The Real Problem With Passive Voice in Fiction

By Janice Hardy, @Janice_Hardy

Passive voice in a novel can put your readers right to sleep.

Before we dive in, a little heads up that I'm over at Writers in the Storm today, chatting about how to use clichés, metaphors, and similes to bring your story world to life.  Come on over and say hello.

And now on to our regularly scheduled article...

“Avoid the passive voice” is one of those pieces of advice most writers have heard and likely struggled with at some point. It’s good advice, since revising passive into active typically makes the sentence stronger, but like all things writing, simply doing it because people say so isn’t always the best idea.

Without understanding why a passive voice causes trouble, you might rewrite it when its actually the best thing for your story at that moment. It does have it’s uses after all.

So first, let's look at what passive voice means.

I used to be one of those folks who wrongly equated passive voice with all forms of the "to be" verb, and I'm guessing I'm not the only one. Because quite often, a “to be” verb is at the heart of a troublesome sentence, but a “to be” verb doesn't always signal passive writing. 

Passive voice is when the subject of the sentence gets all the action instead of the subject doing the acting. For example:

Bob was bitten by a zombie.

This is a passive voice sentence. Bob is the subject here, but Bob doesn't do anything, except maybe stand there like an idiot, and the zombie bites him. “Bob was acted upon by a zombie.” It practically the same sentence (which can be a way to test your own sentences).

In active voice, we'd flip it so that the action (the biting) is done by the subject. Since Bob biting the zombie really isn’t an option here, we’ll need to change the subject of the sentence and rewrite it.

The zombie bit Bob.

This turns the passive voice into an active voice and puts the action in the hands of the subject of the sentence.

Of course, this also shifts the focus from Bob to the zombie, which we might not want to do. The original sentence said that Bob got bitten, not that zombies bite. It’s subtle, but it’s a shift away from the protagonist and what’s happening to him, and puts the focus on a mindless zombie readers aren’t likely to care about.

Even though the sentence is now active, it’s still putting distance between readers and the story—and very likely the point of why Bob was getting bitten in the first place. The problem with this sentence isn’t the passive nature of it, but the way it keeps readers from the action and prevents them from engaging in the story and the likely importance of this moment.

And this is why passive voice can hurt our writing.

Because ultimately, this isn’t about grammar, it’s about writing a sentence in a way that gets the idea we want to convey across in a dramatic fashion that engages our readers.

(Here's more with Five Ways to Kick Your Writing up a Notch)

The trouble comes from passive voices frequently holding readers at bay from the story. The passive nature keeps them from connecting to the characters and losing themselves in the story, and if we revise in a way that is equally detached (such as shifting the action away from the characters), the problem still exists. For example:

The zombie bit him. Bob screamed.

Grammatically, this fixes the passive voice problem, but it’s not very exciting and still has the detached feel issue. But let’s make Bob the subject of the sentence again—even if that means rewriting this concept completely to show the series of events that illustrate the idea that “Bob was bitten by a zombie.”

The zombie seized Bob’s leg and bit down, dangerously close to breaking the skin. Bob screamed and went still. One wrong twitch and he’d be worse than lunch.

A much more interesting situation, even though this also says, “Bob was bitten by a zombie.”

The problem with this sentence was never the passive voice—the passive voice was just hiding a dramatic moment readers deserve to see played out.

Technically, there’s nothing wrong with a passive voice or sentence if it’s also doing its job and making the reader want to see what happens next. If the passive voice works and does what you want it to do in that scene, there’s no reason to change it.

Maybe you want a little distance between the subject and the action. Maybe you want a sense of detachment. Maybe you want to sneak it by readers but still drop that detail in. There are all sorts of reasons why you might choose to keep a passive sentence.

(Here's more with The Difference Between Painting a Scene vs Dramatizing a Scene)

Let’s look at a passive voice gray area next:

Bob was running from the zombies.

Bob is indeed the subject here, and he is indeed the one doing the acting. Bob is running. But a funny thing happens when you use the -ing form of a verb. It can sound passive and make us feel we ought to rewrite it, even when we don’t need to. Writers struggling with passive voice might easily change this to:

Bob ran from the zombies.

This uses a stronger verb and it eliminates the “to be” verb and the -ing. But this has a slightly different meaning than the first example.

Often, we use a sentence like this to show something happening in the middle of the action. “Was running” suggests action in progress, while “ran” suggests action just started or action completed.

A sentence like this can also trigger our passive voice flags when it isn’t actually passive. If this sentence was intended to show action in progress, it’s highly likely there’s more to it—you can practically hear the "when" at the end of this:

Bob was running from the zombies when a car hit him.

Though our passive flags might say this is a passive sentence, it's actually active. Bob (the subject) was running (the verb). You can't say "Bob ran from the zombies when the car hit him" because that changes the meaning of the sentence. The car hits Bob in the middle of him running from the zombies. He is actively engaged in the act when something else happens.

Although tastes vary, I’d say the problem with this revised sentence isn’t a passive voice, but that it’s told, explaining what Bob was doing when something happened to him. Readers don’t see him get hit while running, they’re told that he got hit while running. Our instincts flag it as a problem, but we can easily miss the real culprit.

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If you’re worried about passive voice in your manuscripts, try searching for “to be” verbs: Is, am are, was, were, has, have, had, being, been, and be. You can find most passive voice problems there.

Passive voice is only a problem when it’s making your readers feel detached from your story. Revise to reengage, and you’ll solve that problem.

EXERCISE FOR YOU: Pick a scene from your novel and examine it for passive voice. If you find it, edit to shift into an active voice.  

Have you struggled with passive voice? Does it bother you when you read?

*Originally published May 2009. Last update April 2023.

Find out more about show, don't tell in my book, Understanding Show, Don't Tell (And Really Getting It).

With in-depth analysis, Understanding Show, Don't Tell (And Really Getting It) teaches you how to spot told prose in your writing, and discover why common advice on how to fix it doesn't always work. It also explores aspects of writing that aren’t technically telling, but are connected to told prose and can make prose feel told, such as infodumps, description, and backstory.

This book will help you:

• Understand when to tell and when to show
• Spot common red flag words often found in told prose
• Learn why one single rule doesn't apply to all books
• Determine how much telling is acceptable in your writing
• Fix stale or flat prose holding your writing back

Understanding Show, Don't Tell (And Really Getting It) is more than just advice on what to do and what not to do—it’s a down and dirty examination and analysis of how show, don’t tell works, so you  can adapt the “rules” to whatever style or genre you’re writing. By the end of this book, you’ll have a solid understanding of show, don’t tell and the ability to use it without fear or frustration.

Available in paperback and ebook formats.

Janice Hardy is the award-winning author of the teen fantasy trilogy The Healing Wars, including The Shifter, Blue Fire, and Darkfall from Balzer+Bray/Harper Collins. The Shifter, was chosen for the 2014 list of "Ten Books All Young Georgians Should Read" from the Georgia Center for the Book.

She also writes the Grace Harper urban fantasy series for adults under the name, J.T. Hardy.

When she's not writing novels, she's teaching other writers how to improve their craft. She's the founder of Fiction University and has written multiple books on writing.

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