When Good Advice Goes Bad (part one)

So I’m in Starbucks today, and I spot a CD sitting on the counter (is it me, or is Starbucks a coffee shop that really wants to be a record store?). This is apparently the acoustic-version, tenth anniversary compilation of Alanis Morrisette’s Jagged Little Pill. Now, if you’re my age, and an American female with a certain cultural background, this is the most important CD in your life (for boys, I think it might be Sublime). Oh, the hours I spent shouting along with poor, angry Alanis. Thinking back on it, I barely even knew what going down on someone in a theater was. So it’s been ten years since that album came out? How time doth fly.

So, back to the topic at hand. If you’ve been following the comments section on the previous post (and, as Theresa Nielsen Hayden says, the comments are half the fun) you’ll see that we’ve already followed a few topics. I also thought I’d begin with the ones I mentioned in my intro post. So, without further ado, or reminiscences into my adolescent musical tastes:

WHEN GOOD ADVICE GOES BAD

Try Not To Use Passive Voice
First, a quick review of that lovely quagmire known as English grammar. Which of the following is passive voice?

a) Sailor Boy hit the ball.
b) The ball hit Sailor Boy.
c) The ball was hit by Sailor Boy.

Easy, right? Now, one can imagine that this is very good advice at the outset, because passive voice is often used to deflect agency from the person doing the action. It focuses on the object. Picture a child telling his parents about how the glass just “got bumped” off the table. Kids trying to get out of trouble are experts at passive voice. Beginning writers sometimes fall back on it for the same reason: it lets their characters off the hook from actually having to do anything. Which, as one can imagine, doesn’t work so well in fiction.

However, the passive voice has a long and glorious history in fiction of being used to create suspense. When someone has been shot, when a mysterious letter is left on a table, when you awaken to find that a bloody horse’s head was tucked between your bedsheets — well then, that’s all passive voice. Who did it? Ah, there’s the rub. So by all means, one should not completely eschew this perfectly reasonable grammatical construction.

The problem comes in here. If one looks at my above examples of passive construction, the same word keeps popping up: forms of “to be”. In English, the passive voice is constructed using forms of the verb to be plus a participle. “Has been shot” “is left,” “was tucked,” etc. Enterprising individuals with, perhaps, a less than perfect grasp of English grammar then seized upon the lofty and noble “to be” as the culprit of all “passive construction” and sought to excise it from their (and other people’s) work.

The damage is twofold because of a another, similar-sounding piece of advice, which goes like this: Try Not To Use A Passive Voice. In this case, the advice giver might have been attempting, somewhat clumsily, to encourage writers to embrace strong verbs. “Passive voice” is co-opted from its grammatical usage as a stand-in for the opposite of “an aggressive writer’s voice.” This is the same family of advice that urges you to say “race” rather than “ran quickly” and to rewrite sentences to exclude “to be” and “make/do” verbs (i.e., rather than “Sailor Boy was happy because Diana made him fried chicken for dinner,” to use “Sailor Boy could hardly suppress his glee when Diana served him fried chicken that night”). It’s stronger writing. This advice giver might have saved us all a lot of trouble had she said “weak writing”. Or perhaps she did, and it has since somehow collided with the perfectly innocent “passive voice” to create a mutated monster.

However the evolution of the beast, the fact remains that plenty of us have received feedback on contests in which some red pen-happy judge has crossed out every single “had,” “was,” “have been,” and etc. In the entire manuscript in the never-ending quest “not to use passive voice.” How I have been tempted (yep, passive voice, and I can only assume it was the devil tempting me) to write in my thank you note to such a judge that “Jane was dying” is past continuous tense, not passive voice, and there is a huge freakin’ difference between “Jane was dying” and “Jane died.”

So, should one use passive voice? Should one use “was?” I say yes to both, sparingly, sprinkled like Fleur de Sal, and only where it is the best choice for the manuscript. Trying to build suspense? You bet. Trying to keep it snappy? Sure, why not? Trying to make it unclear who it was that did what in the midst of a melee? Passive voice has got your back. And please, don’t cut all the “was” out of your manuscript if it means killing off poor Jane, who should live to fight another day.