Our old friends Strunk & White advise: Use the active voice. And though I’m not a 100% devotee of The Elements of Style , this is advice every author needs to hear and do our level best to follow even if, like me, you occasionally (or often) fail to see the passive voice wander its way into your own writing.
It won’t take you long in your studies of creative writing, and writing in general, to get to warnings over passive voice drilled down to a simple, common, three-letter word that seems to be the bane of the author’s existence, or at least the editor’s. That word is was .
Though “was” does not automatically identify a sentence as “passive,” and the definition of “passive voice” has gotten a bit fuzzy over the years, for me it’s fair to call “was” not so much “passive” as weak . And as we’ll see below, “was” can be more an issue of show vs. tell —another of the bits of writing advice you’ll encounter first and most often—than it is about active vs. passive.
In terms of active vs. passive, one of the simplest solutions to the “was problem,” is to find any stronger verb than was…
passive: Her anger was deep.
active: Her anger ran deep.
And I covered the “was + gerund problem” seven years ago in “ Active Search: Something Was Verbing ,” but it bears repeating here:
passive: He was patrolling the battlements.
active: He patrolled the battlements.
To me, that seems as easy as it is obvious. Was just sorta sits there, not specifically doing anything. Almost any other verb specifies some action, says that something is happening now, even in the context of past tense narrative. Stronger verbs also tend to speak to the idiom. Her anger ran deep, or burned deep, etc. And as Mr. Strunk himself pointed out, “Note, in the examples above, that when a sentence is made stronger, it usually becomes shorter. Thus, brevity is a by-product of vigor.” I could make the first example even shorter: Her anger burned.
Another approach, the use of the appositive, can help in a sentence that’s a bit more complicated. An appositive is a pronoun or noun that modifies another pronoun or noun:
passive: the thing was described in this way, and did something
appositive: the thing, described in this way, did something
passive: Galen was a guard, and was on the battlements.
appositive: A guard, Galen, patrolled the battlements.
Still, that doesn’t mean the “passive” examples above are something to be automatically deleted. I would tend to use anything but “was” in the first example, but in certain context they’re all perfectly fine, even preferrable over my “active” examples, especially in dialog:
“And the last time you saw Galen…?” the general asked.
The sergeant sighed. “He was patrolling the battlements.”
This is the sergeant reporting, simply and directly, on what happened in the past of the past tense narrative. And in any case, as usual, all bets are off in dialog, since people don’t tend to speak in perfect, active, complete, or particularly eloquent sentences.
On, then, to the show vs. tell part, which is oft-given advice because it really is that important. We don’t read fiction to be told a story by an author. We read fiction to experience a story as a character . Anything that pushes the point of view (POV) character back brings the author forward, and pushes the reader out of the story in the process.
So then more than just looking for a replacement verb, show the effect of what that character “was” feeling or doing.
This sentence tells us about a character’s state: Bronwyn was cold.
This sentence shows a character being cold: Bronwyn shivered and drew her cloak more tightly around her.
Here we end up, almost always, with the reverse of Strunk’s observation that active sentences are shorter. When it comes to showing rather than telling, I’m sure you’ll find that’s adding to your word count rather than subtracting from it, and that’s fine. Use the words you need, and delete the words you don’t, to enhance your readers’ experience.
So again, none of this means you should search for the word “was” in your manuscript and automatically eliminate every instance of it—try not to do that with any word if you can help it. Every word is a tool in our tool box, and like any craftsperson, let’s learn to use them not “correctly,” but well.
More Active Searches:
Active Search: He Could See
Active Search: Something Was Verbing
Active Search: The Thing of Something
And more on the concept of “emotional distance” in this online tutorial: Rarefied Atmosphere: Crafting a Unique Sense of Place
—Philip Athans
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