Is there a difference between passive voice and immediacy?

GeoJon · Oct 22, 2016

This one is confusing me a little.

I understand passive voice, and why it should be avoided, but a few scenes I've shared on here lacked immediacy. I'd tried to avoid writing using a passive voice (although it occasionally slipped in), and assumed writing in the present tense produced immediacy. Given that it didn't, I guess they must be two different things! Any advice would help greatly.

Many thanks

Jon

Once! · Oct 22, 2016

Writing in the present tense doesn't automatically produce immediacy. Similarly, avoiding the passive voice doesn't automatically guarantee immediacy. Immediacy comes from a range of factors which bring the reader closer to the action.

For me it starts with characterisation, plot and voice. Avoiding the passive voice helps, in the same way that adding salt to a stew helps to improve its flavour. But you still need the rest of the stew. Plot and character are way more important for me.

Tense is a personal choice. I'm not a great fan of the present tense, but some people like it. I'd say it's an optional extra.

A quick google found this for you ...

http://allwritefictionadvice.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/creating-immediacy.html

There is no silver bullet for this one. Keep going, layering on the technique and the polish. Each thing we learn makes us a little bit better, but there is no magical single thing that we can do to create good writing. It needs lots of little things all merging in together.

Layla Nahar · Oct 22, 2016

GeoJon said:
I understand passive voice, and why it should be avoided, (oh really?) but a few scenes I've shared on here lacked immediacy. I'd tried to avoid writing using a passive voice (although it occasionally slipped in), and assumed writing in the present tense produced immediacy. Given that it didn't, I guess they must be two different things! Any advice would help greatly.

The passive voice is when you emphasize that a person or thing 'received' an action.

Mary hates Greg. <-- this is the active voice. The subject of the sentence is acting on something/someone.

Greg is hated by Mary. <-- this is the passive voice. The subject of the sentence is 'receiving' the action, that is to say being acted upon.

Note that both these examples are in the present tense.

If the situation calls for emphasis on the receiver of the action then the passive voice is the voice to use. For some reason there is a lot of misunderstanding in the form of writing advice about what 'passive voice' is. (For example, a lot of people say that removing 'was' from your text will make 'passiveness' go away...)

Question for you. How do you define/understand "immediacy"?

Fallen · Oct 22, 2016

Abstract v concrete word choice can be used to help/hinder immediacy. In active voice, readers can't sometimes engage actively with the word choice, and so are left as passive observers and dragged along for the ride. E.g.,

The man was in the room. (Active voice: main verb: Be)

There's two issues here. Both 'was' and 'the room' are hard to visualize for readers, so readers aren't given anything concrete to stimulate them and encourage them to move on to the next clause. Messing with word choice and using images that are very familiar and easily recognizable with readers can help give that immediacy in any tense:

The man danced the conference room.
The man dances the conference room.

This can be where the conflict comes with people saying removing 'was' removes passiveness. You can't remove passive voice from an active voice construction (and vice versa), but looking at word choice does look at removing how readers are sometimes made into passive observers.

Perhaps it could help if you move away from passive voice, and look at whether you are fashioning potential active or passive readers? Does the language stimulate, engage, and get them to interact and want to work with all the images you're giving them on a visual level (active), or are you spoon-feeding them every detail, in a way they can't visualize those images, and losing them in the process (passive)?

Mrs-Q · Oct 22, 2016

Immediacy is a combination of several things. The passive voice can kill immediacy, for sure. However, the "depth" of your point of view also matters. Underdramatization also kills immediacy.

Point of view elements which are immediate:

First person
Present tense
Stream of consciousness

Less immediate:

Third person
Past tense
"God-like" point of view

Complete immediacy comes at the cost of readability. First person present tense stream of consciousness with zero information presented in summary is exhausting. It can be very well done, but it's not a light read.

A lot of people cut the baby in half and do a deep 3rd person limited. That is, you write only what the protagonist of the scene knows. However, you must commit to what they perceive. No filtering. No slipping into omnipresent.

Underdramatization (putting into exposition what should go into a scene) is also less immediate.

blacbird · Oct 22, 2016

I'm confused by your question. The wording of the OP sounds like you are conflating "passive voice" and "present tense". They are two completely different and specific techniques of narrative construction. And, as has been mentioned by others, really have little to do with "immediacy" in narrative, which is a pretty subjective thing.

caw

GeoJon · Oct 23, 2016

Thanks all.

I'm not surprised the question confused you, Blacbird, as I was confused by the two things myself. I assumed that writing in an active voice would produce immediacy (the crits I had received just said the scene lacked immediacy, but I had no idea what that meant), but I see now that they are two completely different things.

It sounds like bringing immediacy to the writing is quite subtle, and I still dont really understand it. The scene in question was 3rd person POV, with the MC watching a fight in an arena. I wonder if I had focused less on the fight and more on his reactions to the fight, it would have become more immediate? I really would like to get to grips with immediacy, as the scene I'm writing at the moment is also 3rd person POV, but most of it takes place in a room with just the MC and a baby in there (so not much opportunity for dialogue) - it's already exposition-heavy. Perhaps I should rewrite it as 1st person POV? Although the rest of the story is all 3rd person, and the MC in this scene in just one of three key characters, so 1st person might seem a bit odd.

Great advice from Once, Layla, Fallen and Mrs-Q. If I could attempt to sum it up: I need to make sure the plot and character development in the scene is engaging, keep exposition to a minimum, allow the reader to visualise the scene without me telling them everything, and avoid passive voice.

Cheers

Jon

Myrealana · Oct 23, 2016

It sounds like your reader(s) may not feel the POV character is invested in the fight. If the narration sounds distant and unemotional, the scene loses it immediacy.

Maybe the stakes aren't clear, or there's too much choreography and not enough reaction, or maybe the tone and pace of the writing doesn't convey a sense that the scene is important *right now.*

Immediacy can be achieved in any POV or tense, it's just a matter of finding the right details to include in the right way. Unfortunately, unlike grammatical errors or passive voice, it tends to be one of those "You know it when you see it" qualities of writing that's hard to quantify.

Mrs-Q · Oct 23, 2016

Jon,

My critique for you for your work was to go a little deeper into your character's point of view and describe the fight in a way you could tell he found his fighter artful without having to tell us. You told us how he percieved it (as art, himself as a patron of arts, and a tribute to his own greatness), but then your 3rd person description of the fight it was just beating swords. There wasn't anything wrong with the fight choreography. But a deeper point of view might have described the warrior's movement in artistic terms, for example. You also had a fair amount of filtering.

But most of the scene had pretty clear conflict (your POV character vs his apothecary friend). I don't know how it fits into the larger work, but up until the fight ends, at least, the idea of it's solid. The depth of POV needed work.

I'm reading Oryx and Crake ATM (not sure if I like it yet), but the first chapter has a very good example of a very deep 3rd person point of view. It's not just the present tense doing it. It's that the concrete details that draw his attention are decribed vividly in a way that betray what they mean to him, which gives clues on who he is.

Cobalt Jade · Oct 23, 2016

Writing fiction is like improvisational theater. The writer has to become that character as they write. Not only once, but every time they work on their scene. The laptop is the stage, the brain and fingers the actor. (Or if you use pen & paper, that.) Every writing session is a performance, and it's not easy. It's exhausting. In fact, if it's not exhausting, you're not doing it right!

Is there a difference between passive voice and immediacy?

GeoJon

Once!

Still confused by shoelaces

Layla Nahar

Seashell Seller

Fallen

Stood at the coalface

Mrs-Q

blacbird

GeoJon

Myrealana

I aim to misbehave

Mrs-Q

Cobalt Jade