Passive voice

[Joe McM]

What’s the prevailing thought about the use of passive voice in fiction. I come from the technical writing world where it’s to be avoided. That’s also true for the non-fiction world, at least for self help type books. My thought is it should also be avoided but there are times that it’s ok, especially if changing a passive voice sentence to active makes it clunky, for want of a better word.

 

[ThinkerX]

Avoid passive voice where possible. According to the MS Word editor, I usually run at about 2% on passive voice, which is acceptaable.

 

[Demesnedenoir]

Ayup, passive is bad (worse in screenwriting, as I recall) but tolerable at low levels. Conversational tends to make for more passives.

 

[Joe McM]

Avoid passive voice where possible. According to the MS Word editor, I usually run at about 2% on passive voice, which is acceptaable.

Thanks ThinkerX

 

[Joe McM]

Ayup, passive is bad (worse in screenwriting, as I recall) but tolerable at low levels. Conversational tends to make for more passives.

That’s what I thought. Thanks.

 

[Finchbearer]

I don’t think using a passive voice is the devils underpants… sometimes it’s entirely appropriate.

 

[Joe McM]

I don’t think using a passive voice is the devils underpants… sometimes it’s entirely appropriate.

Thanks.

 

[Demesnedenoir]

Just babbling with my fingers while thinking about passives...

There are bad passives, and then there are okay passives. I'll spit out 5k words without a passive, and then I'll hit a few I'm fine with. Here's one I passed by in my edits:

Even without hunger, ten days without food heightened the flavors of every bite of a meal that might once have been experienced as drab into the finest feast ever.

I was in a hurry and sick of editing, so I didn't switch to:

Even without hunger, ten days without food heightened the flavors of every bite of a meal that he once might have experienced as drab into the finest feast ever.

Is that a worthy difference? I might go ahead and change it now that I'm less time-crunched, but... It isn't much of a change. IMO, the key to this being a Passable Passive is that in neither is the character Active. We aren't seeing the events. Bad Passive is tricky to come up with off the top of my head, I almost never write one of those days... let's see, let me think...

This will be over the TOP, but, my brain couldn't come up with the perfect example of bad.

Bob the dragon was annoyed when he noticed that the crossbow was loaded with a dragon-slaying bolt.

The passives here are also a type of "tell". And then I ran out of babbling time, heh heh. Holidays! What can you do.