Hey, follower here. A friend/beta reader I have has recently told me that my writing style is too passive, like I'm looking over the character's shoulder rather than through their eyes. Have to admit, it's now making me question everything I'm currently working on. Do you have any advice on how to write less passively (more actively?), maybe with some examples? Beta has already suggested I read around and see what other writers do. Thanks!
What you’re describing sounds only partially like a passive vs. active problem. Here are a few pieces of advice:
Don’t just give the readers what is going on around the character. Give us what the character is experiencing. In a literal sense, show it to us through their eyes. Tell us what they see, hear, smell, taste, and feel. “A glint caught their eye” can ground is in the character, while “There was something shiny in the room” doesn’t.
Associate what is going on around the character with the way the character thinks about it. I have a character who tends to think of things in relation to her family, which she misses. Acting as a temporary nurse reminds her of being trained along with her sister by the village midwife, and of patching her brother up when he fell out of a tree for the third time. A younger character who doesn’t know the word sheepish might think of it as “like when my dad was explaining to my mom that he forgot to move the laundry from the washer to the dryer”, which both gives the reader a sense of what they look like and gives an impression of what the character’s experiences and thought process are.
Generally expand your descriptions. I tend towards leaner descriptions, but it is easy to fall in the He walked, she sat, he shrugged rut, where everything that isn’t dialogue is just a straight description of what is going on around the character. Adding flavor to your writing–in however works best for you–can give a richer experience to the reader and make it seem more like it’s something the character is going through instead of just something that’s happening around them.
Descriptions can particularly help with having the character express emotion. Here’s an excerpt from one of my fics:
The words catch in his throat, and Jake pushes off and walks over to him, closing a hand over the nape of his neck, which lasts about as long as sitting in the chair did, and then he needs to move again, stepping from tile to tile in the same path over and over, seven steps, pivot, and Jake moves out of his way, and seven steps, pivot, seven, pivot, seven, pivot, seven, pivot, and then it’s eight, and fuck he’s going to start crying again, and things haven’t freaked him out this badly since he couldn’t read, and he just has to breathe before he makes himself pass out.
In it, I don’t say “he felt anxious”, but it’s pretty clear from what’s going on that that’s the case. In this specific example, the run-on sentence and excessive commas give the feeling of choppiness, speed, and an inability to slow down that imply anxiety without saying it.
Do what works within your own style, and use techniques like that sparingly so they have an impact. Maybe you decide that anxiety is written in a series of short choppy sentences, or happiness is full of adjectives, or sadness is full of unfinished thoughts. Maybe you take a completely different route. But there are a lot of ways to show emotion without ever naming the emotion, which puts us more in the character’s head; people often don’t just think “I’m happy” or “I’m sad”.
