How do you feel about passive verbs?
Ehhhh *waiving hands around* In a general sense, you want to avoid them, but that comes with a lot of caveats. I mean, try writing an entire novel without using passive verbs at all and you’ll (a) go mad, (b) probably write some weird sentences that sound worse than the passive verbs would have.
Like, I googled an example of a passive verb sentence and found this:
“He is beaten by the chess player from the next town over.”
Here, the passive voice sounds bad, so re-writing this sentence would be a good call.
So mostly how much and when are you using it? Dialogue? Meh, probably fine. Here and there because it fits with your narrative voice? Yeah, as long as you’re not over using (that’s the biggest problem, yeah? Using them so much that the writing feels stilted). Are you in the middle of a climatic action scene? That’s where you should try harder to avoid them. If it’s action, you want the writing to reflect that.
