Glenda Larke

Now that title got you interested, didn’t it? One of my husband’s photos from Kinabalu Park last weekend…. Now I know what keeps him out till all hours of the night when we go to nature parks. Alien sex orgies.

Many thanks to everyone who gave their input about the author photo – you are all wittier than I am! I liked the comment about that skinny green dog of mine, and as Karen (politely) put it – who’d have once thought we’d obsess about such things…there was a time when all we worried about was whether we’d ever manage to get published.

Anyway, photo 2 has gone off to marketing guy, and I am now waiting in trepidation to see if I get a return email gently suggesting that authors with small green dogs was not quite what he had in mind.

Aargh. Came back from a weekend away to find my laptop has no power – I suspect something drastic happened to the insides, as just before everything went black, it went very, very hot…

I am now an anomoly. A writer with no computer. And being a writer, I have no money to buy a new one. Later on today, I shall track down the dealer for the brand, and find out just what it is going to cost to resurrect a laptop so old that the keys have had all the markings worn off them.

I am now sharing my husband’s laptop. Expect to hear about a divorce in the offing any time soon.

Anyway, that was why the grammar thingy is a Monday thingy instead of a Sunday one.

Here it is: Using the Passive Voice

‘Don’t use the passive voice!’ screams the advice. You see it again and again on the ‘How to write…’ pages. I was therefore interested to discover than at least one writer didn’t even know what it was, and proceeded to give advice on how not to overuse the past perfect tense. (e.g. He had been a troll before the princess kissed him and he’d become a handsome prince.)

The passive voice is not a tense at all, but a state where an action is performed by something to something else, and the thing on the receiving end of the action is the subject of your main verb. Make sense? Probably not.

Look at these two examples:

The prince was hit by the club wielded by the lime green troll.
The lime green troll hit the prince with his club.

They both say the same thing, but the first sentence is passive and the second is active voice. The passive voice always has the idea of something being done BY x TO y, where y is the subject of your verb, in this case the prince.

The word ‘by’ might not even be included.
The corpse was brought inside is also passive, even though nothing is said about who did the deed of bringing the body.

The passive voice can also be in the present tense: The flowers in the church are arranged every day by the nuns. Or past perfect: The flowers had been arranged by the nuns… or future: The flowers will be arranged by…

So what is wrong with the passive voice? Well, nothing at all, really. It’s perfectly good grammar and sometimes it is an invaluable way of expressing what you want to say. The corpse was brought inside is exactly right for describing an act when you don’t want to deal with who is involved.

In your story, who is carrying the corpse may be totally irrelevant. They are not characters you are dealing with in your tale and they may never appear again – so why bother with them? Secondly, the carrying of the corpse may not be an action that you particularly want to dramatise. It is more descriptive. So you don’t need the active voice. Your prose is not going to be improved by saying The passers-by carried the corpse inside.

With the troll though…
This is an action scene, and the passive voice is to be avoided. It makes your action seem flat. The lime green troll hit the prince has much more, er, impact.

A handy way to check for passives in your prose is to use that “find” function under the “edit’ menu. Ask to find all instances of the word “was” or “were”. Now obviously it is going to turn up a lot of non-passive uses, such as:
The chickens were sick.
The weather was foul.
The pink elephants were running down the sidewalk.
And that’s a good thing because you can check at the same time if you are over-using a rather weak verb (the verb to be) instead of a verb with more impact (the chickens sickened), or a continuous tense (was running) when a simple past tense (ran) would be better.

The continuous tense (is fighting, was fighting etc) is rather like the passive voice – it lacks impact and is best used for description or where you really want to give emphasis to the continuous nature of the event. e.g. While I was camping at the waterfall in Actagamama, I caught dengue fever.

Er, wait a minute. I have to go fight with my husband about whether he can take the laptop to work today…

No man is an island, entire of itself;
every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main;
if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less…
Any man’s death diminishes me,
because I am involved in mankind.

–John Donne

If someone pinches my bottom on a train, I don’t then turn around and slap the face of every man, woman and child in the carriage.

If two soldiers are kidnapped by criminals, the armed forces concerned should not then turn around and destroy a country, killing anyone who happens to get in the way, ruining its economy for future years, shattering its infrastructure, traumatising a whole generation of children.

It is hard to understand how the people killed can be in the way, seeing as they were exactly where they should be – at home, at work, driving down a road – or in a UN observer post. How many of the dead do you reckon actually had something to do with the kidnapping? 5%? A generous estimate.

The UN deaths were totally accidental, of course. We have the assurances of Israel. Although it is odd that the Israelis didn’t seem to know where the UN post was, and made 21 strikes within 300 m over 6 hours until they hit it. And then ignored requests to stop the bombardment as people tried to rescue those inside. My husband worked for the UN, and this strikes home to me. And if you don’t care about the UN, then consider this: you are the UN. That’s right – in one sense there is no such entity as the UN – it is a union of every nation. Yours too. And the people who work for the UN come from your country as well, no matter who you are. This was an attack on you. The people who died were representing you.

Jane Holl Lute, a deputy head of U.N. peacekeeping operations, told the Security Council there was no Hizbollah firing coming from near the UN outpost.

The next 9/11 or train bombing could be orchestrated by someone incensed by the loss of a family member in the hell that is now Lebanon. Remember that before you applaud what has happened.

And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

Every publisher has their own way of doing things, so don’t take this as necessarily the norm. This is just the way it’s done at my main publisher, with my particular editor and copy editor.

When I have decided (hopefully before the delivery deadline!) that I have finished the book to my satisfaction, I send it off to my editor at the publishing house. After what seems to be a long silence (she’s definitely overworked!) of four weeks or so, she gets back to me. And usually she wants some changes. Fortunately, none have ever been too drastic and on one memorable occasion there were none requested at all. It’s usually along the lines of, ‘Is that X scene really right where it is? I think it would be better moved to the end of the book.’ Or, ‘I find the account of Y’s journey to Altan as a child rather like a hiccup in the story – couldn’t you include it just by having him refer to it once he is grown? Or as a flashback later on perhaps?’ Or, ‘I think it needs a prologue to give more back story.’ Sometimes we talk on the phone about these changes.

There are usually 3 or 4 such suggestions. In the meantime, I have been going through the book yet again, correcting small mistakes. Once I have the editor’s input, I rewrite on the basis of her suggestions, which doesn’t usually take me more than another two weeks. And I send it back.

A couple of things for writers who have got to this stage to think about:

• An editor is not always right. BUT this is their job and they are pretty good at it, believe me. When my editor tells me that something didn’t work for her, I sit up pretty straight and take notice. And I rework the section. I don’t think there has ever been a time when I didn’t make the change, and there has been only one time when I wished I hadn’t done a particular alteration.

• However, I am the writer. It is my book. So I do what I think is right for the book. Sometimes I say to myself – ‘Geez, why didn’t I see that myself?’ and the changes just tumble off the end of my fingers into the MS. Sometimes I have to think about it some more. Sometimes I take the advice to the letter, because I know it is right; more usually I see the problem immediately but I can see a better solution than the one suggested – if indeed an actual solution was suggested. An editor’s strength is in seeing the problem; the writer’s job is to see how to correct it.

• If you think your work is perfect and doesn’t need an editor’s input, then you ought to be self-publishing.

• If you are an unpublished writer and are still submitting to agents/publishers, then your work has to be far more polished than mine is by the time my editor first gets to see it. That’s unjust, I know, but it’s the way things work, at least when I am operating to a deadline.

Let me explain that last. An unpublished writer’s work has to shine above all the others that land on an agent/editor’s desk. You have to impress. The agent/editor doesn’t know you or your work from the ravings of meglomaniac when she/he first turns the title page.

My editor, however, already knows the standard of my work; she knows I am professional; she knows she can rely on me to make changes, to deliver a good story (usually) on time. She knows that the odd silly mistake/repetition/not so polished paragraph is going to be weeded out – either by me or by the copy editor – before the book is printed. With your book, though, she needs to know that you do indeed know the difference between ‘your’ and ‘you’re’. She needs to be impressed by the polish of your work.

With mine, she is (I hope) impressed by me being able to get a good MS onto her desk in six months. I didn’t have the luxury of time that an unpublished writer – who has no deadline – has. And we still have time – editor, copy editor and author – to bring this work to a final polished state. It is in fact better for us to have editorial input before the author has laboured over the final sheen, rather than to ask the author to do that final buffing up twice. It saves time.

So, after working on the alterations suggested by the editor, I send the book back to the publisher, the alterations are accepted (well, I’ve never had mine rejected, but I suppose it could happen) and so on to the copy editor.

And it looks as if I still haven’t got around to what happens at the copy edit! Next time.

Oh, and what was the alteration I regretted making? It was with my first published book, Havenstar. The editor thought I needed to tie the ending up neatly. I had – I thought – left enough hints along the way to show what was going to happen after the climax was done. The editor didn’t agree, and asked me to write an extra chapter to dot the i’s and cross the t’s. So I did.
But I wasn’t comfortable with it – it smelled a bit cutesy to me. I was, however, too new and untried and unsure of myself to protest. And perhaps too inexperienced to work out a way to please both of us.

The very first fanmail I got was from a lovely reader who had loved every inch of the book – until the last chapter. She was so maddened by it, that she dashed off an email.
Why did you do that? she asked. It wasn’t necessary and it was just too neat!

She was right, the editor was wrong and I should have stuck with my instincts.

The power was off all morning, the internet slowed down to the pace of an anorexic snail with a wonky slime trail this evening – so forget the post on copy editing. Tomorrow, ok? So take a look at my grandson on his second birthday last month instead. Isn’t he cute? And maybe it will help you forget that a certain Middle Eastern country seems to have gone completely bonkers this week.

Apparently the way to get on with your neighbours in that part of the world is to blow them all to pieces. The theory might be that if they don’t have a viable country left, they will treat you with courtesy next month.

Well, I have prophetic powers. And here’s a predicition, Israel. Sadly, you will spend the next twenty years wondering why people hate you so much that they strap explosives to their bodies and blow themselves and your kids up in pizza joints. Sound familiar?
I really, really, wish that wasn’t going to be true.
I really, really wish that history taught people lessons, not hate.
The horrible truth is that violence begets violence. If you want peace, this is not the way to obtain it. I thought Hizbollah were about as bad as you could get. Now I’m not so sure.