On passive verbs in queries

The Successful Queries database helps writers answer a number of questions. Some take little effort to answer. Others have taken me two weeks to answer, such as:

How many passive verbs does the average successful query use?

The answer, after reading 426 queries:

1.092.

Of those 426 queries, 166 used zero passive verbs, 139 used only one, 74 used two, 22 used three, 14 used four, 10 used five, and one used six. Here’s that information in chart form:

The rate by age range is .23 passive verbs in the average picture book query, .68 in the average middle grade, 1.14 in the average young adult, .88 in the average new adult and 1.26 in the average adult. Here’s that information in chart form:

Now, by itself, this evidence doesn’t lead to the conclusion that the more passive verbs you have in your query, the worse your chances of landing an agent are. But I’ve been reading successful and unsuccessful queries for a few years now, and the unsuccessful ones almost always have a large pile of passive verbs.

Passive verbs aren’t inherently bad. They focus the reader on who or what was acted on rather than who did the acting. In some cases, they’re excellent. And in fact, when I read those 426 full queries, I found a few trends that suggest frequent good use of passive verbs:

1. Characters are “murdered”

16 of the passive verbs are murdered, and 11 are killed.

The point of a murder is generally that you don’t know who did the deed, which complicates efforts to show agency. Furthermore, “someone murders her best friend” lacks the punch and focus of “her best friend is murdered.”

2. Characters are “sent” [wherever]

12 of the passive verbs are sent, four are transported, and many others are verbs of movement.

If you’re trying to show how determined a character is to control her life, you write something like “she hijacks a jet and redirects it so she can visit her wife.”

If you’re trying to show how determined someone else is to control a character, you write something like, “she’s sent onto a hijacked jet and forced to face her wife one last time.”

3. Characters are “forced” to [whatever]

18 of the verbs are forced, and 10 are faced. Whether the forcing is “to kill someone” or something less fatal, the point is that some other thing is acting on the character and depriving them of complete free will.

So overall, lack of agency can be a good thing when a character is being killed, kidnapped or coerced. Otherwise, you may want to rethink going passive.

Whereas novice query writers use passive verbs poorly, many writers of successful queries do the job well. And some authors are so good that they can mix active and passive verbs and take the reader on a brief agency journey, such as …

1. Tara Leigh, querying the eventual Penthouse Player (bolding mine):

“Abandoned by her mother and spurned by her father, Reina St. James is tired of being treated like a dirty little secret. It wasn’t easy making her way into the high-risk, high-reward Wall Street world ruled by mercurial Hedge Fund Kings and the whiz kids and trust fund tyrants that surround them. But now that she’s got a stiletto-clad toe into Betancourt Bank, one of the swankiest firms in Manhattan, Reina is determined to prove she’s more than just a pretty face hiding an ugly past.”

We begin with lack of agency in a modifier that contains two past tense verbs that here anchor adjective phrases. Before we even get to our character, we’re invited to think she’s lesser. After all, why else abandon and spurn someone?

Then we come to the name and another adjective phrase that hints at a third way people have reacted to her: they want her, but not publicly.

And still we have no agency, only fatigue. Reina hasn’t done anything yet. All we know of her is how other people see her.

Now, normally, “it [whatever]” is inelegant phrasing because you can just lead with the noun. For example, “it’s raining” becomes “rain is falling,” which allows you to be pretty in a few ways. But in this case, “It wasn’t” is an excellent way to begin the sentence for two reasons:

1. The noun you’d lead with is “making … them,” which is basically the entire sentence. Rearranging it so you can be elegant would itself likely impart inelegance.
2. By having the sentence start “it,” we place the character — “she” — subordinate to some unknown noun. And by not even naming the character as she’s making her way (we know her name only in the context of her fatigue), we further marginalize her.

So now Reina has entered a high-stakes world, but she has double lack of agency because she’s in it, and it’s not doing anything to her. No, it’s “ruled by” other people, and good luck getting to them, because even more menacing people surround them. The “hedge fund kings” rule Wall Street, and to get to them, you have to get through “the whiz kids and trust fund tyrants.”

Then things turn. Reina acquires agency. “She’s got.”

And while she’s “got,” where are the hedge fund kings, the whiz kids and the trust fund tyrants?

Nowhere. All we can see is Reina’s “stiletto-clad toe [in] Betancourt Bank.”

And then, yeah, we do see a hedge fund, but what does “one of the swankiest firms in Manhattan” lack?

A verb.

And right after we read about that firm, we get three Reina-empowering verbs rapid-fire:

“Reina is determined to prove she’s”

The rest of the sentence, meanwhile, is an adjective phrase, which robs her “ugly past” of agency and leaves her firmly in control in that swanky firm.

The paragraph is art, and it ought to be in a museum.

2) We get another agency journey from another query, this time Brighton Walsh’s for Caged in Winter:

“WINTER JACOBSON has always led a solitary life. Shuffled from foster home to foster home, then breaking out on her own to attend college thousands of miles away from her home state, she’s made it a point to do things on her own. She’s fiercely independent and doesn’t need anyone’s help. So when a Prince Charming wannabe swoops in on his white horse, attempting to rescue her, she tells him to get right back on his horse and keep riding.

CADE MAXWELL is intrigued by her fierce rebuttal.”

Both paragraphs begin with character names, but the stark differences between their verb phrases hint at a power situation. Winter is shown first having agency in choosing to lead a solitary life (though because of pain). Cade, meanwhile, is shown first reacting to someone doing something he didn’t expect.

And the difference between “Cade is intrigued by her fierce rebuttal” and “Her fierce rebuttal intrigues Cade” is huge: By beginning each paragraph with a character name-led sentence (and their paragraphs are within a few words of equal length, even), Brighton has placed them on equal footing.

The first paragraph is active verbs except where Winter is suffering, and in those places, Brighton uses adjective phrases, but even within one of those, “breaking out” shows us who Winter is: someone who takes charge of her life. Then, when someone attempts to take charge of part of it for her, she gives that character agency — legitimacy — while also not diminishing Winter’s. Consider the difference between:

“So when a Prince Charming wannabe swoops in”

and

“So when she’s visited by a Prince Charming wannabe.”

The first sentence gives Prince Charming power (though limited, since swoops is meant to convey Prince Charming’s foolish arrogance) for Winter to take back, which she immediately does with three consecutive verbs. One of them turns him from a prince into a direct object, the next turns his white horse into a direct object, and the last turns both of them into an act.

The second involves something being done to her, which removes agency and equality.

Lastly, after “is intrigued by,” we get nothing passive — not even an unobscured “is” construction (“she’s offering” contains an is, but the contraction obscures it), which means the reader gets active phrases leading the way.

3. The last example of amazing passive voice use comes to us from Tere Kirkland’s query for Evangeline:

“Evie Cowen is used to being a nobody. Too bad fate has other plans for her.

A week after she moves to her grandmother’s old house in New Orleans, she finds a tarot card that does more than simply tell her future — it makes it. Whisked back in time (not that she’s with it enough to realize that at first), she’s frightened by a strange girl in her home (which has changed drastically), kidnapped, drugged, and almost sacrificed to a demon. As if that isn’t bad enough … ”

Three passive verbs in five words.

In most situations, I’d recommend that the writer make those verbs active to avoid burying the reader in passivity. But in this case, the effect is not to bury the reader in passivity but to bury the reader in an unknown force’s agency. In reading this query, I went from shrugging (a piece of writing can be both aesthetically brilliant and something you simply don’t connect with) to “ohgodwhatthehelljusthappened.” That’s how fast that section reads.

And I suspect that’s the point.

The other thing that makes this work so well to me is that before we hit that sentence, the only past tense verb form we read is “used,” and even that one is both short and in a figure of speech. So there we sit, reading present tense information, and then we get one past tense construction, then another, then anotheranotheranother — and then the writer has the audacity to chase the furiously paced section with “as if that isn’t bad enough,” which both returns to active verbs and gets you (well, me) anticipating more furiously paced passive verbs.

Instead, we get this:

“she can’t even touch the hand of her gorgeous young rescuer, the demon hunting Jude Dulac, without burning them both.”

One verb — “burning them both” is a noun phrase — and the language establishes the character’s strength through both the verb’s agency and the sentence’s focus. Sure, Evie just got put through the ringer, but what she really wants now isn’t to piss herself or rage.

She wants to claim this beautiful boy.

She is still in control. Still acting.

Powerful characters take active phrases and act.

Agents like powerful, acting characters. So pepper your query with strong, active verbs (and the occasional, well-conceived passive verb).