Fiction Novels & Active vs. Passive Voice
Before I launch into this, I've perused these threads and they don't quite answer the specific question I have in mind:
When to keep the passive voice and when to remove it
When *should* I use passive voice?
I'm making decent progress on a story, and I tend to do my drafts in Microsoft Word and use Grammarly to get additional grammar checking as I go along. One of the features of these that I have been working on is active vs. passive voice, for which these tools are immensely helpful. I've found that I have gotten much better at writing in active voice, but there are times when I am certain that mangling a sentence to use active voice, as suggested by the tools, ruins the mood or feel of the scene.
Therein lies the real question: How peevish are editors about the use of passive voice in fiction, really?
I worry that I'm spending too much time agonizing over voice, when I should be spending more time just writing. (See: The "Rules" of Writing) Even if I just stop and start blasting out volumes of text, I might later blindly follow every voice suggestion to my detriment.
I find myself in need of advice from those who actually have experience. Therefore, I turn to you.
Thanks in advance.
And yes, I'm a first-time writer.
This is decent advice everyone is giving. However, not knowing how to use active vs. passive is the mark of an amateur. …
9y ago
Go with your gut. Quit worrying about voice. Get it down on paper, walk away, come back and revise it, find a beta or pa …
10y ago
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/q/11057. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
2 answers
This is decent advice everyone is giving. However, not knowing how to use active vs. passive is the mark of an amateur.
Someone who over uses passive is new to the writing game. Why use passive voice when you can get straight to the action? Passive voice can be confusing, and dull. Active voice gets it over with.
Use active when the scene is fast paced, if it's a slow scene then passive may be okay.
It also matters if you are using first person, or third. If someone is using first person, and the narrator's desire is to make the main character seem passive then it can be okay to use passive voice. However, it is almost always better to use active voice; so the story moves along in a more direct fashion.
To sum it all up, it is important to take time to consider why a scene should have passive or active. A good balance will slow the story down when it needs to, and speed it up when the action is moving.
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/17067. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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Go with your gut. Quit worrying about voice. Get it down on paper, walk away, come back and revise it, find a beta or pay an editor. Let your reader worry about the passive voice for the first draft. Tell the person to keep an eye out for it, and if your reader comes back with "yeah, this part sounded egregious," you can cut it.
You're letting the perfect become the enemy of the good. Just write. Polish later.
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