Passive Voice agression

While I was preparing to post today, I was stuck by the idea of writing about passive voice. Recently I was able to read several samples of writing. It was fun. It was enlightening and they were full of passive voice. The tone of the works were varied and the content was very different, but the sentences were so often in passive form that I was pulling my hair out over some of the paragraphs.
In fact, while writing this post, I was fighting with the urge to scream.

Not claiming to be an expert on active voice or passive voice, I am merely going to pose a few questions and give some examples from when our group studied passive voice vs active voice.

How many of you noticed that the first paragraph of the post is completely passive? How many of you are bugged by it? When is passive voice a good idea? When is it lazy writing?

Some teacher out there can explain how the verb 'Be' makes a sentence passive etc. I'm just going to say, if you do a word search for "was" in your manuscript and find 8 uses in one paragraph, hopefully you did it on purpose and not by accident. If it was an accident, then changes are easy to make.

It was a dark and stormy night. (passive)
Dark thunderclouds rolled across the sky. (active)

I was alone in the room. (passive)
They left me alone in the room. (active)

Times to use passive according to our guru on grammar:
1) When you are describing ongoing movement or action. (ie: I was curling my hair, when the phone rang.)
2) To break up an intense scene or stream of action: (I can't make up a good example cause I keep trying to fix the passive.)

So when do you think its okay to use passive voice? Is there a difference from 3rd person to 1st person? Does it vary by genre?

Keep Bleeding

"If you cut me, do I not bleed?" So asks my manuscript as I hack and chop more than 20% of my hard work and inspiration to make the story tighter and more printable.

A word to the wise...If you invite a professional editor to join your writing group: BE PREPARED. Your rough drafts will bleed and scream, but then again you will also get very humbling and valuable advice on how to make your genius idea more marketable.
Yes, I have learned this very difficult lesson and was reminded again this week when I mentioned that I had only cut 12,000 of the 20,000 words an editor (who may or may not be interested in buying my book) asked me to cut and then send it.
It was an impossible task. How could I possibly send to oblivion 20,000 words that had been born of blood, sweat, and sleep deprivation, over months of my life? How could anyone ask me to do such a thing with no guarantee that it would pay off?

And yet...
It it finished. Well, at least 18,000 words anyway. I'm still searching out the lingering 2,000. The first shavings were not all that hard. In 100,000 words their is bound to be several superfluous passages. They were not hard to dump because they neither moved the story or the reader. But that only accounted for 8,000 words or so. Then I chopped out the extra dialogue. Places where my story crafting lens had zoomed in close for too long on a particular scene. There were chunks of dialogue that could be summed up in just a few sentences.

And then I went to my writing group meeting and over spinach dip and chocolate chip cookies, my trusted critics and friends said it was time to cut entire scenes and subplots. Complete threads of the tapestry had to be removed. That is when my manuscript began to truly bleed and my inexperienced, trepidation red pen became a surgeons scalpel to careful remove the less important organs without killing the entire story.

How do I feel about being asked to perform surgery on my own creation? Scared to death and a little sad. I hope that readers will never recognize the scars that I see in the manuscript. Like the airbrushed version of a photograph I hope they enjoy the more perfected version and that only the few initiated support personnel can look at it and say, "Oh yes I remember that detail, but you can hardly see the stitches. If I hadn't seen it before I would never have even noticed."
So I will swab the blood and present the supermodel version of my story, lean and airbrushed.