Ask an Editor: Passive and Literary Writing

Theresa:

Your last column on writing actively brought up a question I’ve had for quite some time on passive voice writing.  In commercial genre fiction (romance, mystery, etc), the practice of writing in an active voice vs. a passive is pretty standard and accepted.  I’ve noticed, however, that when someone is claiming to write literary fiction, the writing tends to be passive voice (with lots of has and had and were and other passive voice indicators and sentence structures) with much of the action and scene events being “summarized” instead of being shown to the reader through direct action and dialogue.  To me the difference is as noticeable as feeling like I’m listening to a report of the story on the radio vs. seeing the events play out live on TV in ”Breaking News!”

Is there really a different active/passive voice need in commercial genre fiction vs. literary fiction?  Is it a matter of commercial fiction narrative vs. literary narrative?  Or is this something wannabe authors tell themselves distinguishes their work from “mass commercial fiction,” or is it really a necessity of their form? 

Thank you.

Julie H.

 

Hi, Julie,

Let’s start by distinguishing passive voice from passive writing.  Passive voice is a type of sentence structure in which the object of the verb action occupies the subject position in the sentence.  For example, in active voice, we might write:

The priest rang the bell.

In passive voice, however, the sentence would read:

The bell was rung.

Or,

The bell was rung by the priest.

Passive voice is a useful sentence construction anytime you’re trying to obscure the actor or anytime the actor is unimportant.  It has a bad reputation, but it is not without its uses.

Passive writing, on the other hand, can result from any number of things–weak verbs, meandering characters, flat conflicts, too much exposition, and many more.

The style you describe — especially the reference to heavy use of narrative summary — is something that many of us first encounter when reading classic literature in school.  Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean that aping that style makes the resulting work literary.  The literary community has evolved since the days of the early novelists.  They’re bending narrative forms and tinkering with structure and point of view.  Think, for example, of De Lillo’s long lists of nouns in “White Noise,” Proulx’s fractured interior monologue in “The Shipping News,” the metaliterary flourishes in Faber’s “The Crimson Petal and the White,” or Atwood’s truncated structure in “Oryx & Crake.”

Although it’s possible for the style you describe to be used by a contemporary literary novelist, in my experience, this type of writing more often results from laziness or confusion. Writing from subjective viewpoints is hard work. And wrapping a standard genre plot and characters in exposition won’t convert a book into a literary novel. Today’s literary novels push the boundaries of form. They don’t retreat into a style that was developed over a century ago.

Commercial fiction usually prefers deep point of view (though some thrillers are sometimes more omniscient), lots of action, minimal exposition, and other devices which engage the reader’s emotions in an immediate and direct way.  This is especially true of romance with its goal of providing powerful emotional experiences for the hero, the heroine, and the reader. (Which is not to say that current literary books are incapable of engaging our emotions. See “Oryx & Crake” in particular for an example.)

In general, writing genre fiction means getting this part of it right. We want stories told in scenes with lots of action and emotion.  There are exceptions. For example, Sherry Thomas kicks off her popular first novel, “Private Arrangements,” with an omniscient summary of the definition of proper marriage that feels almost Dickensian. But the rest of the book is narrated from the subjective point of view of the hero and heroine, and there’s very little exposition other than that opening. This technique worked beautifully for this book, but it’s not a one-size-fits-all approach. The subject of Thomas’s expository opening was unique and engaging enough that the lack of an immediate point-of-view character was not a problem.

All of which is to say, yes, genre writers can occasionally borrow techniques from our literary brethren, but we still must focus on providing an emotional, immediate reading experience. We can accomplish that better by avoiding passive writing and narrative summary.

Readers, what do you think makes for an emotional read? Active writing? What else?

If you have a question for Theresa you can submit it to askaneditor@romanceuniversity.org.  Don’t miss this great opportunity to have your concerns addressed by a top-notch editor!

After earning degrees in creative writing and law, Theresa Stevens worked as a literary attorney agent for a boutique firm based in Indianapolis where she represented a range of fiction and nonfiction authors. The lure of the courtroom led to a nine-year hiatus from the publishing industry, but now Theresa is back as Managing Editor for Red Sage Publishing, a highly acclaimed small press. Her articles on writing and editing have appeared in numerous publications for writers. Visit her blog at http://edittorrent.blogspot.com/ where she and her co-blogger share their knowledge and hardly ever argue about punctuation.

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