Passive Voice - How to Bore Your Readers or Not

Have you ever submitted a manuscript to an editor and one of the feedback lines, if you receive any, is that you need to remove most if not all passive voice sentences?

“Uh-hem.” Yes, that is me raising my hand, waving it in the air for all to take notice.

After doing some research, I found out that passive voice is the number one mistake new writers make.

“Well, gee, somebody should have told me that before I finished writing those 350 pages.”

Now you are sitting there on your sofa or in your desk chair wondering, “What is passive voice?”

Good question and here is the answer.



Passive voice defined: Passive voice, in writing, results from the overuse of the "to be" verbs: am, is, was, were, be, being and been. Passive voice lacks the SVO pattern of a sentence.

I know, I know. “What is the SVO pattern?”

SVO stands for Subject Verb Object pattern. A good, clear sentence follows this structure. The sentence begins with a Subject that performs an action, then a Verb, which is the action, and finally it has an Object that receives the action. (The object is not always there.)

Your head is still spinning so let me give you an example of a sentence with the correct use of SVO.


1. The car ran Jane over.
Subject = car, Verb = ran, Object = Jane

The following is bad SVO pattern, which results in passive voice.


2. Jane was run over by the car.
Subject = Jane, Verb = was, Object = Car



Close your eyes and visualize the word “was.” You can see nada, zero, and empty, completely blank. A reader will never be able to close his or her eyes and envision your passive verbs (for one cannot see "be" or a picture that goes with "is").



Here is your visual clue. Close your eyes and visualize the word “ran.” You can see someone lifting their legs, their feet hitting the pavement, and arms pumping.

Passive voice is “telling” and keeps your reader disengaged from your story. Often, it weakens a sentence by using more words than necessary. Just look at our examples above.





Your exercise:



Write and post 5 Passive Voice sentences. (Write them off the top of your head, pull some out of your own manuscript, or pull some out of a published novel.)



Let me get you started:



Kim was invited to a party by Raymond.

The Vikings were beaten by the Redskins in the playoffs.

My books were stolen by someone yesterday.

The pizza was eaten by the girls.

Allison was stunned by the actions of her classmates.

Book Hooks Day 4

How else to create a hook for your book?

Start with action. "Action" does not necessarily mean a gunfight, a fistfight, or an explosion. Action means starting your book or story at a compelling place, in a scene, with something at stake for your characters.

Look closely and you may find that you have pages of material that should not be in the beginning. They fill in some important blanks for readers, but that backstory can safely be moved to somewhere after your opening.

“Uh – hem.” Yup, that was me. The first time I took my pages to a NHRWA critique session, I found out that the action of my story actually started on page four, so I moved it up to page one.


The key is to start your story with a riveting moment that grabs the reader by the shirtfront and does not let him or her turn away.


Example: “Twelve hundred pounds of charging horseflesh hit the wooden railings chest high and somersaulted into the north stands. Faces frozen with horror moved in desperate slow motion to get out of the path of the crazed beast.”

The first lines of Cut Throat by Lyndon Stacey a horse has crashed through the gate protecting the crowd and someone is going to get hurt.


Now that's some action!


A general rule is to never put dialogue or straight description in your opening lines. Dialogue is fine in the first scene. Many experts agree that first scenes without dialogue do not achieve their potential.

"Why is that?"

The most compelling reading material involves tension between people, and people usually talk to each other. However, if your very first lines are dialogue, it is impossible for the reader to understand who is speaking right off the bat. It would be like walking in on the middle of a conversation between two people at a party and trying to decipher what they are discussing.

“I think she is a very attractive girl.” “Yes, but can she sing.” You do not have a clue about who they are or who they are talking about.

Similarly, the use of description right up front will not pull your reader into the story. Not because it confuses or disorients the reader like dialogue, but because description can be dull and it does not tell the reader anything about the story itself.

If (and this is a big IF) the setting is somehow crucial to your first scene and you feel you must start there, limit it to one or two sentences and then get right into the meat of the scene. There will be time for description later.


Example: Death was not taking a holiday. New york may have been decked out in its glitter and glamour, madly festooned in December of 2059, but Santa Claus was dead. And a couple of his elves weren’t looking so good. ~from "Creation in Death" by JD Robb

Your homework, should you choose to accept it is. . .

Exercise: Write two different opening hooks. They can be just a paragraph or a page. But remember, you are to hook that reader and make them want more.

At least one of the opening hooks has to have action in the opening paragraph.

Have fun!

Book Hooks Day 3

A hook is a concise, one-sentence tagline for your book. It’s meant to hook your reader’s interest, and wind them in. The best way to understand how to write a hook is to read the loglines of books.

A logline is usually a sentence you see in big print on the back of a book or the one sentence you hear at the beginning of a movie trailer.

Example: On the back of my book, It Happens in Threes, you see the sentence, "Once burned, twice learned, did she dare trust again?" That is a logline. It makes you wonder how was she burned, and who or what was she afraid of trusting.

Example: On the back of "Identity: Unknown" by Suzanne Brockmann, the logline is

"What he remembered
His clothing size

What he didn't remember
Everything else"

So your first question is why didn't he remember anything beyond his clothes size.

These are both hooks that as a reader you see first and foremost and go, "Hm. That sounds interesting." Now you want to know more.

Now that we know this, let's talk about how to actually write this.

A typical and effective way to create a hook is to use the "When" formula. Stop waving your hands in the air and I'll tell you, oops! show you what the "When" formula is.

"Bridges of Madison County": When Robert Kincaid drives through the heat and dust of an Iowa summer and turns into Francesca Johnson's farm lane looking for directions, the world-class photographer and the Iowa farm wife are joined in an experience that will haunt them forever.

"The Corrections": When family patriarch, Alfred Lambert, enters his final decline, his wife and three adult children must face the failures, secrets, and long-buried hurts that haunt them as a family if they are to make the corrections that each desperately needs.

The "When" formula is “When such and such event happens, your main character—a descriptive adjective, age (maybe), professional occupation—must confront further conflict and triumph in his or her own way.

I don't recommend this for every hook, but it is a good starting point to get the basic high points written down in one concise sentence. From there, you can modify it and make it even stronger and stand out more. Remember, you're trying to take a 350 page book and tell a reader, agent, or editor what happens in 1 sentence.

Your assignment: Write two hook sentences that use the "When" formula. Tomorrow, we'll talk about other ways to write the hook.

1.

2.

Good luck!

Next Interactive Discussion Topic

I know many people did not actually post to the blog but have been doing the exercises along the way. I hope you found these "lessons in love" educational and entertaining. Maybe in the future, the non-posters will feel more comfortable with sharing. Remember, we learn from each others examples.

Yesterday at NHRWA it was so neat to have everyone given the same set of scene structure and them all come up with a totally different outcome. The guide was a carriage with leather seats and windows, mid-afternoon in london in the fall, with dark-haired, beardless Brock as the hero, and Amelia as the heroine.

I have received great feedback on the writing prompts as well so I will keep those going. Besides, they really do make me get into the creative mindset. And if you have a prompt you want to submit feel free to do so.

I have enjoyed this immensely! Are there other topics that would be beneficial for us to do more of these types of interactive exercises?

Feel free to send me your thoughts and ideas.

How to write more often

So we all have day jobs or families, even daily tasks that have to be done. When are we supposed to get any writing done??

Here's a tip - okay a couple of tips:

1. Instead of taking a book to read with you when you run those errands that require you to wait for a period of time, like a visit to the vet or a doctor, take a pad of paper and a pen. Write! I even carry the last few pages of the section I'm working on with me just so I can refresh my memory as to where I left off.

2. Block some specific time aside just for your writing. Write! I have for many years set aside an hour every evening to read so why not do the same for writing.

3. Say you are used to your schedule and then it shifts, you no longer are taking that night class on belly dancing on Tuesday. Fill that time slot with. . .take a guess. . .writing!

4. The biggest tip of all is to stick paper and pen in your car, your handbag, your backpack, underneath your sofa. Why? Because when you feel the urge, you will have something there that you can use to write with. Heck! It may not be a chapter, or a paragraph, but it may be the story idea for your next novel.

For the record, I even have paper and pen with me when I'm on the treadmill. I can't exactly read the writing, but I'm getting something down to jog, no pun intended, my memory later.

The beginning of my WIP came to me as I was driving to a NHRWA meeting. Yeah, can't exactly write while driving. Okay, I could but it probably wouldn't be pretty, cars piled up on 93N. I can see the headline now, Local Author Writes Her Own Death Scene. Anyway, as soon as I got to the meeting spot, I pulled out notebook and pen and wrote the first few sentences down. After that. . .novel three is in the works!