One of the most commonly repeated pieces of writing advice I’ve recieved is to “avoid passive voice”. For a time I followed the rule blindly, not entirely sure what it meant but aware that the word “was” appeared to be the primary culprit. I joined the many people out there comfortably missapplying a rule because it was never properly explained to me. Also, the grammar checking app I was using at the time flagged pretty much every instance of “was” as passive which didn’t help, essentially meaning I found myself writing elliptical sentences and doing all sorts of prosaic acrobatics unnecessarily.

The advice, after all is easier to repeat than to apply correctly, because passive voice is a specific, less obvious thing than the label suggests.

Here’s what passive voice is, why your fiction should leans toward active always, and how to recognise when passive is okay to use.

What Is Passive Voice?

A sentence is passive when its subject receives the action instead of performing it. The grammar behind it: a form of to be (is, was, were, be, being, been) plus a past participle, with the person or thing doing the action either tucked into a “by” phrase or dropped entirely.

Active: John threw the ball. Passive: The ball was thrown by John. Passive, agent dropped: The ball was thrown.

In the active version, John, the subject, does the throwing. In the passive versions, the ball, the subject, has the throwing done to it. Same event, different grammatical subject, different emphasis on what’s important.

The Grammar Checker Problem

Grammar checkers routinely flag sentences as passive that aren’t passive at all (here’s me shaking my fist at the likes of Grammarly and ProwritingAid) anything with a to be verb, whether or not there’s an actual past participle doing passive-voice work.

Not passive: The door was open. Not passive: She was tired. Not passive: The house was enormous.

Open, tired, enormous are adjectives describing a state, not past participles describing an action done to the subject. There’s no action being received here, nobody opened the door in this sentence, nobody tired her out. These are simple descriptive sentences that happen to use a to be verb, and no rewrite makes them “more active” because they were never passive to begin with.

Passive: The door was left open by John. Passive: She was exhausted by the argument.

Now these are genuinely passive: something was done to the door, something was done to her, and a to be verb plus a past participle is carrying that action.

A test you can try: insert “by zombies” after the verb and see if it still makes grammatical sense, even if it’s silly. The ball was thrown [by zombies]. Works, it’s passive. The door was open [by zombies]. Doesn’t work, it’s not passive, it’s just a state-of-being sentence with a to be verb in it.

This distinction matters because “cut all your to be verbs” and “cut your passive voice” are different instructions, and conflating them leads to mangling perfectly good descriptive sentences that were never a problem.

Why Your Fiction Should Default to Active Sentences

Active voice keeps the sentence subject as the one doing the action, which reads as more direct and immediate. It’s also shorter on the page, where passive constructions carry the extra weight of an auxiliary verb and often a “by” phrase that active voice doesn’t need.

In scenes built for momentum, action, chases, fights, anything meant to feel fast, active voice’s directness matches the pace you’re going for. She grabbed the rail. She swung. She landed. Compare that to the passive equivalents and the energy drops immediately, because the sentence structure itself has slowed down to match the grammar, not the moment.

This is the reason “avoid passive voice” became common advice in the first place. Active voice does more work with fewer words in the scenes built for pace and momentum. It’s a good default, but it does have real exceptions, and the exceptions below aren’t just edge cases.

When Passive Voice Is the Right Choice

The agent is unknown, unimportant, or deliberately withheld. The window was broken. Focus stays on the broken window, which is what matters here, not on who broke it, which might not be known yet or might not matter to this particular sentence. Forcing an active version, inventing an agent just to satisfy a grammar rule, adds false specificity the story doesn’t have yet.

Mystery and suspense. She was being watched. The passive construction does real work here: it withholds the watcher’s identity as part of the sentence’s actual meaning, not as a grammatical accident. An active rewrite, someone was watching her, barely changes anything, but a fully active version that names the watcher would give away information the scene is deliberately keeping back.

Emphasis on the object of the action over the person doing it. The city was destroyed. If the scene’s emotional weight is the city, its loss, its scale, rather than the army or the weapon that destroyed it, passive voice puts the grammatical spotlight where the emotional spotlight already is. The invading army destroyed the city is a sentence about the army. The city was destroyed is a sentence about the city.

Matching a character’s lack of agency. She was pulled from the wreckage. In a moment where a character has no control, injured, unconscious, overwhelmed, passive construction can mirror that powerlessness at the level of the sentence itself. She isn’t acting. Things are being done to her. The grammar matches the moment.

A character or narrator whose voice calls for it. Formal, bureaucratic, academic, or clinical registers lean passive as a matter of style, “mistakes were made” is a recognisable register in itself. If a character speaks or narrates in that register, matching their real voice means allowing the passive constructions that voice would use, not correcting them into someone else’s voice. It reads cold and detached and can add a chilling effect to a utilitarian style villain, for example.

In-world documents. Reports, scientific logs, official records, or any text-within-the-text meant to read as genuine bureaucratic or technical writing. Real documents like these lean passive constantly, “the sample was collected” rather than “we collected the sample”, and matching that register is part of making the in-world document feel authentic.

Sentence rhythm and variety. A paragraph of exclusively active, subject-verb-object sentences can start to feel mechanical after enough of them in a row. An occasional passive construction, chosen deliberately, can break that rhythm the same way a sentence fragment or a longer clause-heavy sentence can, a legitimate reason to keep one you’d otherwise cut, though not a reason to reach for passive voice by default.

When to Cut Passive Voice (vs Keep It)

Default habit rather than choice. The real problem is passive voice that crept in because a first draft was written fast and the grammar defaulted there without a decision being made, rather than passive voice chosen for a reason. This shows up heavily in exposition and description, sections where there’s no clear “doer” in mind yet and the sentence structure follows the path of least resistance.

Action and tension scenes. If a fight, chase, or high-stakes moment reads passively, check whether that was a deliberate choice to convey powerlessness, per the exception above, or whether it’s simply slowing a scene that’s meant to move. If there’s no clear reason for it, it’s slowing the scene down.

Unintentional obscurity. There’s a real difference between passive voice deliberately withholding information (the mystery exception above) and passive voice that’s just accidentally unclear about who did what. Mistakes were made in the report might be a deliberate character choice in dialogue from someone dodging responsibility. The same construction in your narration, with no clear reason for the ambiguity, is probably just unclear writing.

Wordiness with no payoff. If a passive sentence is longer than its active equivalent and isn’t doing any of the jobs above, deliberate emphasis, withheld information, character voice, it’s just costing you words for nothing.

How to Find It in Your Own Writing

Search for is, was, were, be, being, been across a chapter, then apply the “by zombies” test to each hit. Does inserting “by zombies” after the verb make grammatical sense? If yes, it’s passive, and worth a second look against the exceptions above. If no, it’s a state-of-being sentence that was never passive to begin with, and no amount of rewriting will make it “more active,” because there’s no action to redistribute.

For each genuine hit, ask: is there a reason for this, agent unknown, deliberately withheld, matching a character’s powerlessness, matching a register, breaking up rhythm? If yes, keep it. If the honest answer is “no reason, it’s just how the sentence came out,” rewrite it active.

Writing Desk tip: The AI Editor’s line edit lens flags passive constructions as part of its chapter-by-chapter feedback, alongside filter words, weak words, and adverbs. It’s tuned to the actual grammatical construction rather than every sentence with a to be verb in it, ruling out the same state-of-being sentences the zombie test would. Every flag is a suggestion that you can then review and decide whether it should stay, be cut, or edited out.

Choosing writing software? See the best editing and proofreading software.