Nostr Web Client

Spending a few hours tonight going through my fiction writing and seeming where I can change passive voice to active voice, like removing was/were wherever possible. A bunch of tiny little sentence tweaks to tighten up the prose.

One of my early run-throughs was to search for "ly" and see what percentage of adverbs I could eliminate by using stronger or more precise verbs. And now this run through is meant to increase the ratio of active voice.

As a benchmark comparison, Brandon Sanderson used the word "was" as about 1.2% of his words or less in the Mistborn trilogy, whereas I found it to be 1.5% of my fiction writing.

Bewlay 9mo ago

I think this “show don’t tell” and “don’t use the passive tense” is a bit of a modern fashion. People have “told” stories for millennia. Wouldn’t surprise me if a few years if editors started saying “starting using the passive tense more to add more texture to your prose”

Reply to this note

Please Login to reply.

Discussion

Lyn Alden 9mo ago

The way I see it, I want to be intentional with each decision. There are some sentences that I think are better in passive, to give more texture to the prose. Especially if they're next to an actively phrased sentence.

But I don't want to overuse words unintentionally.

Bewlay 9mo ago

Agree 💯