Today,
Writers’ Checklist extends a warm welcome to bestselling novelist, Michaelbrent
Collings.
Let's talk about our activity levels, shall we?
Obesity, as I'm constantly
being reminded every time I turn on my radio, is one of the top problems facing
America's people today. It comes largely from a sedentary lifestyle, a passive
engagement in activity.
Okay, then let's talk about the darker side of that problem: fat writing. Fat writing, like fat people, suffers from inactivity more than anything. Just as an obese person lives on a diet of junk food, fast food, and various things you can find fried at the county fair, so chubby writing exists on a steady and corroding diet of passive tense. Tossing back any form of "to be" adds ten pounds to your sentence, making it slow and clunky.
Check out these two
paragraphs. The first one is from my book, The
Haunted, which at the time of this writing is in its second straight month
on amazon.com's bestselling horror:
Then,
just as he felt himself about to give in, about to lose himself in the irrational
fear (and what other kind of fear was there but the irrational, for rationality
fled in the face of terror, the ability to be a thinking human being ran before
the onslaught of horror), his fingers felt the cool links of the chain. He grabbed it like a man about to fall off a
high cliff would grab a tethering line.
Nice, huh? It moves forward,
actively and resolutely. It's a decent example of perfectly weighted writing. But
add just a few junk-food "to be" words, and see what happens:
Then,
just as he was about to feel like he was about to give in, about to be lost
himself in the irrational fear (and what other kind of fear was there but the
irrational, for to be rational was something that would flee if it was faced by
terror, the ability to be a thinking human being would have run before terror
which was like an onslaught of horror), his fingers were able to feel the cool
links of the chain. He was going to hold
it like a man who was about to fall off a cliff and was going to grab a line
that would tether him.
Wow. Chubby writing. Worse, this writing is
downright riddled with lard and excess weight.
Passive tense doesn't do
that. Passive tense is more like a butler standing at your side as you read and
asking in a polite and insistent voice if perhaps you might not be better
suited doing something else. Something more active. More interesting. Like
fixing the garbage disposal, perhaps. Or going to the bathroom.
You get the picture, right? If
not, I'll just sum it up for you here:
Passive voice = bad.
Active voice = good.
Thus endeth the lesson.
Michaelbrent Collings is the
#1 bestselling author of RUN, The
Haunted, The Loon, and many other international bestsellers. His website is
http://michaelbrentcollings.com and he welcomes visitors. If you liked this
article, consider checking out one of his books. They're cool. Like
"integrated robot arm" cool.
2 comments:
Excellent post.
I'm guilty as chartged, but hopefully only ont he first drafts.
If it gets through them, it's Mo's fault.
Mmmm...
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