Passive Characters and the Passive Voice

People sometimes talk about avoiding "the passive" in writing, but the expression tends to be used to refer to a couple of things.

First, passivity in a character is what it sounds like. A passive character is one that things happen to. The character doesn’t take action or make decisions: he is just affected by stuff. To use modern jargon, he has no agency. I sometimes suspect that one of the main differences between literary and genre writing is that a lead character in a literary novel is much less likely to be dynamic. 

Generally speaking, passivity in characters is hard to warm to. Characters who are dynamic are more appealing to read about, because they move the plot forward. My own feeling is that, unless you are going to do something very clever, writing about a character who is fundamentally passive – a man locked in a cell, for instance – is a risk. Of course, once the man is working out a way to escape from the cell, he’s no longer passive any more…

Second, however, the Passive Voice is something different, as in the criticism that a writer is using too many “passive verbs”. "Voice" tells you whether the subject of the sentence is doing the verb, or having the verb done to them.

The passive voice is the opposite of the active voice. “I hit Bob” is active, because the subject of the sentence, me, is doing the action, namely hitting Bob. “I was hit by Bob” is passive, because the subject of the sentence, still me, is being affected by the action, namely being hit by Bob. However, note that “Bob hit me” is active. Although the people in the sentence have swapped around, Bob is now the subject of the sentence and is doing the action in the verb (the hitting). “Bob was hit by me” is passive.

And now, to really complicate things... Passive voice is not a tense. A tense tells you when something happened, not whether the event was caused or affected the subject of the sentence. The passive voice is easily confused with the pluperfect tense because it often includes the word “was”, as in “I was hitting Bob”. Here, despite the use of “was”, the sentence is still active, because "I", which is the subject of the sentence, is doing the hitting. If this sentence was in the passive, it would probably be “Bob was being hit by me”.

 Be wary of lapsing into the passive voice too much. It is often used in official documents to add a false level of grandness to proceedings, but is prone to vagueness and lacks dynamism. Overusing it won't destroy a story, but it will rob it of a degree of immediacy and accuracy, probably for no real gain.