Is He Lying?

Passive Voice: Is he lying?

Some of you may remember my blog about passive voice and how it might actually be useful to you when developing a character’s dialog. How?  Folks engaged in denial or lying, often use passive voice as a way of deflecting attention away from themselves or their responsibility for the events in question. No one, not even the most terrible serial killer, believes they are bad people or responsible for terrible actions against another human. That’s where passive voice becomes a writer’s most useful tool when portraying that bad guy or gal. Because she'll rarely say, "I killed him." Instead, she'll say, "He was killed by a gun." Yeah, like the gun acted under it's own volition and she had nothing to do with it.


Most folks who do terrible things almost always blame the victim or the weapon itself, or the circumstances. I would never do something like that—she made me do it. Or the weapon just up and did it on its own.


Expert law enforcement personnel and psychologists know to listen for these tell-tale signs of shifting responsibility and use of passive voice to deflect attention. Here’s a good example and a refresher on what passive voice is.


Passive voice is when the action is not performed by the subject of the sentence. The subject of the sentence is the recipient of the action. For example, instead of saying, he hammered the nail into the wood, you could use passive and say: the nail was hammered into the wood. The passive version is ambiguous because you don’t know who hammered the nail. And it’s that ambiguity that attracts liars to passive voice.

I should note that folks who either can't face responsibility for their actions, either because they're just irresponsible people, or in the case of a true tragedy, where someone honestly didn't mean to do something.


Let’s say the police have arrested a woman who may have smothered her child in his crib. The woman, unable to admit her terrible action, uses passive voice to avoid admitting her responsibility.


“Who smothered your baby?”


She shrugged and twisted her wedding ring around her finger, unable to meet the gaze of the policeman.


“You were there, weren’t you?”


She nodded.


“He was crying, wasn’t he?”


“He kept crying—he just wouldn’t stop!”


“So what happened?”


“I tried to comfort him, but he just wouldn’t stop. I didn’t know what to do! I just wanted him to quiet down, so I held him for a while.”


“And what happened when you held him?”


“He was smothered by the pillow, I guess. I don’t really know. He turned his face into the pillow and after a while he quieted.”


“Did you press his face into the pillow?”


“I—I didn’t realize—he must have been smothered by the pillow—that’s all I can say.”


You’ll often hear these types of statements from folks who can’t quite accept their part in a tragedy. For example, a bus driver inadvertently involved in an accident may use passive voice to minimize his role, “She was hit by the bus.” He doesn’t say he hit her or ran over her when he was driving the bus. He phrases it as if the bus had acted on its own when it hit her.


Passive voice isn’t the sole tool, however. That bus driver may really shift blame by using active voice, e.g “The bus hit her.” As if the bus drove itself and independently made the decision to run over a pedestrian all on its own.


Those kinds of shifts in focus are extremely useful in characterization and they can be applied either to an innocent person who just can’t accept or absorb his role in a tragedy, such as the bus driver, or it could be a more conscious effort by a liar/bad guy to shift the blame to the victim.


To me, these little nuances in characterization and the underlying psychology of developing realistic characters are intrinsic to the foundations of a fascinating story.


I’d love to hear any habits of speech or actions you’ve noted that make characters come alive.

Amy Corwin is the author of over half a dozen historical romantic mysteries, paranormals and cozy mysteries. She can be found on the web at http://www.amycorwin.com and http://amycorwin.blogspot.com. Her latest book, The Vital Principle, is now available from Amazon.

The Finer Points of Characterization

Every once in a while as I’m working on a manuscript, something makes me recognize a writing craft detail that turns into a light-bulb moment. In recent blogs, I’ve talked about characterization and dialog, because dialog is one of the richest ways of developing a character. Then, of course, there’s action—what the character actually does. Not to mention the character’s interpretation of events around him or her.

Those are the major tools a writer has. Ironically, a lot of writers spend far too much time on something else: physical description. That, my friend, is a double-edged sword. You can actually drive readers away from descriptions of characters. Yes. It’s true. In fact, there are novels out there that have virtually no descriptions of the main characters at all. Readers build up their own picture of the characters and prefer not to be distracted with details that don’t match their perception of the heroine or hero.


That was one of those a-ha moments for me that got me thinking of other less well-known ways to shine the light on your characters. So many writers overlook the more subtle ramifications of point of view. If we’re in the heroine’s point of view (POV) then when she stares at the twisting road ahead of her, leading up into the mountains, the description of that road and the scenery must be her description—not yours. And certainly not just a dry catalog of the black tarmac, pine trees, and mountains. Descriptions mean nothing and are frankly boring unless they provide a glimpse into the character’s soul and emotions.


If your heroine is on her way to a meeting she’s nervous about, she’s not a great driver, and has never been out of the city in her life, she may see the mountainous terrain as more ominous than beautiful. Describing it then becomes a way of revealing her inner life.


The steering wheel felt slippery under her damp palms as she stared at the twisting road ahead. On one side was a sheer drop off that made her stomach clench. One small mistake, a blown tire, a skid, and the car would crash through the flimsy metal barrier and crash through the dark trees that clung precariously to the slopes. But the other side was no better. The mountainside rose sharply away from the edge of the road and small cascades of rocks lay just off the pavement. Rock slides appeared to be common. It would be just her luck if the grumble of her car set one off.


She jerked at the sudden screeching wail of some animal or bird from the depths of the forest. The sound made the hair on the back of her neck prickle.


And so on. It’s less about a plain description than the heroine who is letting her nervous emotions color what others might find to be a gorgeous view. It’s never really about the mountain. It’s about the emotions it evokes.


That’s it. Another arrow for your writing quiver.


Amy Corwin

Mysteries and Romance…what could be better?

http://www.amycorwin.com/
http://amycorwin.blogspot.com/

Characterization & Shifts in Focus

Dialog, Focus and Characterization

All of us know those gremlins who like to beat up writers who dare to use passive voice, and we all grit our teeth when those gremlins incorrectly identify passive voice by ruthlessly searching for the word “was”, but did you know that passive voice can be your best friend? Or, maybe not best friend, but at least a hanger-on, because it lets you manipulate the focus of the sentence.


First, I should clarify one thing: passive voice is the focus of the action. If the action happens to the subject of the sentence, it’s passive. If the subject performs the action, it’s active. Passive voice is often used when the writer wants to maintain focus on the subject, rather than the doer of the action. For example: she was hit by a bus. That’s passive, but it’s the best way to frame the sentence because you want to keep the focus on the woman. Who cares about the bus, except in the horrible context of it being the cause of her demise? If you change that to active voice: the bus hit her, then the bus is more important than the woman because it’s the subject and focus of the sentence.


But beyond that, how could passive be good? Lots of ways. But one of the more interesting ways is deflection of responsibility because active/passive voice selections change the focus of the sentence.


How does this impact characterization and dialog…that’s where this really gets fascinating. The use of passive voice is a terrific tool to craft a character’s dialog to show either consciousness of guilt, or simply indicate lying. Let’s look at two examples.


A Good Character Feels Guilty


Let’s say you have a basically good character, but she’s done something she’s not proud of. In fact, let’s say she got involved in something really terrible that she feels guilty about. We’ll call her Clarissa. Now Clarissa is a taxi driver in your story, and she picked up a passenger who was late for a plane. Clarissa wants to get that passenger to the airport, so she’s speeding when she rounds a corner and…runs over a little old man.


When she’s questioned about this, she might say, “We turned the corner and this man came out of nowhere. He stepped right out into the street in front of the taxi and got clipped by the fender.”


If pushed, she might even say, “He got hit by the taxi.” Or possibly, “The taxi hit him.”


The most important points to recognize in that dialog is that, whether its stated in passive voice, e.g. he was hit by the taxi; or active voice, e.g. the taxi hit him; nowhere does she flat out state, “I hit him.” The taxi hit him, as if the taxi was acting under its own volition. She is using both active and passive voice to shift the focus away from herself—to make her seem less responsible.


A good person will do this when the truth is painful and difficult to accept—she’ll try to shift responsibility to either the man (he stepped out of nowhere) or the taxi—so she doesn’t have to admit to herself that she did something so terrible.


A Bad Character is Lying


In a very similar way, law enforcement staff will watch for shifts in focus—and passive voice is a good clue to this—when questioning a suspect. Keep in mind that bad people almost never believe they are bad. If they do bad things, it’s because they were forced to do so by external forces. This means, they will frequently use passive voice, because that reflects their feeling that they were forced to do something—the action happened to them and—not the reverse.


Let’s take the classic: a man who beats his wife. Fred has been dragged to jail because he killed his wife and now the cops are questioning him.


“What happened, Fred? How did she die?”


“I didn’t do nothing.”


“Your wife’s dead from a blow to the head. There were witnesses.”


“So what?”


“You were seen arguing with her. A neighbor called the police. When they arrived, they saw you through the kitchen window.”


“What’d they see? Nothing!”


“They saw you hit her. Now why don’t you tell us the whole story?”


“Nothing to tell. She got hit by that dang skillet, that’s what happened.”


“How’d she get hit by a skillet?”


“Well, she asked for it.”


“Really? How?”


“Well, I’d just got home and was drinking a beer when she started yelling at me for being late and burning the dinner. The skillet was right there on the stove, full of burnt potatoes, and she’s yelling and screaming about it. I was just trying to drink my beer in peace, but she wouldn’t stop. She kept yelling about them burnt potatoes. She got herself in such as tizzy that something had to be done and the skillet was right there. So she got one upside the head. With that damn skillet.”


“You mean you picked up the skillet and hit her with it?”


“I mean she was hit by that damn skillet to make her stop yakking about those burnt potatoes.”


“You hit her with the skillet.”


“The skillet hit her. She asked for it! It weren’t my fault and those cops know it! It was the only way to shut her up.”


“I guess you shut her up, all right. For good, this time.”


You’ll note both active and passive peppered through this dialog. The important thing to notice is how Fred keeps shifting the blame to his poor wife and the skillet. As if the skillet could leap up from the stove and bash her without any action on his part.


Passive and active voice are all about focus, and interestingly, so is characterization!

Express Your Character

As an author, I'm always fascinated by characterization. So I thought it might be fun to explore this topic over the next few blogs.

Characterization rests mainly on three legs: dialogue, action, and description. Of the three, description may be the least important. In fact, some authors never describe their hero or heroine and leave it up to the reader to decide what the character looks like. This works (pretty well, too) because ultimately, the reader builds up their own image of the characters anyway, despite what the authors says about it. It's not the author's factual descriptions of the characters that matters to the reader.

What does matter? Indirect descriptions. These descriptions are expressed by one character about another. Those indirect descriptions bring both interest and richness to the story.

When one character sees another, what he notices reveals as much about him as the other characters he's describing. For example, let's take a man who has been a loser all his life. No matter how much he tries, he ends up messing up. As a result, he's become bitter and envious of others, believing that everyone else has a better, and easier, life.

If he sees a brunette, he may describe her as "Little Miss Perfect Princess," and he may believe she has it made--doesn't have to work and has never had a hard day in her life. He'll see her polished nails and imagine she goes weekly to a manicurist. And she must have a maid, too, to keep her clothes so white and crisply pressed. She's got it all.

His envy makes him see those things that support his beliefs, despite other more subtle signs about her true position in life. He won't see that her life isn't so perfect, either. He won't notice that her "big fancy foreign car" is fifteen years old and has a ding in the fender that she couldn't afford to repair. Or that her clothes, while good quality, are well-worn with slightly baggy knees and nearly transparent elbows. Or that the cuticles on her right hand are ragged because she's right-handed and does her own nails and manicures.

He sees what he needs to see to confirm his belief that everyone else has all the luck and s better off than he is. Therefore, his descriptions of others are filled with envy. He only sees signs of wealth and an easy life, and ignores the rest.

That's just a small aspect of characterization, but an undeniably powerful one for it let's you relay important information about two characters, simultaneously. What could be better than that?

And as I'm always interested in expanding my horizons, be sure to leave your comments and tips about favorite techniques used to portray characters--whether you're a writer or a reader.