In this week’s episode, we look at the use of the passive voice in fiction, and discuss whether or not it is bad.
TRANSCRIPT
00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates
Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 159 of the Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is July the 7th, 2023, and today we’re going to look at the passive voice in fiction writing and whether or not it is always a bad thing or just sometimes a bad thing. First up, some updates on my current writing projects.
I am pleased to report that Silent Order: Thunder Hand is completely finished. I am going to actually start publishing it immediately after I finish recording this podcast. So by the time this goes live on Monday, July 10th, the book should hopefully be available at your favorite ebook store of choice so you can get it there. I did also write a tie-in short story to go with it that will go out for free for my newsletter subscribers. I settled on Excision as the title of the short story and my newsletter subscribers will get it for free when the book comes out.
In the six years that the Silent Order series has been out, the overwhelming evidence of the sales data is that cover images with spaceships and plants convert on them much better, so all the books have spaceship/planet themed covers. But I do enjoy making the character based covers and since I’m giving the short story away for free anyway, a character based cover is on it, even though there is still a planet and a spaceship in the background of course. I’ve also come to really dislike single colored text on book covers, so I’ve stocked up on a lot of different stock photos of textures that I can apply to text. The texture on the text of Excision is a photo of a piece of sheet metal with the levels and the colors adjusted. Anyway…all that is a digression.
Silent Order: Thunder Hand should be out by the time you listen to this and my next project will be the final Dragonskull book as part of my Summer of Finishing Things. It will be Dragonskull: Crown of the Gods. I am hoping to start that on Monday if all goes well. And when Dragonskull: Crown of the Gods is finished, I will also be writing…I will then be writing the final Silent Order book, Silent Order: Pulse Hand. That’s the title of the final book. And I think this podcast episode is actually the first place I am mentioning that anywhere.
So if all goes well, Silent Order: Pulse Hand will be out in early fall. And then the Dragonskull and the Silent Order series will be complete. And so…hopefully I will have finished the things I set out to finish in my 2023 Summer of Finishing Things. So now, without any further ado, let’s get on to our main topic of the week: Is passive voice actually bad?
00:02:30: Main Topic of the Week: Is Passive Voice Actually Bad?
If you listen to any writing podcasts or read any writing websites or watch any writing YouTube channels, one of the most common pieces of proverbs, one of most common pieces of advice, is to avoid passive voice. But what does that mean and why is passive voice bad? Is passive voice actually bad? Let’s find out. Like good philosophers, let us first define our terms. To put it in the simplest terms possible, in passive voice, the object and subject of a sentence get reversed. A basic sentence in active voice typically goes noun verb object.
For example: Jenkins ate pie.
In that sentence, Jenkins is a subject, ate is the verb, and the pie is the object. That is how active voice works. Passive voice, by contrast, flips it around so that the object is actually the subject of the sentence.
Like this: The pie was eaten by Jenkins.
The difference is subtle, but it’s there. In active voice, Jenkins, the subject of the sentence, is acting upon the pie. In passive voice, the pie (the subject) is being acted upon by Jenkins. Now both sentences have identical meanings. Either way, Jenkins is getting his pie. So why is active voice better than passive voice?
00:03:52: #1: Passive Voice is More Work to Read
So, Number One: passive voice is more work to read and this is just a fact of simple mathematics. “Jenkins ate pie” has half the words of “the pie was eaten by Jenkins,” which means it takes half the time to read. When writing any kind of prose, the goal is to convey the maximum meaning with the fewest amount of words. Wordy is not a good adjective to have applied to your writing. If your writing is wordy and difficult to read, it is very likely the reader might not grasp your meaning. If you’re a fiction writer, that means the reader will get bored and go do something else. As the late, great science fiction author Jerry Pournelle said, fiction writers are trying to separate Joe from his beer money (or Josephine from beer money), and if anything reduces the odds that Joe or Josephine will spend beer money on your book, that is a bad thing. You want to have the clearest possible prose that you can write.
00:04:42 #2: Bad Habit
Reason Number Two: Bad habit. Passive voice in general seems like a bad habit in writing to which people naturally gravitate. Like in many fields of endeavor, you will find that there are bad habits that newcomers need to be trained out of, or learn not to do. For example, firearms instructors will tell you that people need to be trained not to rest their finger on the trigger of the weapon and to always check if it’s loaded, if there’s a round in the chamber, and if the safety is on when they pick it up. Personal trainers will tell you that people need to be trained to do deadlifts and squats properly so they’re not lifting with their backs.
Artists will tell you that the big breakthrough in learning to draw is not to make symbols of what you see like the smiley face…like how the smiley face is a symbol of an actual human face, but to actually put down on paper what your eye observes. It seems the mind naturally wants to, or at least many minds, naturally want to write in passive voice. I’ve even met people who like writing in passive voice and believe it gives their writing an air of authority and even gravitas. This is, in my opinion, mistaken. Passive voice is a bad habit that the writer needs to avoid because too much of it makes prose harder to read than necessary.
00:05:52: #3:Air of Diffidence
Number three: the air of diffidence. Passive voice uses a lot more words than active voice, which means that your document is longer and therefore more effort to read. That is quantifiable. That’s simple mathematics. Less quantifiable but still apparent, is that passive voice is much less energetic than active voice. It sounds weaker, more timid, less confident, less sure of itself. Passive voice gives an air of diffidence to prose, which at the proper time and place, might be a good thing. More on that below, but most of the time it just sounds bad, especially in action scenes. Consider this quote:
“Jenkins slashed his sword through the orc’s neck, sending the creatures head rolling away across the flagstones.”
Now this sentence would be much worse if you phrased it like this:
“The sword was slashed through the orc’s head by Jenkins, and the creature’s head was sent by the blow to roll away across the flagstones.”
That’s much worse. Now you might say to yourself that you’re not a fiction writer and have no desire to become one, this isn’t applicable to you. Wrong! Even in business writing, especially in business writing, active voice is preferable.
Consider this example: “By adding new features to the product, we anticipate a 40% rise in sales in the East Asia region.”
Clear and concise. By contrast:
“If new features were to be added to the product, our sales in the East Asia region will be enhanced by 40%.”
That’s much worse. It sounds much less confident and you are much less likely to persuade your reader of your argument.
I think some of the tendency towards passive voice is a side effect of schooling. Back when people are in high school and college, writing assignments usually involve: “write a three page essay” or “write 1,000 words about various topics.” So if you’ve ever graded student essays, you’ll know that they’re very good at padding things, which is why the sentences are totally, completely, massively, heavily, seriously, grotesquely, laboriously, and stupendously overridden with as many adverbs as possible.
Passive verbs, as we mentioned above, use more words than active ones, so I suspect quite a few people get into the habit of using them as students and then get stuck in the habit. So writing clear and lucid prose is a useful skill regardless of one’s occupation. I know several people who have attained professional advancement simply because they can write more clearly than their coworkers.
00:08:10 #4 Passive Voice Does Have its Uses
And finally, argument number four: passive voice does have its uses. The title of this podcast episode was basically “passive voice is bad,” but that’s hyperbole. Passive voice is ultimately a tool, and it has its proper time and proper place, just not as often as beginning writers tend to think. Passive voice is often useful in dialogue. You can use it to indicate that a character is uncertain about something or is thinking something through aloud. You can use it to indicate characterization when a character might have a tendency towards diffidence and wordiness in their speech.
Another good use for passive voice is simply getting on with things. Remember, in fiction, the goal of the prose is to tell the story and sometimes you just need to get on with the story. Simply using sentences like “It was Friday” or “His girlfriend was an overpromoted sales rep”, or “the car was parked across the street” is fine, it’s just fine.
Sometimes you want to tell the reader that it was Friday, or that the car is parked on the other side of the street, so you can get to the more interesting parts of the story. It’s a mistake to spend too much time on the liminal parts of the story where the characters are moving on to the more interesting scenes and sometimes artists fall into that trap. For example, a certain major fantasy author wasted hundreds of pages of the fifth book of the series describing an extremely long and very tedious river journey. So there is nothing wrong with using some passive voice to lay down some necessary info and then to get on to the more interesting parts. The trick is not to overuse these sentences and then to shake things up.
For example, “It was Friday.” That’s perfectly serviceable, but we can eliminate the passive voice and get the sentence to do some characterization for us. Consider this sentence in contrast: “At 8:00 a.m. on Friday, Jenkins had already eaten his third Egg McMuffin with the fourth waiting on his tray.” This lets the reader know that important information. It was Friday and eight in the morning but it also includes some character details about Jenkins. It’s even better if you wrap some sensory detail into it:
“At 8:00 a.m. on Friday, Jenkins unwrapped his fourth Egg McMuffin, the greasy paper crinkling under his sweat-damp fingers.”
The sentence accomplishes the same thing, but includes two senses: touch and sound. Let’s try another one:
“His girlfriend was an overpromoted sales rep.” That’s a perfectly fine sentence, though it depends on what follows.
This sentence, I think works better: “Jenkins would never admit it, but he thought Maura had been promoted past her competence when she left sales behind for management.”
Or we could rework it in for more character details about Jenkins and Maura, like this: “As Maura rambled on for the fourth night in the row about her first major project as district manager, a revision to Megacorp’s employee dress code, Jenkins realized with growing concern that his girlfriend might not have been quite as intelligent as he believed, that the charm and attention to appearance that has served her so well in sales had covered over her complete inability to understand the business model. He made a mental note to sell his remaining shares of Megacorp as soon as possible.”
But let’s not pick on Maura too much. Consider this basic sentence: “Jenkins was a high functioning alcoholic.”
Again, this is perfectly serviceable, but we can make the sentence do much more for us:
“Jenkins dropped the beer bottle in the recycling bin. It clinked off the 30 or 40 other discarded bottles. Hadn’t it been empty two days ago? Jenkins shook his head, took two breath mints to cover the smell, and went to prepare for his meeting. Governor Smith did not approve of drinking, and so far he remained unaware that Jenkins had been the one filling up the recycling bins.”
Even better, let’s engage a few more of the senses in the description: “Jenkins dropped the beer bottle in the recycling bin. It clinked off 30 or 40 other discarded bottles, the sour order of the dregs coming to his nose. Hadn’t it been empty two days ago? Jenkins shook his head, took two breath mints to cover the smell, sharp and minty against his tongue and went to prepare for his meeting. Governor Smith did not approve of drinking, and so far he remained unaware that Jenkins had been the one filling up the recycling bins.”
In the end, passive voice is a tool like any other. It’s a bit like watering down the sauce when you’re cooking. There’s a time and place for that, but you definitely don’t want to overdo it.
So, that’s it for this week. I hope you found the discussion about passive voice to be helpful. Thanks for listening to the Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave a review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.
