I spent the day hunting. It was ruthless and brutal and bloody. But I showed no mercy - I sliced and diced; ripped and tore - using my biggest caliber weapons. To hell with hunting season - today was the day I decided to kill. And I didn't even have a permit.
Wait! Hold on. I suppose I should clarify before a reader calls the ASPCA...or the sheriff.
Yes, my hunt was brutal and ruthless and bloody. But I wasn't hunting animals. And my keyboard was my weapon. I was hunting passive verbs....and there were many.
It all started out innocently enough. I went back to my memoir, which I've put through two revisions and which I thought was close to final, to make one innocent fix: I decided to change the I am's to I'm's to make my writing more conversational. Small change, I know, but one of my sins as a former lawyer is to come across as more formal than friendly. So I thought this would make for a simple, subtle fix.
I was about halfway through the 80k word manuscript when a whole slew of passive verbs congregating in the vicinity of the "I am's" began to bash against my eyes. How's this for a nice example: I am happy to have been a positive role model. Oh, god! Please let me repent. I'm ashamed to say there are a ton of sins in that one sentence, not just a passive verb, which is why my hunting expedition was particularly painful.
It seems that as a lawyer another one of my sins (in addition to the above-mentioned formality and a tendency to write run-on sentences) is an over-reliance on passive verbs. Yeckh. But I do know that I am not alone in my sinning. Nor is the sin confined to the ranks of lawyers. If hell was populated by users of passive verbs it would be one crowded place. Stephen King famously concluded that the overuse of passive verbs is linked to lack of confidence in one's writing. I agree wholeheartedly. Timidity and law school. But it is not too late: bravery can be found in the second draft.
So what to do? Just what I did. Ruthlessly kill them with a close reading as part of your second or third draft. Or plan a special reading focused on just this one topic. Don't worry about passives in your first draft - they tend to crop up almost subconsciously and obsessing over them too early impedes on the creative process (at least it does mine).
Since this is the day of confession, another sin I noticed in my manuscript is that most of the above-mentioned transgressions were more heavily congregated in the second half of the memoir. Why is that, you ask? The answer is simple. I have a tendency to rush through my re-writes. By the time I reach the second half my eyes are tired and my rigor is failing.
I hence resolve to practice as I preach: to set aside separate 'quality time' to edit later portions of my works instead of treating them as the afterthought at the end of a long day. And what will I be doing in this quality time? Killing passive verbs, of course. Not all killing is sinful after all.
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