No one likes a Passive Hero, fixed

No one likes a Passive Hero

The city was sleeping, but I was walking its dark streets. I was looking for trouble and didn't have to look too hard. I saw a mugging in progress. One of the thugs saw me and soon bullets were whizzing past my head.

Sounds exciting, right? So why are my eyelids drooping and my hand tossing the book on the floor? Take another look at our hero. He doesn't do anything. Stuff happens around him. Try this version.

The city slept, her snoring kept me awake. Foetid air rose from grates as the subway passed. I grew up on these streets. I know the sounds they make. I also know when the space between the sounds means trouble. I looked around, some sap was making a gift of his wallet and gold watch to a pair of thugs. I stayed on my side of the street. The sap looked like he could afford a donation. Then I saw the gun. Who pulls a gun after they mug someone? I pulled my own gun. It wasn't as big, but I knew exactly how to use it. Thug one took a bead on me so I hit the pavement. The bullets made sure some body shop would be working overtime. I checked the window to get a location on Thug One. Our eyes met, his beady ones with my tired peepers. I shot out the window and the alarm shrieked. Funny how shots got my juices flowing, but alarms just gave me headaches. That's when I saw Thug Two on my side of the street. He had me cold, so I followed my bullets through the window. I felt the brush of death as a bullet tugged at my coat. It came from the other end of the street. I didn't stop to figure out who was shooting. I kept going deeper into the store. Maybe I'd find a back door.

Now the second paragraph is longer. It usually takes more words to show the action than to tell about it. The advantage is that all those words do double duty. The action holds the reader's attention, but they are also learning about the character of the hero.  A lot of the time the writer knows exactly what the story is about. They tell us the story and when you tell the story it is easy to slip into passive voice. It becomes about what happens to the character instead of what the character does. You do need things to happen to the character, but if you can attach those actions to something or someone it will be a stronger story.

The form of the verb 'to be' with a gerund after it creates a static situation. This is happening and continues to happen. There is no change. You want your characters to be actively shaping the world around them. Action is one of the triumvirate that reveals character. If you write with 'was' too often, you are muzzling your character. It will distance the character from the reader. It feels like the character is being moved instead of moving themselves.

Another problem with gerunds is that we try to load too many of them into a sentence. 

Standing, wiggling his eyebrows and juggling watermelons, Bozo the clown waited his turn to pay for his groceries.

Poor Bozo is standing, wiggling, juggling and waiting all at once. That's impressive, but we don't learn much about Bozo from all that. The standing, wiggling and juggling aren't really part of the action. It's hard to imagine him doing all that simultaneously. Let's get active and see what happens.

Bozo stood in line at the grocery check out. The child in the cart ahead of him looked very cranky so Bozo wiggled his eyebrows. Was that a smile? He picked up the two tiny watermelons and a squash. He started to juggle them. Everything went well until the child's mother turned, saw Bozo and let out a piercing shriek. The child clapped its hands and laughed.

The two sentences give the same information, but the second one pulls you in and makes you feel like you're a part of the action. Each of the verbs has it's own object and subject. The gerund as an extra sneaky helping of verb is really one useful if the actions are all happening at the same time.

"I'm sorry," Bozo said, wiping watermelon juice from his eyes, "It must be hard to be a coulrophobic,"

I can see him talking while he is wiping juice from his face. Using too many gerunds is another way of telling rather than showing the action. Try to give each action its own sentence. It will help to keep things straight and the reader will be able to follow the story better.

The goal of the writer is to entice the reader to enter the story's world. That requires active characters who participate fully in the story. There are so many good words to use, so many interesting verbs. Let's put them to work.

But 'was + verbing' is not passive. I made a mistake in the original article and am finally getting around to fixing the problem. My apologies.

The passive voice is when things are being done to the subject of the sentence instead of the subject acting. Sound confusing? Yup, guess why I goofed up. A great many writers (and readers) think that any construction with 'was' is in passive voice.

But the first sentence in my example:

The city was sleeping, but I was walking its dark streets.

is not passive voice. The city is acting, I am walking. Boring, yes, passive, no.

Try this one

The city streets were walked by hordes of zombie clowns.

That is passive voice. The city is not acting. It is being acted upon by the horde of zombie clowns. 

This sentence gives us the simplest test of whether your sentence is passive or active voice. Believe it or not it is called the zombie test. (Google it, I did not make it up.) Very simply you add 'by zombies' after your sentence. If the sentence makes sense, you are writing in passive voice. If it doesn't it is not.

The city was sleeping by zombies. Does not make sense, thus passive voice.

So, when do you want to use passive voice? Because if it were truly the ultimate evil in language, we wouldn't have it.

You use passive when the object of the action is more important than the subject. In the passive voice example above, the hordes of zombie clowns is more interesting and probably more important to the story than the city streets. You want passive voice here.

When you are using a character as the passive subject it is trickier. Your character is important. Most of the time you want them acting, not sitting passively around being acted upon. Where passive voice comes in useful is to accentuate situations when your character, for whatever reason, is unable to act. They are tied up, unconscious, dead or whatever.

So there you have it folks, the real goods on passive voice.