The books readers get lost in — the ones where you look up and an hour has passed — put you inside a character’s experience. You’re not watching from outside. You’re in the body, feeling what they feel, seeing what they see.
A lot of what creates that effect comes down to verbs, and if you’ve been following me for a while you already know how much verb choice and verb position matter. But there’s one more question that most writers never think to ask, and it’s sitting right next to the verb the whole time:
Who’s the subject?
Who — or what — is doing the action in each sentence? Because it turns out that matters just as much as the verb itself. When a person is doing the action, the reader experiences it. When an inanimate object or a body part takes over, the reader drifts back away.
This is the fourth post in a series on verbs in fiction. If you’re just joining, you might want to start with Strong Verbs in Writing, The Power of Verbs, and Visual vs. Non-Visual Verbs before continuing here. Or keep reading — this one stands on its own.
People Should Be Doing Things
Here’s a sentence a writer might draft:
The smell of coffee reached her before anything else.
There’s energy in that sentence — something happens, time moves, the scene shifts. But look at the subject. The subject is the smell of coffee. A smell. That’s an inanimate object doing the work.
She is the person in the scene. She’s our point of view character. We’re supposed to be experiencing this from inside her body. But grammatically, she’s the object — the thing that gets reached — rather than the agent doing anything.
Compare it to this:
She smelled the coffee from her bedroom.
Now she’s the subject. She’s the one doing. She’s smelling. The coffee smell is still there, but it’s the object now, the thing she’s perceiving. It’s content, not the actor.
This might seem like a small distinction. It isn’t. Every sentence where a person is the subject lets the reader visualize the character, inhabit his or her experience. Every sentence where a sound, an object, or an abstraction takes over is a sentence that subtly pulls the reader out.
The Three Subject Problems
When I look at writers’ pages, I find subject problems in three main flavors:
Inanimate objects as subjects. The door opened. The car pulled up. The phone rang. These aren’t wrong — sometimes an object doing something is exactly right. But when you string several of them together, the camera floats up above the scene and the character disappears. Nobody’s home. Nobody’s experiencing anything.
Body parts as subjects. Her eyes shot around the room. His hands gripped the wheel. Her jaw dropped. This one is sneaky because it feels physical and specific — body parts are doing things, after all. But a body part as the subject of a sentence is a dissociation. The reader starts to picture the eye moving around the room independently of the person it belongs to. It fragments the character’s experience rather than grounding it.
The fix is almost always to put the person back in: She looked around the room. He gripped the wheel.
Passive constructions. The gun was pressed against his head. The door was opened. The coffee was poured. Passive voice removes the actor from the sentence entirely. Something happened, but we don’t know who did it. If someone has a gun pressed against his head, I definitely want to know who’s holding it.
What This Looks Like on the Page
Here’s a before-and-after that shows the problem clearly.
Before:
Her eyes moved slowly across the room, taking in the shelves of books, the cluttered desk, the single window where grey light pressed in from outside.
One sentence. The subject is eyes. The first verb is moved — reasonable enough — but it’s immediately paired with taking in, which buries it in a participial phrase. And then there’s a subordinate clause about the grey light doing something with its own implied presence.
By the end of the sentence, the reader has processed five or six distinct elements without landing on any of them. The character has vanished into a description of what her eyes were doing.
After:
She scanned the room, noticed his shelves of books, the cluttered desk, grey light at the window.
One subject. two verbs. Everything else in service of what she’s experiencing. The reader is in her body.
Same information. Half the words. Twice the presence.
The Simple Diagnostic
Pull up a page of your draft and run this check:
Go through sentence by sentence and ask: who is the subject? Is it a person? A body part? An inanimate object? A passive construction?
You don’t need every subject to be a person. There are plenty of good reasons for an object to take the subject position — when the object itself is the point of the sentence, when you’re varying rhythm, when the person isn’t present. But if you find three or four sentences in a row where no person is doing anything, that’s a signal. The character has drifted away.
The deeper principle connects to everything else in this series. Verbs carry weight. Position carries weight. And the subject — the who or what that acts (does the verb) — carries weight too. When a person is doing the action, the reader experiences it. When an object or an abstraction does it, the reader watches from a distance.
This is the next level of what I teach in Show Don’t Tell — the course covers verb choice, sentence structure, and how to put it all together on the page. If you want to go deeper, you can find it here.
