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.
However, he used “apprehensive” in every other sentence in the first mistborn book 🫠
Please Login to reply.
Yeah his Mistborn series is considered to have somewhat weak prose for an author of his caliber. Unlike say Rothfuss or Jensen.
True. Adjectives aside, I really enjoyed the books though.
