“The prize is five hundred gold pieces Yanos. You must enter. They are saying that even Silvano will be there.”

Kahnae’s ears pricked up at the mention of gold. She had been trying for hours to ignore the loud-mouth whose voice drowned out the noise from the rest of the tavern. She had come here for a quiet drink. The last thing she needed was to listen to some drunken fool trying to impress his friends.

“I assume you will be entering,” Yanos replied.

It was the first time that she could recall hearing him speak. His voice carried an air of authority sparking her curiosity even further. It had been clear from the first that he must be the leader of this disparate group of mercenaries. Even the tavern’s owner had shown him undue deference, unusual in this city. Most citizens barely tolerated mercenaries.

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She had been trying for hours to ignore the loud-mouth whose voice drowned out the noise from the rest of the tavern.
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This first line of narritive employs the 'to be' verb been. I don't know if this is passive voice or not, but perhaps the sentence could be rephrase without it.

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She had come here for a quiet drink.
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This is the second line of narritive which has the word 'had' in it. 'Had' is one of those word frequently overused, yet sometimes one just has to use it. But perhaps rephrasing might be considered.

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The last thing she needed was to listen to some drunken fool trying to impress his friends.
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'Was', another 'to be' verb. At times it cannot be avoided. I try to avoid using it again in the same paragraph.

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It was the first time that she could recall hearing him speak.
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'Was'.

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It had been clear from the first that he must be the leader of this disparate group of mercenaries.
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'Had been', 'must be'

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Even the tavern’s owner had shown him undue deference, unusual in this city.
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'had'.

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Most citizens barely tolerated mercenaries.
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'barely', one of those so-called 'empty' adverbs.

I must say, though, I disagreed with every nitpick you made. I hope it's ok with you that I bring it up. I usually would leave it to the author to decide, but you've hit on a pet topic of mine and I thought there might be some room to discuss it.

First of all, you should learn what passive voice is. I know, you said you didn't know if that was an example or not, but you *should* know. A sentence is written in passive voice if the subject of the sentence is not performing the action. It's as simple as that. Most passive sentences use "to be" verbs but most occurences of "to be" verbs do not make a sentence passive voice. (I hope you followed that.)

SO when "She had been trying for hours" it was in fact she who had been trying, so it is active voice. Passive would be weird in this sentence, but it would be something like, "The loud mouth whose voice drowned out the rest of the bar had been ignored by her four hours." The "by" is actually a bigger giveaway because it means that the action was done "by" what follows rather than by the subject. Just wanted to clear that up. We could do another passive voice lesson. It seems that no matter how many times it gets brought up, there remain some who are confused. I think it is one of those difficult topics that can be confusing in certain situations even for the best of us.

As for the rest of this...this is all my opinion. "Had" is one of those things. I've had people flag "had" in my writing before and it usually is annoying. "Had" merely indicates action that happened before the present time of your story. OF course, the story is written in past tense, so it is the past tense of the past tense. There is ually no other way to reword a sentence with a "had" in it short of going back in time and showing. In fact, the biggest problem with "had" is a "show don't tell" thing. In this case, we are being told about what's her name's experience in the bar rather than seeing it firsthand. It might be that Yanos should go back and do that, but it's hard to say from 13 lines. It could just be boring background and in that case, I'm fine in having him(her?) spell it out quickly and with the "hads"

As for "to be." It is one of those cursed words. There are people who overuse it and when that happens, you can tell. Sometimes things are...and trying to rephrase it in another way turns the prose into something ludicrous. Sometimes it is more clear to have things lay, sit, rest, explode, or bamboozle. A rule of thumb I use for a misplaced "was" is when it comes in the form "was ____ing." I find that about 90% of the "was _____ing" can be rephrased as simply "______ed", eliminating the was and making it more concise. Anyway, I mention this because there was not a single instance of either "had" or "to be" that you flagged that I felt was inappropriate, overused, or needing of rephrasing. Now, I've heard extremists try to get rid of all instances of these verbs but in practice I don't think it sounds right.

Also, "barely" can be an empty word...but not in the sentence you flagged. Removing the word "barely" completely changes the meaning of the sentence. Unlike in my previous sentence, where removing the adverb "completely" could stand without any difficulty. Yanos could rephrase the entire sentence, but the sentence has a nice flow, blends in with his (her?) natural voice, and boils down to one of those personal preference things that I try not to flag in critiques unless it honestly gets in the way of my reading.

But I do have an issue with the way it starts. While I don't typically have a problem with a scene opening with dialogue (I do it a lot myself ), this feels a bit awkward for exactly the reason Chris mentions: we don't have a context for it. Then we're pulled off into an observer's POV.

I think I would like it better if you just started it with Kahnae trying to ignore the conversation. You could also try giving more of the conversation and establishing the people involved in it, but then you run the risk of a POV jolt when you actually do introduce Kahnae.

As to the passive vs active voice, I just copied this into Word and checked the readability stats and 0% of it is passive.

Of course, in my writing, a few have flagged ‘to be’ verbs, and while they were not passive constructs, they said it was weakly worded and I could use stronger verbs. And after franticly reworking, I picked up Nine Princes In Amber (for the 100th time), and found Roger Zelazny had many in the first paragraph. This was after I worked to remove ‘was’ and ‘had’ altogether.

Now I set my golden mean for was to 1 in 77 occurances and ‘had’ one in 143. I reworked a short story my wife absolutely loved, and she liked it better the first time.

AH! WIP=work in progress

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She had been trying for hours to ignore the loud-mouth whose voice drowned out the noise from the rest of the tavern. She had come here for a quiet drink. The last thing she needed was to listen to some drunken fool trying to impress his friends.

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Another logical reason to be in a tavern is to gather information (which is what Kahnae actually ends up doing here) from drunken fools. You can also occasionally make advantageous deals with drunken fools, in the company of witnesses who find nothing unethical about this practice. And of course, since this is a tavern rather than the common room of an inn, eventually there will be drunken fools wandering home through dark alleys (though you don't want witnesses for that).

Basically, there are a lot of reasons she could be there, but getting a quiet drink isn't one of them.

There is also the matter of how she reacts to Yanos. It shouldn't surprise or intrigue her that his voice has an air of authority, since she has already pegged him as the leader of a group of mercenaries. By the way, "disparate" isn't a good word, since it isn't clear what about the mercenaries is "disparate". The first meaning that came to my mind was that they appeared to have widely varying levels of skill/experience/success. Either clarify that or leave it out. Anyway, she needs something else about this guy to find interesting.

Also, getting back to the first point, she's paying way too much attention to this guy for her to simply be there in pursuit of a quiet drink.

Gold pieces belong in Dungeons & Dragons. Take a moment and create a monetary system for your world, a believable coin of the realm.

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But I could just as easily change the name to gold domnari. Would that make it any better?

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I submit that it would make it better. Small, well-thought out details make the world your characters inhabit believable or not. Changing it from "pieces" to "domnari" would only minimally suffice.

I'll give you an example where it matters. I'm currently reading David Farlane's Runelords series. In it, people from the Southlands use standardized, perfectly weighted & balanced gold rings as currency. A practical result of this is that when searching a victim's person for gold, a bandit does not look for a purse or in pockets. The bandit tears open the victim's shirt and looks for the necklace with the gold rings on it.

What's the point? This strange form of currency is unlike that of the protagonist character group, which uses coins, and so it is a better-than-average (average methods being insufficient) method of determining the person was from another nation. Would there be other ways of accomplishing this? Sure, the average ones, such as clothing. But this is a unique and clever detail that adds that little bit extra richness we love about worlds of fantasy.

I'll not belabor the point further, but when I read "gold pieces," I feel that the writer hasn't even taken enough time to invent a worthy milieu. If your story is worthy, give it what it deserves! Give your readers what they deserve.

I kind of like "gold pieces". It made me think of an ancient time and immediately told me this is not a modern setting. While I agree that it may be worth it to create a naming system for the currency in your milieu, "pieces" is a perfectly acceptable synonym.

Or take a note from history. Where raw gold is used as currency, it is usually metered by weight or volume, not by "pieces". And raw gold is rarely used as currency except in a "gold rush" situation, where a newly discovered source of gold is being exploited by numbers of less organized individuals. As a result, where raw gold is being used as currency, the value of gold is severly depressed. In such a situation, five hundred "pieces" of gold is probably enough to buy a couple of rounds of drinks for everyone in the bar.