PASSIVE WRITING?

Dear EditorChix,
I don't get it. I revise and rework until my manuscript is perfect...or so I think. Then I get feedback that my writing is passive,that it doesn't engage the reader. I've read "Show don't tell" in my margins until I'm sick of it. What am I doing wrong? Help!
Rejected

Dear Rejected,
I'm going to reprint an article I wrote addressing this topic. I hope it helps you. Show-don't-tell is tough to master, but don't dispair. Keep working at it.
Good luck!
Cheryl

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HOW TO TURN PASSIVE WRITING INTO ACTIVE READING
©2009 Cheryl Norman

In judging contests, critiquing, and editing, I’ve found one thing in common with all new writers: passive writing. If you’re tired of editors or critique partners telling you to “show, don’t tell” but you aren’t sure what that means, you're not alone. Telling instead of showing is another way of saying your writing is passive.

Symptoms of passive writing include:
· Overuse of adverbs, especially –ly adverbs
· Overuse of “be” verbs: was, were, to be
· Overuse of weak verbs: walk, sat, move, place, put, and felt
· Author intrusion: heard, saw, thought, wondered, knew
· Too many long passages of narrative

Today’s reader is impatient; she wants to be entertained, not informed. Rather than tell you how to punch up your passive writing, I’ll teach by example and show you. Consider this passage:

Sally Sleuth knew better than to break in the office. She had a reputation as a klutz, as her accomplice-in-detecting and best friend Tess often told her. But she persuaded Tess to help her hunt for clues after the construction crew went home for the day. She didn’t think anything would go wrong. But it was not to be. Just as she and Tess raised the window, she noticed a blinking red light on a panel. It was a burglar alarm. They hurriedly left the construction yard before security guards could catch them. Unfortunately, they had no chance to search the files and were no closer to proving that Mr. Crookshank was guilty of taking bribes.

Are you eager to read more of this story? I’m yawning, and I’m the one who wrote it! The trick is to relate the same information in a way that engages the reader, pulling her into the action. By re-writing the scene, we add word count, true, but also white space. And punch.

“Are you sure you want to break in?” Tess asked. “What if we’re caught?”

“Do you want to nail Crookshank or not? We need evidence.” Sally climbed the chain link fence and dropped inside the construction yard.

Dressed in black like Sally, Tess followed her over the fence. “I do. But we can’t find evidence if we’re sitting in a jail cell for B and E.”

“Everybody’s gone home. All we have to do is climb through that window on the side. The lock’s broken.” Sally flicked on the flashlight. “It’ll be a piece of cake.”

Tess crouched beside her. “Like I haven’t heard that before. What about the time you fell into that fish pond—"

“Must you bring that up? One little mistake.” Sally pulled on her black hood to cover her blond curls.

Tess snorted. “One little mistake? What about getting us trapped in that time locked safe?”

“Hey, that wasn’t my fault. I fell—"

“My point exactly. No offense, Sally, but you’re a klutz.”

“Stop wasting time. Let’s go.”

“Wait up.” Tess ran alongside her.

They reached the side of the construction trailer. Crouched beneath the window, Sally paused to listen. She’d show Tess she could be a detective without fouling up their snooping. No security guard on premise. No vicious Rottweiler. What could go wrong?

“Showtime.” She handed Tess the flashlight then stood on tiptoe and shoved the window. It squeaked open, and she wiggled across the frame.

“See anything?” Tess asked in a whisper.

Hanging half in, half out of the window, Sally winced from the narrow metal frame cutting into her waist. “Only a flashing red light on some kind of panel . . . uh oh.”

“Uh oh?”

“Quick. Help me down. We’ve got to get out of here, now!”

Big difference. Instead of telling the reader through passive narrative, we show through dialogue, internal thoughts, and action. Which passage makes you want to read more?

Did you notice how I sneaked in the backstory? Begin your scene “in the moment” and find creative ways to weave in need-to-know information.

Now, go back through your manuscript and look for the red flags listed above. Try reworking those passages as I did in the Sally Sleuth example. Have fun with it.

Remember: Telling is for your synopsis. Showing is for your story.

Crafting the Love Scene

Dear EditorChix,
I received feedback from a contest that my love scenes were euphemistic. Help!
~Paige Skipper

Dear Paige,

It may surprise you to learn the average reader skims or even skips sex scenes in books. Truly! He/she wants to get on with the story. Yet the last thing a writer wants is to lose the reader's interest, so what's the answer?

You must write so the reader can't afford to skim any part of your story.


Study the bestselling authors and see how sex is handled in their books. I did, and here is my list of the Dos and Don'ts of writing love scenes.

Do this and you'll keep your readers involved with your story.:

• Create sexual tension--regardless of genre, even inspirational, there needs to be a physical awareness that sparks between the hero and heroine.
• Choose the point of view character with care--make it the character who has the most at risk. Or if you need both points of view, switch smoothly and limit to one switch.
  
• Get inside their heads--Instead of clinically describing his hand on her breast, show the reader what she thinks and feels about this step toward intimacy.
• Use dialogue--a love scene is more entertaining and revealing if the couple talk, or try to talk, between kisses. It's an easy way to show what's on their minds.
  
• Tie the love scene to the plot. Growing intimacy should move the plot in a new direction.

Do any of the following if you want to lose the reader:

• Be repetitive--regardless of how many times the hero kisses her collarbone, describe it every time.
  
• Use clichés--use the phrases and expressions commonly associated with love scenes (She'd never felt this way before. She tilted her head to give him better access. The list is endless)
• Give a clinical description of the action naming each body part and action. Be realistic. Readers love to know all details involving personal hygiene and bodily functions.
  
• Ignore emotional development.
• Ignore the plot. Add a gratuitous sex scene to pad word count.
• Head-hop--use both points of view, switching as necessary to the scene. Don't worry about losing the reader; she's focused on inserting tab A into slot B.
  

Yes, I'm being silly with the second list, but these are, unfortunately, common mistakes with newer writers. If you're guilty of any of the items in the second list, revise. With practice, you will be able to write love scenes that fit seamlessly into the rest of your story. Remember: You must write so the reader can't afford to skim any part of your story.

Cheryl

Are You a Generic Writer?

Dear EditorChix:
I received a rejection letter from an agent who said she found nothing about my writing to make her enthusiastic enough to offer representation. Translated: My writing is blah and ordinary. How do I make my story stand out?
Thanks,
Clear as Mud

Dear Clear,
Early in my writing career, an editor referred to my generic style of writing when rejecting my manuscript. What the heck did she mean by that? I suspect you and I shared a penchant for hackneyed expressions, worn out similes, and plot clichés. I could be cute and advise you to avoid clichés like the plague, but you need solid advice.

Generic writing and clichéd writing is the tried and true (sorry!), or what's been done before. Are you guilty of any of the following phrases in your manuscript:

Pretty as a picture
selling like hotcakes
avoid like the plague
hard as nails
airing dirty laundry
reared its ugly head
make ends meet
tight as a drum
black as night
depths of despair
madder than a wet hen
crack of dawn

You get the picture. If you're going to use a simile, make it unique to your character. For instance, a football player would refer to sports terms, i.e. selling like Super Bowl tickets, hard as a fourth-down conversion, etc. An architect would think in drafting or building terms, i.e. hard as reinforced cement, black as roof tar, etc.

Plot clichés are a dime a dozen-- oops! sorry. Plot clichés have been used too often and create predictable stories. These include:

Having the hero walk in on the heroine while she's bathing/showering/changing clothes
Dogs who warm up to the good guys and growl at the villains
Hero soothing the heroine after a nightmare
The rogue cop/angry boss
Good twin/evil twin
Having the hiding character discovered when he/she sneezes

Overused expressions:

In your dreams!
Do I look like I'm ___________?
I could tell you, but then I'd have to kill you.
We're back to square one.

Exceptions to writing overused expressions are in historical fiction. If the slang fits the time, use it. Just be careful not to create anachronisms, i.e. in the 1860s, cowboys didn't "catch flak" or have "ego" problems, because flak and ego are twentieth century language. (Flak is a term for antiaircraft fire, hardly something troubling cowboys on the wild frontier!)

Stretch your writing muscles and go for unusual similes and figures of speech. As for plot clichés, remember if it's the first idea to pop in your mind, it's too familiar. Push yourself for a different way to move your plot, something the reader isn't expecting. Use your characters' voices to tell the story based on their backgrounds and vocations.

Good luck.

Cheryl

TUNNEL VISION

Dear EditorChix,

I’ve been enjoying this blog and learning from it.

While writing my first novel a friend told me about a Web site that was running a contest. It stipulated the novel didn’t have to be finished, but to submit a one-page summary and the first three chapters. I did that and as I continued on with writing, I got back a discouraging review on those initial pages. The biggest complaint was about POV. Without going into detail with everything that was graded on my first three chapters, could you explain POV?

Sincerely,
Down-in-the-Dumps Writer

Dear Writer,

I’m not going to tell you getting letters criticizing your writing is fun. As writers, we’ve all received rejection letters and critical comments. What we want to do is not look at these as downers, plugging up our creative juices, and leading us to quit writing, but as opportunities for improvement. It’s difficult to receive rejection of something we’ve poured our heart and soul into. So let’s take criticism and/or rejection as a chance to better our writing.

POV, or point of view, is not that difficult to wrap our heads around. We just need to remember that it’s each character whose head we’re into that we’re trying to wrap. *LOL*

The absolute best way to write is to keep an entire chapter in one person’s POV. Some current writers do this well. James Patterson comes to mind. He can run up to 70 some chapters in a book with multiple characters, delegating an entire chapter to one character. But most of us like to keep our chapters minimized, so we parse it up into sections, dividing with asterisks or some type of symbol—maybe even just double spacing, although that isn’t my favorite format.

Now that we’ve got that straight, the thing to remember about POV is to keep it in one character’s head for that chapter or section. Think of it as placing your character in a tunnel. What that character can hear, see, smell, taste, or feel while in that tunnel are the only things that can be included in the section your character’s in.

It’s a real desire, especially in the romance genre, to want each of your character’s feelings known. You can do that, not just within the same section. In editing a work, I pointed out to the writer that she’d just jumped into another’s POV, and her comment back was that was what she wanted to do. The problem in having more than one POV to a section is that it more often than not will cause the reader to have to go back to see who’s doing the thinking, feeling, etc. Nothing can be more of a turnoff than to have to reread portions of a story.

You might think you’re going along smoothly and keeping your character’s POV straight, when whammo, someone says, whoops, you’re head-hopping—one paragraph in one character’s POV, the next in another, and so on. The biggest bugaboo—the use of adverbs. One adverb can throw one character’s POV into another’s in a heartbeat. So keep an eye out for the use of adverbs, which should be minimized in any case.

Thanks for your inquiry, and keep tuning in for more advice on honing your writing skills.

Patty