material for a friend.  All this has gotten me thinking about writing in general, and thus a new category is born in the side bar: On Writing.  This is just my little space to help give some advice to people who want to be writers too.  It will be geared toward fictional writing, although many of the techniques mentioned will cross into non-fiction too.  Those who only read this blog for the philosophical or theological articles…well, too bad :-)

Since one of the most difficult things for new writers to grasp is the difference between the active and the passive voice, I will start there.  At first glance, it might not seem like it matters much whether you use active or passive voice.  However, the difference is palpable.  Read a paragraph written in passive voice and you’ll lose your interest before the end; read the same paragraph in active voice and it’ll flow through to the end.  To illustrate this, take this sample paragraph written first in passive and then in active voice:

I was walking down the street when the ball was kicked to me by my friend.  It was carried by the air and deposited at my feet.  The ball was then kicked by me back toward my friend.  His head was hit by it and his neck was broken.

I was walking down the street when my friend kicked the ball to me.  The air carried it and deposited it at my feet.  I kicked the ball back to my friend.  It hit him in the head and broke his neck.

In the first paragraph, the reader is left detached from the scene.  Things are happening to the person; the person isn’t doing them.  In the second paragraph, however, the person is the one acting, and thus the subject of the sentence is the person.  It is therefore active and more immediate.  In short, if the person in the sentence is doing the action, it’s active; if the action is happening to that person, it’s passive. 

Imagine a book full of paragraphs like the first one.  Reading it, you are always kept insulated from the action.  There is an extra layer you have to get through in order to get to it.

Now imagine a book composed of paragraphs like the second one.  This time, as you read it, the action is immediate, vivid.  You experience the text with no hinderances between you and the action.

The second paragraph is much prefered.  Thankfully, comparing the two paragraphs helps us to spot when we have slipped into passive voice.  When we look at the structure of the first paragraph, one specific verb jumps out a lot: was:

I was walking down the street when the ball was kicked to me by my friend.  It was carried by the air and deposited at my feet.  The ball was then kicked by me back toward my friend.  His head was hit by it and his neck was broken.

If you are using the verb was a great deal, that is a good indication that you are writing in the passive voice.  Let us look at some specific examples to see why this is the case.

Passive: The ball was kicked by me.

Active: I kicked the ball.

For the passive voice, we see that the subject of the sentence is “The ball.”  However, the one doing the action is “me.”  In the active sentence, we see that the subject of the sentence is “I.”  “I” is also who is doing the action.

Thus, we see that in the passive sentence, the subject is not doing the action (which necessitates the verb was, since “the ball” did not kick “me” but instead was kicked); in the active sentence, the subject is doing the action.  When the subject of the sentence does the action, you are writing in active voice; when the subject of the sentence is not doing the action, you are writing in passive voice.

In addition to the actual active/passive voice, there are certain structures that function (as far as literary editors are concerned) in the same way as passive voice.  For instance, an over-reliance on verbs that end in -ing can indicate passivity.  For example, compare the two sentences:

More Passive: I was walking down the street.

More Active: I walked down the street.

Once again, we see the use of the verb was in the first sentence.  In this example, it doesn’t make the sentence passive because the subject is still the one acting.  However, the construct of the two verbs “was walking” lacks the immediacy of action that the simpler verb “walked” has.  In this case, the -ing verb slows down the reading and makes it less active, even though technically both sentences are active voice.

Does this mean that you should go through your writing and take out all the was and -ing verbs?  Not at all.  There are important times to use them, and indeed sometimes an artful use of the passive voice can add an extra element to your writing that pure active voice will miss.  However, in order to be effective these occurances must be few and far between.  As such, I would suggest you try to write a copy without any was and/or -ing verbs.  Then, only when you absolutely must have them, insert them back into the text.