This week, I read about filter words and felt embarrassed all over again at my earliest attempts at a novel.
What are filters in your writing, and how do they harm your relationship with your reader? Today, it’s our goal to eliminate all that.
But first, let me share that I submitted a short story yesterday after hours of editing, only to read over the submission email and discover an echoed phrase. Not only a repeat phrase, but a cliched one: smiled ear to ear. Oh dear. Oh dear. I immediately fixed it and resent, to receive a laughing emoji from my editor. Nothing like submitting material to immediately find the bits you ought to have edited out! Will let you know in due course how that one fairs. Anyhow, let’s get on with this week’s stuff:
Here’s my understanding - and believe me when I tell you (with a rather red, embarrassed face) that my first attempt at a novel was ridden with such examples of filtering.
She saw the sun transform the colours of the trees.
The sun transformed the colour of the trees. OR… Sun transformed the trees.
She heard the tick of the clock in the empty room.
The clock ticked.
She felt her heart thump.
Her heart thumped. (or find a better way to say it in order to avoid cliches!)
In front of her was…
For the love of the wee man, just tell us what’s there! We don’t need a filter like “in front of her…”
I promise, once you start seeing them, you’ll most likely recognise them everywhere. Unless, of course, you are a fantastic writer who has already learned this lesson!
WHERE’S THE HARM OF FILTERS?
Basically, filters are where you type words like:
In front of her. Behind him. She heard. He felt. She saw.
You are doing stage direction. In a book. It is not required.
You are already telling us a story from the viewpoint of a character, so you don’t need to say “she heard” or “he felt”. Just get right to it.
What is wrong with that? Think about it - if you are looking at the sunset from your doorstep would you say “The sunset in front of me is beautiful.” Nope. You’d just say that it’s a beautiful sunset. Not the most riveting of examples, but do examine if you have extra filters, words in there that the reader does not need!
Honestly, as a beginning writer, I thought I’d chosen a “style” of writing. Telling the reader - oh look what my character is doing/feeling/seeing/hearing.
Wrong.
What I was doing was reminding them there was a writer.
I was putting me between the reader and the story. I was stepping into their reading experience - in the worst way possible.
Anything that you put between the reader and your story, anything that makes the reader pause, is a bad thing for your story. Yes, I’ve put that in bold because it is really, really important.
There are other types of filtering (filler words) which we may mistake for “style” and for me, that was repetition of the use of certain words:
so, therefore, then.
Again, it was like hearing my writer’s voice within the piece - that is entirely different from narrative voice. There just may be space for something like this if a piece is written from a particular viewpoint and the narrative voice is showing youth or age - but sparingly, please - and do be sure it is narrative voice and not filtering. Instances like that ought to appear during passages of internal voice or in dialogue, not in the narrative. At least, that’s my easy way to spot it. (A very close First POV may have more instances like this if the reader is hearing that narrative voice - but filler phrases (rather than filtering in this case) can become annoying to the reader, so choose them carefully.
Thankfully we can search for repeat words on a PC these days but my own editor eye also picks them out - unfortunately there have been some occasions with short story writing, where I don’t spot a repeat until it’s in print by which time it’s gone through a spell/grammar check by me; and an edit by the magazine (two actually!). Not exactly filter words, but repeats/echoes that were not necessary. These things happen. That’s ok, we have to live with it. Those are genuine mistakes.
Once we know about filtering, we would be smart to remain aware of it until we eliminate it from our writing.
Might there be a good example of filtering? I’m not so sure. I don’t know if I’d read it anywhere, or I simply thought I was doing the right thing - a stylistic thing, but now I howl with embarrassment at the thought of agents reading that piece of work.
CONNECTION
Learning Point: If you’ve queried agents and received a rejection that mentions they “found it difficult to connect with your character/s” then this type of filter/distancing may be to blame. The reader (agent) is not close enough to your character telling them the story. You are telling them, and they can see that (read that) in the writing. Even a First POV story should be direct, possibly even more, so remove the filtering where you can..
And yet, I’m howling because my very first Post here on Substack was titled I’M LOOKING AT!!! How funny is that? Of course, I’m Looking At is a prompt from a card, and if you were to publish something that resulted from it, you’d remove the words I’m Looking At!!! Anyhow, if you’re interested in that first post, the link is at the end!
Do you write with your reader in mind?
Are you aware of filtering and how it puts space between the reader and the story, where they suddenly notice you, the writer?
Unless you’re breaking the fourth wall (oh boy, that would be a bold narrative voice to go with), then the author, the writer, has no place in the reader’s mind when they are reading your story.
There’s no place for filter words, and no place for fancy lingo and smart wording. Sure, we all want a bit of beauty in the work, perhaps enough to make a reader react emotionally, but do we really want them to stop in their tracks to say, “Oh wow! I see what the writer did there. What a wonderful phrase”??
OK, yes, as writers, wouldn’t it be lovely for readers to highlight phrases and sentences - but even better if those phrases and sentences cause such resonance that the reader has an emotional reaction: because then it’s about them, the reader, not us as the writer.
So, have you written filter words, filler words, and sentences in your work?
What might you do to correct this?
With a novel full of them, it wasn’t so easy for me to simply remove them. It needed a fresh, new look - and one day I will indeed go back to that (finalnotfinal) draft from 2018 and rewrite the whole thing.
It’s a wrench to realise our errors, but we can only be grateful and move forward being more aware of such things. And write with fresh eyes (or preferably a pen, or a keyboard).
Oh boy.
That’s all for this week. Go forth (and ditch the filter words).
Love, from Jackie in the Little Writing Corner in Scotland x x
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Thank you.
PS Here’s the link to I’M LOOKING AT (Hopefully you’ll forgive the use of the filtering phrase - it was a style-choice. Honest!!!)
PS The only person I ever heard use the phrase “…for the love of the wee man.” was my childhood minister who hailed from Helensburgh on the west coast of Scotland. He said it with such an accent, it seemed acceptable to everyone who heard it.
Another PS: Just a little humble note to say I don’t ever want to come across in my Posts as telling you what to do. I’m no teacher, or professor, or anything in between. I’m simply a writer who happened across a market for my writing, someone who now gets paid for their writing, and who has learned along the way. I wish I’d learned some of my lessons earlier.
OK, that’s definitely it for this week.
