Active Versus Passive Voice

I just drank a whole glass of 100 percent cranberry juice (for medicinal purposes only, I assure you; shudder), while simultaneously uploading pictures from my camera, editing said pictures, writing bad poetry, and waiting for an email response from an author. Boy, can I multitask.

Meanwhile I am thinking how much I need for my Monday mornings to be just like this (especially writing the bad poetry part), so that I can process Everything I Learned Over the Weekend While Hanging Out With My Kids (maybe that should be the title, or at least subtitle, of every one of my Monday posts).

Lesson 1: The Vernal Equinox does not bring immediate spring weather. I took my boys to the lake yesterday, and our toesies were cold! My youngest wondered what the white things were on the lake--whitecaps whipped up by a very brisk wind.

Lesson 2: Cold brings out different reactions in people. All I wanted was to stand on the rocks and feel the wind whipping against my cheeks, no matter how cold I got. My younger son doggedly followed through on his compulsion to gather sticks and stones and throw them in the water, no matter how cold he got. My older son declared that he was freezing to death and decided to retreat to the car. All valid reactions.

Lesson 3: Meeting the needs of three said people with very different reactions to a cold, windy lake involves cajolery and compromise. My younger son threw his rocks and branches into the lake until he declared that his fingers were about to "freeze to death." Meanwhile, my older son climbed on rocks for a little while and then raced to the warm car before his toes fell off from the cold. And I got a few minutes of wind-basking, rock-perusing, and picture-taking in between keeping the kids out of the water.

Lesson 3: I much prefer active voice to passive voice, even (especially?) when describing nature. This lesson actually came to me in the shower as I was thinking about my bad poetry, rather than deriving directly from hanging out with my boys. Of course, "He hit his brother repeatedly with a stick" did come up yesterday, illustrating the power of an active verb. The phrasing sounds more direct and evocative than "He was hit repeatedly with a stick wielded by his brother," I think. The latter sounds almost Dickensian. Not to disparage Dickens--the readers in my family all consider him a quite fine writer--but his writing comes from two centuries ago.

The active voice issue came up for me as I was thinking about the crazy assemblage of driftwood, stones, and detritus that the waves had washed up into the crevices of the big rocks along the jetty. I suppose that it's much easier to say that these sculptures were created by natural forces (passive construction) than try to identify and spin out a tale of all the random causal forces involved: geological forces acting over millenia to create these particular rocks and the particular location itself (a glacial lake over the remains of an ancient sea), acts as random as a boy throwing sticks in a lake, nature returning its treasures to a smoother, more primitive state.