I don’t see a single passive construction here, and the description is vivid. This piece entertained me as a reader for two reasons. First, the story itself was engaging. Second, I could feel your excitement and joy as a writer through the prose. You can always tell, I think, when a writer likes what he or she has written.

I will look forward to our fellow writers’ responses in the comments.

Cheers,
Loren

My nature requires me to test things out as soon as I learn something new, partially to get a feel for the process, and partially to get feedback to see if I understand what was shared.

One thing that caught me was in part four of the Flow series. I have not looked at what I have written previously, yet, out of fear that I have been using passive voice extensively. Instead, I wrote a single play in a baseball game in order to try out my active voice, to see if I could portray the action clearly and communicate the excitement of five seconds contained in a two hour game.

The bat cracked as it made contact with the ball. The ball flew out towards right field, striking the ground feet in front of the right-fielder’s glove. As soon as the ball rolled into the glove, the right fielder twisted his body, grabbed the ball from the glove, and let loose a powerful toss right at third base.

The runner from second base had a few seconds of lead, having started to run early, intending to steal the base. The ball raced towards third base. The third baseman planted his foot immediately in front of the base, ignoring the runner and willing the ball to move faster. The runner jumped into a face-first slide, kicking up a cloud of dust as he landed. Momentum carried the runner closer to the plate. As the runner reached out for the base, he felt the third baseman’s foot blocking the way. A fraction of a second later, as momentum continued to carry the runner around and past the base and the third baseman’s foot blocked the runner’s hand from touching the bag, the sound of hard leather hitting soft leather rang out. Sure of his grip, the third baseman lowered his gloved hand and brushed it, almost gently, across the runner’s back.

The umpire, aware of the baseman’s shoe stopping the runner’s hand, let out a loud shout and raised his right hand to his shoulder. The play ended, and the runner jogged back to his team’s dugout.

The intended audience is people who have at least a basic understanding of baseball, and its purpose is to entertain, with some minor persuasive elements to convince people who think baseball is boring that there is a lot of action packed in each play than meets the eye. The persuasive elements are a distant second to the entertaining elements, though.

Also, the reason why I’m sharing it here is to get some feedback so that I can get an idea of what to concentrate on as I start broadening my reasons for writing.