![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
I am sick of reading passive voice. After having a nice long run of very enjoyable books (about four of them), I am currently trying to read two novels which were sitting much further down in my to-read pile: Eragon by Christopher Paolini and The Dust of Wonderland by Lee Thomas. Otherwise entirely unrelated, these two disparate books are united by a single shining similarity—crappy, crappy writing styles.
Eragon is a case of its own. It begins with the driest possible arrangement of noun verbing noun with no attempt to show instead of tell, but then Paolini begins to break out all sorts of shiny new tricks, including metaphors so bad I had to read them aloud to the boy, a lengthy slew of adverbs including "dilligently" which just rolls off the tongue don't ya know, and passive voice—passive voice used by bards, passive voice to avoid an acting noun, passive voice just for decoration and delight. The Dust of Wonderland is artful by comparison, but it is heavy with fragmented sentences, dream sequences, italicized thoughts, and—you guessed it—passive voice. Passive voice, for no purpose that I can figure. Perhaps Thomas just didn't notice he was using it, but he sure does use it a lot.
In high school, teachers redline passive voice as a matter of course and rarely explain why writers should avoid it. Of course, no one should avoid things just because they were told to do so, but there is a very good reason to avoid passive voice: Passive voice is weak. Passive voice is passive. Remove the actor, and you dampen the action. If there is no actor, there is no reason to care about the action. Eragon chowing down on a dinner can be visceral and hedonistic, it can a way to survive in the wild mountains, it can be a social ritual; a dinner that was eaten is so entirely unimportant that Eragon didn't even need to be involved.
Sure, there's room to deviate and chances to slip up. I know I'm anal-retentive abouteverything grammar, but there's no reason for every writer to hunt down and destroy every bit of passive voice that slips into his text. But when it begins to creep into every page of text or clutters individual paragraphs, the writer can no longer afford to ignore the habit—because it makes readers like me roll their eyes, put their books down, and write bitchy rants about passive voice.
To come full circle, as it were.
On a related note: When and how often do you give up on a book? I'm genuinely curious—perhaps because of all the effort I put into my decisions. I used to be a strict stickler for finishing the vast majority of what I read, especially if I got past the first seventy pages. I now have an average of eight books checked out from the library at any time, as well as a long and active to-read and holds list, and a fair amount of that turns out to be shite. Because there is so much that I want to read, I've gotten better about deciding what I can't bother to read—but it's hard to decide which bad books are worth finishing. Are they only mediocre instead of painfully bad, and will they be swift and forgettable? Do they lack useful negative reviews, and will I be able to serve some sort of useful purpose if I read and review the bad book? If the book and my review will both lack redeeming factors, should I give up on the book? Worst of all, is it so positively awful that, even if my feedback might be useful, I can't possibly force myself to continue?
Most of the books I return without completing have a fair number of average reviews, such that my review will make no really difference. I've forced myself through a fair number of truly awful books merely so that I can write an educated review to warn others away. I can only think of one example of a book so downright horrible that I wasn't able to continue reading it despite my best attempts, and that was Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn—which featured prose so amateur and so slow that I found the book truly excruciating to read.
The Dust of Wonderland could use a healthy less-than-glowing review, so I may complete it. Eragon, however ... the boy took it away from me and refuses to give it back because he already hates it—and he's not even reading it. It is a book of cliché from characters to plot, and it feels like it was written my a fifteen year old boy—because it is. It also has a fair number of reviews, many of which are two or three stars. I miss nothing by returning it unfinished, and the rest of the world misses nothing by being spared my review. There are better books out there and less painful ways to spend my time.
Speaking of: I'm currently padding to my to-read list, and would I love to hear what people are reading or would recommend. All genres, all sorts, anything is a good starting place.
Eragon is a case of its own. It begins with the driest possible arrangement of noun verbing noun with no attempt to show instead of tell, but then Paolini begins to break out all sorts of shiny new tricks, including metaphors so bad I had to read them aloud to the boy, a lengthy slew of adverbs including "dilligently" which just rolls off the tongue don't ya know, and passive voice—passive voice used by bards, passive voice to avoid an acting noun, passive voice just for decoration and delight. The Dust of Wonderland is artful by comparison, but it is heavy with fragmented sentences, dream sequences, italicized thoughts, and—you guessed it—passive voice. Passive voice, for no purpose that I can figure. Perhaps Thomas just didn't notice he was using it, but he sure does use it a lot.
In high school, teachers redline passive voice as a matter of course and rarely explain why writers should avoid it. Of course, no one should avoid things just because they were told to do so, but there is a very good reason to avoid passive voice: Passive voice is weak. Passive voice is passive. Remove the actor, and you dampen the action. If there is no actor, there is no reason to care about the action. Eragon chowing down on a dinner can be visceral and hedonistic, it can a way to survive in the wild mountains, it can be a social ritual; a dinner that was eaten is so entirely unimportant that Eragon didn't even need to be involved.
Sure, there's room to deviate and chances to slip up. I know I'm anal-retentive about
To come full circle, as it were.
On a related note: When and how often do you give up on a book? I'm genuinely curious—perhaps because of all the effort I put into my decisions. I used to be a strict stickler for finishing the vast majority of what I read, especially if I got past the first seventy pages. I now have an average of eight books checked out from the library at any time, as well as a long and active to-read and holds list, and a fair amount of that turns out to be shite. Because there is so much that I want to read, I've gotten better about deciding what I can't bother to read—but it's hard to decide which bad books are worth finishing. Are they only mediocre instead of painfully bad, and will they be swift and forgettable? Do they lack useful negative reviews, and will I be able to serve some sort of useful purpose if I read and review the bad book? If the book and my review will both lack redeeming factors, should I give up on the book? Worst of all, is it so positively awful that, even if my feedback might be useful, I can't possibly force myself to continue?
Most of the books I return without completing have a fair number of average reviews, such that my review will make no really difference. I've forced myself through a fair number of truly awful books merely so that I can write an educated review to warn others away. I can only think of one example of a book so downright horrible that I wasn't able to continue reading it despite my best attempts, and that was Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn—which featured prose so amateur and so slow that I found the book truly excruciating to read.
The Dust of Wonderland could use a healthy less-than-glowing review, so I may complete it. Eragon, however ... the boy took it away from me and refuses to give it back because he already hates it—and he's not even reading it. It is a book of cliché from characters to plot, and it feels like it was written my a fifteen year old boy—because it is. It also has a fair number of reviews, many of which are two or three stars. I miss nothing by returning it unfinished, and the rest of the world misses nothing by being spared my review. There are better books out there and less painful ways to spend my time.
Speaking of: I'm currently padding to my to-read list, and would I love to hear what people are reading or would recommend. All genres, all sorts, anything is a good starting place.
