I have been making attempts at fiction for a few years now and have not had much formal education or training. That said, I am hoping that one of you gents might help me define the meanings of the active and passive voice in writing. Tonight I read it has nothing to do with tense; but when ever I read examples of passive setences it usually has words ending with "ed", or complete words like was and were that seem to imply past tense.
I also read that passive means the subject dictates the action(the verb), and that in active writing the verb dictates subject. Generaly, it seems to me that the active says more with less words.
Thanks inadvance,

Dear Maeterlinck:

Active: Lions eat Zebras -- Passive: Zebras are eaten by lions.

Refer to www.englishclub.com or specifically google Grammar:Active and Passive voice; there are numerous sources available to clarify the subject.
Active voice tends to be the form of ordinary speech in which the object takes the action of the verb -- I threw the ball.
In the passive voice the subject recieves the content of the verb -- The ball was thrown by me.
Most simplistically, passive voice is commonly characterized by the use of some form of the verb "to be": is, are, am, was, were, will be, will have been, etc.

Tense is not relevant.

Note: Puella pulchra illa gluteum maximum bonum habet! -- That cute chick has really great buns. -- Passive

I want to jump her bones! - active

E-mail me at

yithian442@yahoo.com

I'd like to read your work.

I cringe at the thought of some one else seeing, my below ametuer scriblings at this point.

Thanks though,

I am still an ameture, I've only finished 3-4 of the 10 stories I have written in the past year. I would recomend googling the National Ameture Press Association, to start with your ameturdom. That's what I am doing, but alas! I am 15 and cant find time to publish anything!

For more questions e-mail Bill Volkart the vice president of NAPA at...

calmlake@ix.netcom.com

Not to be excessively harsh, but you guys might want to start with a spell-checker :)... It's "amateur", "amateurish", etc.

Fifteen, thats pretty young for this type of writing. I thought I was the youngest sappling amongst this gang of cyclopean gents at age thirty. Who got you into the world of Arkham?
Thanks RodOvarl, I am working on that.

maeterlinck Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Fifteen, thats pretty young for this type of
> writing. I thought I was the youngest sappling
> amongst this gang of cyclopean gents at age
> thirty. Who got you into the world of Arkham?
> Thanks RodOvarl, I am working on that.


LOL, sorry, I felt I had to interject with a bit of elementary orthography. But in all sincerity, although I don't claim to be a fiction writer of any stripe, I do feel strongly that one must master the basics (grammar, spelling, etc.) before attempting to set pen to paper in earnest. No editor is going to bother reading past the first page of a submission with misspellings like that. BTW, it's "sapling", and "cycoplean" doesn't really apply to age (yeah, I'm just being a jerk now), although I am rather large and irregularly built.

I am sorry as well, that you had to interject. Your right, your just being a jerk.

Fare enuf. God luck ta ya. Seriously, I wasn't trying to be insulting, just trying to shock you two into an awareness of the (paramount) importance of mastering the language. Like I said, I'm not a creative type, and could never write a story, much less poetry, so I admire you for even considering entering that thankless arena. But consider this... CAS's own formal education ended at around 14/15 (he only finished grammar school), and HPL barely finished high school (if at all, I don't recall). Somehow, though, both of these enviable autodidacts became paragons of good English usage and abusage. When I imagine their teenage years, I picture them with huge dictionaries as their constant companions. Hell, even with my 25-odd years of (probably inferior) modern education, I still have to reach for the dictionary every few minutes while reading Smith's stuff (not so much with HPL, he keeps using the same terms over and over). It's a humbling experience, to say the least, to have a smaller active vocabulary than someone who only finished 8th grade.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 9 Dec 06 | 07:57AM by Radovarl.

Note from the grammar police: your - possessive
you're - you are

All you who wish to write - consider reading Dr. Kantor's new book, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Literature =

There are certain basics that are essential - Clark dropped out of grade school about the 6th grade - wrote Black Diamonds at about 14, and The Sword of Zagan about 16 - manuscript showing few corrections.

The apostrophe always means something is left out. Your teacher who said it means possession lied. It became confused with the possessive case when "John his bood" became pronounced John's book.

Cool, I didn't know that (John's book = John his book) or else I had forgotten.

First of all, sorry for the grammar. I dont much care for grammar "correctness" on message boards lol.

I got into the world of Arkham in the 7th grade. I was into black clothes, heavy metal, and spells. I came across the "necronomicon" ya know, the one that isn't anything close to Lovecraft's necronomicon? anywho, I read it's introduction and it talked about Lovecraft.............And then in the 9th grade when I was normal, The videogame came out and so I went on the computer to do research and found the Mythos.

And from there I came across NAPA which I have been a member for only a few short months.

Lovecraft was both very erudite, and a genius, but even he made occassional mistakes, as in his (in my opinion) rather overrated essay, Supernatural Horror in Literature, when he quotes a grammatically awkward passage written by his fellow Classicist Samuel Loveman:

"In Poe one finds it a tour de force, in Maupasant a nervous engagement of the flagellated climax. To Bierce, simply and sincerely, diabolism held in its tormented depth a legitimate and reliant means to the end."

As biblical scholar (and ghost story writer) M. R. James observed about this passage, in a 1928 letter to Nicholas Llewelyn Davies, "This appears to me to have no meaning."

Yeah, Lovecraft can babble like a 19th century German metaphysician sometimes. He definitely wasn't an academic, but sometimes he tried to fake it :). This is not his best sentence ever, LOL. Despite being overwritten though, "Supernatural Horror in Literature" is a great guide to "pre-Lovecraftian" macabre fiction. I find that since I share Lovecraft's scientific materialist outlook, I tend to have similar taste in horror fiction (I don't like overly "superstitious" stuff, with ghosts rattling chains and such). Whenever I've read something recommended in his essay, I've almost never been disappointed (W. H. Hodgson, Machen, etc.), and when he has misgivings about particular stories I tend to have similar impressions of them. It's a shame some good scifi or fantasy writer (I don't read recent horror, never picked up King or Koontz) hasn't written something similar to help us wade through the mass-marketed crap offered today to reach the few choice tidbits hiding in the muck. If someone knows of a survey/lit review of this sort please let me know.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 11 Dec 06 | 07:19AM by Radovarl.