Sometimes It Pays to be Passive

Don't let the active-voice people in on our little secret.

This post is part of the Write With Me series. For more like this, check out the writing your novel page.

In another post in this series, I covered the importance of striving for the use of active voice whenever possible. Though I still stand by favoring active voice over passive, I feel it's important to acknowledge that there are times where use of the passive voice can be beneficial, and, in fact, the more prudent choice.

Emphasis

One of the main advantages active voice has over passive voice is that it grants greater agency to the subject of the sentence, which is often our protagonist or another character of import. As I've argued before, why not keep them in the metaphorical driver's seat?

Well, sometimes we may want to emphasize the object of the verb rather than the person doing the verbing. Let's take a look at the example below, and ask ourselves which reading works best given the focus of the paragraph.

"This," Jah-ru said, "is the belt of atonement."

"It's beautiful," I said. And it was.

The leather—red and beaded in all the colors of the rainbow—was as thick and unbreakable as the cultural forces that kept it in use generation after generation... at least according to Jah-ru. It had been crafted hundreds of years earlier, Jah-ru went on to explain, by artisans whose expertise was now lost to the leathersmiths of the modern settlement.

"Would you like to try it on?" Jah-ru said.

"I'd be honored."

"That you would." He extended it toward me, only to pull it back a moment later. "But it is only for those who have earned it. And you, my friend, have not yet atoned."

Did you catch the use of passive voice in there? It's in the sentence that begins with "It had been crafted..."

An active-voice hardliner would suggest this sentence be rewritten as something like the below.

"Artisans whose expertise was now lost to the leathersmiths of the modern settlement had crafted it hundreds of years earlier."

There's nothing inherently wrong with this phrasing, though it does now begin with a thirteen-word noun phrase. To top that off, the subject of this noun phrase mentions individuals for whom we as readers have no previous context.

Furthermore, the focus of the paragraph—and the scene, insofar as we can tell—is the belt itself. Why take the belt out of focus by putting emphasis on the artisans who crafted it?

This is a perfect example of where the use of passive voice as seen in the first example is the better choice: it keeps the emphasis on the belt, which is the most critical component of the scene.

Concealment

Building on the (admittedly rhetorical) question posed near the end of the previous section, passive voice can also be used to conceal the agent of an action if we as writers decide that information is best left off the page (or if a character wants to prevent others from knowing who committed a certain act, for example).