Heresy of an one story writer.

[Octavian]

Heresy of a one story writer.

Having only one real story to my name, I cannot claim to be a writer although I would like to think I am literate.

Now this might seem a heresy to some of you accomplished authors, but does it really matter if the passive tense is used from time to time? I recently read some feedback deprecating the overuse of adverbs. What constitutes overuse?

It is a pre-requisite for me at least that a story is literate and I will immediately hit the back button if it is not. But it is possible to be too esoteric in critical analysis. For example, I was told that the passive was overused in my own story. But you should see the feedback I’ve had for it and surprise, surprise, no one else has even noticed the occasional use of the passive tense.

It was a panel of ‘experts’ who selected an unmade bed as a work of art. Most of us lesser mortals couldn’t understand why. And I suspect that most of us lesser mortals would not be deterred by the use of the passive voice or the ‘overuse’ of adverbs, if the story itself was good enough.

 

[dr_mabeuse]

The passive voice and other rhetorical bugaboos have bad reputations because of the effect they're generally perceived to have on a piece of prose. But to criticize a story just because it has passive voice--or sentence fragments, or sentences that are too long, or whatever--without looking at how they work to give the story style and flavor is just silly.

Creativity always involves breaking rules, and as long as you're in control of what you're doing I think you can do whatever you want. It's when you're not in control, when something doesn't read right and you can't quite figure out why, that this kind of academic criticism can be useful.

I don't think any accomplished writer takes those grammar school rules seriously. Never start a sentence with a conjunction, never split infinitives, never use sentence fragments, these rules are violated all the time by excellent writers who are in complete control of what they write.

---dr.M.

 

[PaulX35]

... And I suspect that most of us lesser mortals would not be deterred by the use of the passive voice or the ‘overuse’ of adverbs, if the story itself was good enough...

Octavian,

Gastronomy has a couple of rules, saying things about which wine matches well with which type of food. That doesn't mean Mr. & Mrs. Average cannot enjoy their red meat steak with a sweet white wine, or even that they will necessarily not like it.
Yet, gastronomy has not just madeup these things as customs: there are valid and rationally arguable reasons for using and avoiding certain things. And my experience is that even "lesser mortals" instantly detect a better wine & food pairing when they're served one.

A similar thing goes for writing, I think. A good story will not become unreadable from a lot of passive tense or adverbs being used, despite "expert rules" condemning such. At the same time it will likely become even better without them, but you will only start noticing once you have spotted and gotten the "feel" for the actual difference.
Passive tense and adverbs possess an intrinsic "slowness", which can actually work well under certain conditions. Generally though, active tense will read more easily, as will adjectives compared to adverbs.

The trick is probably to be aware of your story-speed as a writer. In slow parts, your language can be slow as well. In fast parts, excitement and nervousness should be reflected in your sentence building and choice of words.

Again, good stories can do without, but rules like these also have a rationale. That means they're there for a reason.

Paul

 

[Pookie]

dr.

VERY well said!

 

[Un-registered]

I recently read some feedback deprecating the overuse of adverbs. What constitutes overuse?

Years ago, before most of Lit regulars were born there were a series of stories in American magazines which became known as "Tom Swiftlies" because the main character, Tom, never did anything without an adverb. The example I remember best was: "I haven't got any money," Tom said brokenly.

That was overuse.

these rules are violated all the time by excellent writers who are in complete control of what they write.

Yes, they are, but not often and each and every time it is done for a particular effect.

 

[Madame Manga]

The passive voice and other rhetorical bugaboos have bad reputations because of the effect they're generally perceived to have on a piece of prose. But to criticize a story just because it has passive voice--or sentence fragments, or sentences that are too long, or whatever--without looking at how they work to give the story style and flavor is just silly.

---dr.M.

Oh, absolutely. If a story feels good from the get-go, then obviously the writer knows what to do with his or her words, and any style solecisms that may exist are not causing a problem or drawing attention to themselves. If I read a story with crit in mind, I do not checklist adverbs and passive voice constructions from first principles, even though at *least* two-thirds of the stories I read suffer from their overuse.

If a story works, it works. Only when I get that all-too-familiar dragging sensation do I go back and start diagramming sentences to find the cause. It usually leaps off the page at me--and that applies to editing my own work, too. ;-)

However, I have heard the argument "But good writers use (fill in grammar or style violation here) all the time!" a little too often. ;-) Of course it's true, but good writers are not good *because* their styles are non-standard. It is self-defeating for a writer to claim that she doesn't have to deal with her genuine problems because some other person has enough skill to use the same constructions with success. All that matters is *your* end result; the reader is not going to cut you slack for the sake of someone else's talent!

MM

 

[wildsweetone]

one single passive voice sentence has been known to drive me stark staring mad.

i have been trying to ensure i don't include any passive voice in my writing recently.

now and again i come across one single sentence and no matter how i reword the sentence i cannot figure out how to change it into active voice. i am sorry to say that often i've ended up deleting the sentence and any relevant references to it.

the trouble is, i like those oddball passive voice sentences and i resent having to deal with them.

 

[dr_mabeuse]

Un-registered,

I would take violent exception to your "but not often" statement.

Kerouac wrote without periods. Joyce wrote long streams of nonsense. Shakespeare invented entire words out of whole cloth. Hemingway violated all conventions by throwing out all the long-winded descriptions that were the norm of the time.

If you do any scientific writing you'll find that the passive voice has become the accepted norm. Everyone decried it, but everyone does it.

It's the artists who make the rules, not the rules that make the artist, and once you master your tools you're free to use them as you wish.

And of course they're used for effect. Everything is used for effect.


---dr.M.

 

[karmadog]

The difficulty is that people cite rules of thumb as though they were laws handed down by God.

The passive voice is handy when a past tense story shifts to something that happened before the action of the story.

'Show don't tell' is easily the most abused notion on this board. In general, a story works best if action that is central to the plot is shown, but a story becomes bloated if the back story is also shown rather than told. I've seen ads for the movie 'Adaptation' (about a screenwriter) who says, "OK, we open at the beginning of time." In a nutshell, that's why a writer doesn't show everything. The ratio between showing and telling is where the art is.

Adverbs are useful words, but they are abused when the writer uses them to cover up that they don't know how to explain that a character is skeptical, or that their voice breaks, or whatever.

Writing is an art not a science and there are no laws.

 

[Weird Harold]

The difficulty is that people cite rules of thumb as though they were laws handed down by God.

The passive voice is handy when a past tense story shifts to something that happened before the action of the story.

Simple past tense usually works better than passive voice.

There are some occassions when passive voice is the best way to present a concept or idea. It is only when passive voice is overused that it becomes a problem and has an adverse effect on a story. Technical writing does involve a lot of passive voice, but even there, articles are generally "better" if it can be avoided.

For those confused about passive voice nd why it should be avoided, check out http://owl.english.purdue.edu/ and find their article on passive voice. Among other things, it says, "... overuse of passive voice throughout an essay can cause your prose to seem flat and uninteresting." That sounds like a pretty fair description of most technical writing, doesn't it?

FWIW, I've found that the predicted "flat and uninteresting" prediction generally starts to be fulfilled at about 2% passive voice sentences as reported by MS Word's readability statistics. I think that it's as much an indication of tendency to phrase things indirectly as it is a direct effect of the passive voice sentences that causes the "flatness".

Passive voice should be avoided if you can, but the mindset that leads to using passive voice should be avoided even more.

 

[Dirt Man]

Straight talk:

It's funny how when we start out writing we get buried under boulders of trivial pursuits. The truth is, a Writer writes, a true Critic critiques, and an Editor edits. Unfortunately, a great many writers forget that they must be all three of the above, and never all three at the same time. To start, one must write the story, poem, book, etc. as they see it in their mind's eye. Editing can take place afterwards, and should, though I constantly do a spell, and grammar check as I go along. And editing should be done with the reader in mind. Critiquing our own work though is almost anal retentive in nature, and leaves a bad taste no matter how well we write as we are usually our own worst critics in most cases. I for one am never satisified with any of my work, and am constantly changing something or other even after the work is published. But that's just me. So how do I know when to submit a work for publishing if I'm never satisfied? I come to a point where I know that the reader will thoroughly enjoy what I have shown them in words whether erotic, or not.

As Always
I Am the
Dirtman

 

[Un-registered]

Kerouac wrote without periods. Joyce wrote long streams of nonsense. Shakespeare invented entire words out of whole cloth. Hemingway violated all conventions by throwing out all the long-winded descriptions that were the norm of the time.

Well --- one great writer out of four isn't bad.
Kerouac wrote good stories, but was a bad writer.
Joyce's "stream of consciousness" was very fashionable for a while. Done well it can be very gripping, see some of MsLinnet's early work on here and on her own website.
Hemingway didn't even write good stories.

If you do any scientific writing you'll find that the passive voice has become the accepted norm. Everyone decried it, but everyone does it.

In the offices of a well-know management consultancy company in the 1960's there was a sign which read: All sentences in the passive mood will be deleted from reports.

It is all so personal; I don't have a problem with the use of the passive. I dislike split infinitives, so I don't use them.

 

[Un-registered]

Simple past tense usually works better than passive voice.

Sorry, this I really do not understand. Passive voice can be in any tense; simple past tense (by which I take it you mean perfect tense) can be active or passive.

 

[PaulX35]

Example please?

...I dislike split infinitives, so I don't use them...

I want to learn from this. Could you give a few examples of what a "split infinitive" is, please?

Thanks,

Paul

 

[Weird Harold]

Sorry, this I really do not understand. Passive voice can be in any tense; simple past tense (by which I take it you mean perfect tense) can be active or passive.

True. I tend to think of passive voice as past tense because it includes a form of to be and a Past Participle. It is also most common in the past tense stories or scenes.

 

[dr_mabeuse]

Some passives I would use:

"There was a knock at the door."
I don't even know if this is really passive, but I had a grade school teacher who actually insisted I write "Someone knocked on the door". It's not the same at all.

"In the morning, her body was found by a vagrant searching amidst the trash."
Not the same as "In the morning a vagrant searching amidst the trash found her body." The passive voice gives us a kind of chilly distance from the action.

"The knife had been thrown by a man who disappeared into the shadows."
Not the same as "A man who dispappeared into the shadows had thrown the knife."

Passive has its uses.

Passive voice evolved in scientific writing out of tye scientist's unconsciious desire to absent himself from the proceedings. "The crystals were treated with hydrochloric acid." was deemed better than "I treated the crystals with hydrochloric acid." In chemistry, at least, passive boice is still the accepted norm.

 

[Natural Born Eros]

Split infinitives

Paul

The infinitive simply a tense of verbs. An example would be "to be." If you are concentrating ( ) you will notice it has two words. As a result, it is possible to place words between them (famous example: to boldly go). Grammatically, this is wrong, since "to go" is one part of a sentece (the verb). However, it has become a very common formation, and is no longer truly considered wrong, although many purists do still object.

Personally, I have no problem with it in speech, but try to avoid it in writing. I hope this clarifies things.

Eros

 

[PaulX35]

Thanks

I smilingly tried to perfectly grasp the things you meant to clearly explain

Thanks for the examples; it may be from Star Trek memory (to boldly go where no man...) but is it also considered wrong in cases you really want to stress something, like the French do with adjectives and nouns, e.g. l'homme fameux vz. le fameux homme?

Paul

 

[Natural Born Eros]

I don't think that splitting an infinitive does stress a verb. I may be wrong.

E

 

[jon.hayworth]

Whilst I agree one should not slavishly follow rules - writing is an art and in art all rules are made to be challenged.

I would suggest that when you write your next story - if you use word with the (horrible) grammer checker - you try rewriting those sentences identified as being passive - see what you think - maybe you will find the rewritten sentences are better than your original sentences, or it may be the case that you prefer the original version you wrote. The point is you will have taken a look at the options, never a bad policy for a writer.

jon

 

[dr_mabeuse]

Curious:
How many authors here run their story through the grammar checker? Not the spell checker; the grammar checker.

I turned mine off long ago and keep it off. I think it's an idiot.

---dr.M.

 

[Natural Born Eros]

My grammar checker is an idiot. I turned it off when, at the end of a 10,000 word essay on the economy of Ptolemaic Egypt, it had this nugget for me. "Excessive use of the passive voice is consdiered boring." True, but when writing academic prose for a period where few, if any, figures are identified by names, what can you do?

That fit of pique aside, for my important works I do use it to pick out word repititions, missing commas (I tend to hit ALT a lot) and other such minor errors. I ignore 90% of its "corrections" though. As you say, a good writer has to know the rules, so as to know when to break them. My analogy has always been the test pilot - pushing the limit, using a plane to do not what it is designed to do, but everything it is capable of. In the same way, our language is capable of doing a lot more than following the rules we have imposed. They are there to be used by most of us, most of the time. Art is a test pilot.

Eros

 

[jon.hayworth]

I was not saying to slavishly follow the advice of the Grammer Checker - but it is a tool a guide. Often I end up by ignore what it has said but I also do often re-examine the sentence in question. It flags up something worth taking another long hard look at.

I am not advocating writing like a machine - I am simply saying use the tools.

jon

 

[Un-registered]

I have never found a grammar checker which follows English (as opposed to American) rules.





I have found many spell checkers however, which distinguish between "grammar" and "grammer".

 

[Octavian]

spell checker grammar checker

I have neither of the above.
They is both ades what I don't nede.
______________________________________________
A gentleman will always raise his hat before striking a lady.