There’s No Such Thing as a Passive Verb

May 31, 2006 @ 4:24 am

A few somber notes, a happy note, a correction, some comics and a grammar lesson….

A moment of silence for the passing of Bug, my feline companion in Austin, Texas, who kept my pillow warm and myself awake out of pure affection, and Wolfgang, who survived more in one lifetime than most cats survive in all nine, yet who had a better home than all of them combined. Godspeed to that big ball of yarn in the afterlife, to you both.

Penelope sang to me again today… pitch perfect, with enough decibles to crack the overhead plaster, and all of that pure, beautiful sound coming from a puffed up clump of green and yellow feathers pearched on my right forearm with her companion, Jazz, perched on my left, both of them having unsuccessfully attempted to take a chunk out of the Sisyphus inked into my skin where they perched. Yeah, I’m a sucker for a bird with a good singing voice and a vocabulary better than our president.

I mentioned a month ago that Will Christopher Baer had visited San Francisco, and that the hotel he’d stayed in, where we’d been neck-deep in tag team scribbling, had been home to some eerie synchronicty with respect to the hotel room numbers in our respective books. I said that the room we’d eventually been assigned to was number 406, the same number as that of the central locale of Dermaphoria. I stand corrected… 406 was the original room number in Dermaphoria’s Hotel Firebird, until I changed it at the last minute to room 621, in honor of Barton Fink’s room number at the Hotel Earle.

Once more, Gabor Kiss continues his exquisite interpretation of the Handbook here. Grab the pages while they’re up, because they’ll get pulled as the others are posted.

Finally, an impromptu grammar lesson of mine on the Velvet continues to be cited and circulated, much to my shock, as I slept through most of my English classes growing up. As its popularity grows, I suppose I should make it more reachable. So, here ’tis, reprinted below* with some minor edits. Thanks to fellow Velveteer Stephen Graham Jones for pointing out its worthwhile-osity to my ignorant ass, as I’ve been too preoccupied with my novel in progress and getting all gushy over a certain flock of tropical birds in San Francisco, who insist on saying “hello” like Ethel Merman and playing dueling banjos with yours truly, only with whistling instead of strings. Like I said, I’m a sucker for a cute bird.

Spread the word , and stay warm and bound….

-Craig

*There Are No Passive Verbs, Only Passive Voices

Don’t confuse using passive verbs with using the passive voice. The distinction is huge. A well timed passive verb is the dramatic pause, the silence after the distant scream and the before chainsaw, the feather duster between riding crop lashes. The passive voice is the weak and lazy voice letting, versus making, the story happen.

Passive Perbs

In most cases, when someone says ‘passive verb,’ they usually mean a ‘being’ verb (forms of ‘to be’ such as am, is, are, was, were), versus an ‘action’ verb (run, jump, scream).

Being verbs are the quickest way home, if you’re relaying information while maintaining narrative flow. Too often, simple and clean sentences get mutilated by a desperate attempt to rid them of ‘being’ verbs, when it was raining would have sufficed. Used judiciously, simple phrases like it was raining will carry their weight as much as any other.

Secondly, it’s dangerous to confuse verb tenses with verb types. I will eat versus I have eaten are different statements, and neither is passive. Verb tense is vital to a reader’s sense of chronological navigation. If you have a passage in which your man is late for work and lighting a cigarette while he watches an ambulance drive away with his neighbor in the back, you’ve got a sequence of circumstances all occuring simultaneously: The past- what made him late, what put his friend into the ambulance; the present- the act of being late, lighting a cigarette and watching the ambulance drive away; the future- he has to run for the next train or try to hail a taxi at rush hour. The way to keep the sequence clear while conveying a single narrative instance is via multiple verb tenses:

“Bob lit a cigarette as he watched the ambulance drive away. He had been late for work three days in a row, so he’d be sprinting to the subway for a fourth, thanks to his neighbor who had said the wrong thing to a very pissed off repair man that morning.”

Past simple, past simple, future progressive, past perfect.

Using verb tense properly in order to clarify one’s timeline is critical. It involves copious use of have, will have, had, was and the like, none of which have anything to do with being passive, but have everything to do with a reader not getting lost.

Passive Voice

The real culprit with the passive voice isn’t the verb, it’s who or what is verbing versus who or what is being verbed. “I think, therefore I am,” is about as active as you can get. The passive voice happens when the person or thing being verbed assumes the role of subject in a sentence.

“The rain hammered down onto Bob.” The subject is rain, the verb is hammered, the object is Bob, receiving the hammering. Hammer, when used as a verb, is by no means passive, but to say, “Bob was hammered on by the rain,” is to use the passive voice, no matter how agressive the verb.

His boss was shot by him. Passive voice- the verb object assumes role of sentence subject.

He shot his boss. Active voice.

“He had shot his boss through the face…” Active voice with an action verb, but the verb did its business before the current narrative action, “… and now he had nowhere to hide the corpse.”

He had shot his boss. Still active voice, but told in the past perfect.

Ad infinitum.

Again, there are no passive verbs, only passive voices.

-cclev

The original post and it’s thread on the Velvet are here .

So Dull the Con of Code

May 17, 2006 @ 3:59 pm

I’m a bit late on this one but, here are the latest four pages of the Handbook graphic novel. I’d meant to post this yesterday, as 5/16 is a significant date in the Handbook… if memory serves me, I believe it’s one of John Vincent’s release dates from juvie. It also happens to be my younger brother’s birthday and, as one Handbook fan pointed out to me, the original release date for Star Wars. Uh… yeah.

As I neglected both my younger brothers’ birth dates these last two months, here’s a loud and public Happy Belated to Cory and Mick.

Lastly, though the original piece has long since been wished into the cornfield, a faithful Velvet member has transcribed my review of the Da Vinci Code I wrote for the Santa Barbara Independent a while back. The subject won’t go away so, by popular demand, here’s a link to said review on the Velvet, as well as my more lengthy follow-up post.

Spread the word; stay warm and bound.

-Craig

Fun with Duct Tape

May 2, 2006 @ 11:06 pm

There’s a drain in the floor of the white tile bathroom. Not in the shower, but in the middle of the floor, which leads me to believe the masons and carpenters of yore had some scary precognition about the accidents which would send some unlucky souls missing, post check-in, and figured they’d make clean up easier for the trigger men so as not to traumatize the maids, as yet to be hired. Chris had originally been handed a key to room 411, the same hotel room number where Phineas Poe had first met the woman of his nightmares, but said quarters were too small for our dualing laptops and bulk quantities of energy drinks. They moved him to room 406, the same room number where Eric Ashworth held court with Jack and the Beanstalk when he wasn’t dissecting cyborg cockroaches. Many people have said to me, “There’s no such thing as coincidence.” Actually, there is, and I normally wouldn’t infer any kind of cosmic significance to both of those room numbers playing host to the Pit, but I can’t help but think that Baer’s own Muse made the reservation, while mine is picking up the incidentals. So, room 406 in a tiny hotel between Union Square and the Tenderloin is where we’ll spend the next ten days spinning the kinds of stories that bad dreams are made of.

It’s May 2, 2006, which is the official U.K. release day of Dermaphoria and Harper-Perennial edition of The Contortionist’s Handbook. Feel free to celebrate by cutting up a cockroach or trying some consentual duct-tape and dripping water experimentation on your significant other.

Speaking of the Handbook, the latest four pages are up for your viewing pleasure.

Stay warm and bound,

~Craig