Sunday 14 August 2011

THE PASSIVE VOICE!

"Every day I'm shufflin'..." LMFAO- Party Rock Anthem

Recently, after a two-year hiatus from the company of other writers, I swallowed my post-collegiate distrust and began attending a critique group. In many ways it has been a wonderful experience. As advertised, it turns out it is almost always useful to have more eyes on your work once you think it's ready for them, I have gotten some good advice, and the opportunity to play editor for others has been a valuable one.

That said, there are many in this critique group (and other critique groups across the internet and the planet) who are, I feel, overly disparaging of a.) the passive voice, and b.) the verb "to be" in general. So much so that I fell asleep on Friday constructing what I felt to be a spirited defense of the passive voice and the verb it uses so heavily. What little of it I remember two days later, I shall share now.

First I shall sum up conventional wisdom as it has been (ahem) explained to me:
Passive voice ("it has been explained," or more simply "The dead horse was beaten," is almost always inferior to active voice ("My professors explained it," or "My professors beat the dead horse"). It is somewhat tolerable when the entity performing the action is unknown ("A rock was thrown from the crowd") or in journalism ("Three suspects were arraigned today...") when the actor (the person doing the arraigning) is unimportant to the story.

There is some truth to this. Passive voice can make for weak, boring writing. It can be especially painful in academic writing, which is where most writers are first made to realize they're using it. But there are circumstances in which it can be not just tolerable, but preferable to active voice. We'll start with, "A rock was thrown from the crowd," and move into a hypothetical critique group battle royale:

"Bad!" cry those who despise passive voice in all situations. "Consider the following: 'A rock hurtled from the crowd,' 'Someone threw a rock from the crowd,' 'A rock from the crowd struck the wall just left of the President's head." Look at the detail! The action! The zing! The absence of the word 'was!'"

Let's start with the first example. "Hurtle" is a Big Word. It's unusual. It's eye-catching. It bears tension. "But wait!" cry my haters of passive voice, "Aren't those all good things? I want my writing to be all of that!" To which I reply that if something hurtles or erupts or volcanoes forth in every sentence in your paragraph/chapter/novel I as reader will very quickly lose any sense of what sort of motion is important and what is not, and probably throw something across the room.

"Someone threw a rock from the crowd," is slightly tougher to defend. It is very similar in most respects (meaning, length, tone, emphasis) to, "A rock was thrown from the crowd." A poet will notice that the sentences scan very differently (meaning that the accents on the words occur in a different pattern). Someone else might note that this affects the rhythm of the sentence as well as the sentences around it. I maintain that that in and of itself is reason to keep the passive version, especially given that little of importance is changed by making it active in this particular way.

And finally, "A rock from the crowd struck the wall just left of the President's head." This is my prime example of what can go wrong when a writer seeks to eliminate passive voice. It's a good sentence. There's detail. It's interesting. We can go in just about any direction from there. But consider the different sentences placed in the context of the following paragraph:

Tony shivered. The President looked pale and shaken on his balcony. Tony's ankle was swelling up and he knew he wouldn't be able to run far if things got ugly. A rock was thrown from the crowd. He needed a way out.


Versus:

Tony shivered. The President looked pale and shaken on his balcony. Tony's ankle was swelling up and he knew he wouldn't be able to run far if things got ugly. A rock from the crowd struck the wall just left of the President's head. Tony needed a way out.


In the active example we wind up having to redefine the subject of the paragraph again in its last sentence ("he" would be ambiguous). This paragraph is about Tony. It's not about the rock, or the crowd, or the President. There are things going on around Tony that are making him nervous. That's what's important. The only reason this paragraph exists at all is to let the reader know that. When we make "A rock was thrown from the crowd," active in this way our paragraph loses its focus.

"But wait!" cry my haters, "You could..." and I don't care any more. I could spend a lot of time fiddling with this paragraph and changing it in all kinds of ways, but the only way to make the sentence, "A rock was thrown from the crowd," active is to make the rock an actor in the sentence. That's how you get rid of passive voice. It's the fix. And when you make the rock an actor you introduce three actors (yes, "looked" is a weak verb, but it still counts, and I picked a weak verb in that sentence for the same reasons I picked passive voice later) into a five-sentence paragraph that's meant to be about only one of them, and that's just too many.

It's here that many writers wind up damaging their own writing in an attempt to purge it of passive voice. Yes, passive voice is weak. Sometimes weakness is desirable. Not every sentence gets to be captain of the ship.

The other instance I wanted to talk about is when you're working deep inside a character's head (which, SPOILER, I contend you always are. Hemingway's nameless, formless narrators are as much characters in his novels as his actual characters are). People experience the world in words. Four different people watching the exact same footage of a rock being thrown from a crowd could turn out the four different sentences we go over above. It is imperative that a character who, seeing that footage, would say, "A rock was thrown from the crowd," be allowed to relate it to the reader that way through the narration, even if he or she isn't talking or thinking it directly. If we're in Tony's head, we ought to see the rock the way Tony does, and no matter how much the writers in some critique group might hate passive voice, I'd much rather experience the rock through Tony's words than theirs.