Passive Writing

I was going to write about passive writing, but then I decided that maybe it was better to show you what I mean, so decided to write this sentence that includes passive voice, a run-on sentence, and just extremely long and boring heading nowhere but to give you an extreme headache.


Passive voice is the replica of a smashed mirror. You have fragments of words stringed together. Does this makes sense? No? Picture a mirror. Now picture a broken mirror, tons of pieces lined in a row on top of a string. Llft the string and you chance a piece falling off. Too much of a metaphoric explanation for you?

The pieces of mirror are your readers who are reading your book. At some point they break away from your book because you’ve bored them to death with nothing but passive and telling passages. They are the pieces falling off. In all reality, every single piece will fall off that string unless they are tied down…so tie your reader down with an active voice.

“But, editor, passive is the way we speak.”
“Yes, but passive should be in the lower percentage of your writing.”
“I don’t get it.”
“Then you haven’t read as much as you think you have.”

The one constant thing I repeat to writers is to connect your character to the reader. When this magical event takes place then a reader cannot put the book down, cannot forget about the character, will feel the same urgency and emotional upset as your character, and will stick it out until those last two words come into play: The End. And one way to connect reader and character is to use an active voice, showing rather than telling their story.

Think of a story as your canvas. Without the fine, intricate ‘showing’ paint strokes the message hidden within the portrait is lost to the viewer. Same rule applies to a story. You need to show the details using vivid and powerful words along with the five senses.

Choosing weak verbs only allows a reader to simply ‘read’ a passage without pulling them into your fictional world.

For example:

I watched as she ate breakfast.

Does this excite you? Can you ‘see’ this other person? Do you care? It offers nothing. Now let’s change it around a bit:

I watched as drool and bits of cereal dribbled down the side of her mouth. She munched away as though given her last meal.

Now we have some sort of a visual, and get the sense this character ate like a pig and extremely hungry without having to say:

I watched as she ate like a pig.

Eliminating passive tone and bringing it to an active voice changes how a reader connects to the story. One causes them to take an outsider’s view, while the other brings them right into the story.

YOUR TURN: Write one passive sentence and then change it to active. Come on, don't be a chicken.