Removing Filter Words from Your Writing
I am a strong believer the most important thing you can do as a writer of fiction is to disappear. The best books are the ones you forget you’re reading. It’s one reason I think that poetic language is often a mistake, and when someone stops to point out how good the writing is, I wonder I can make it less distracting.
One of the most common ways to remind a writer they’re reading a book is filter words. This is as it might imply a word that is used to filter what is happening through the thoughts or senses of a character. Perhaps the most common for me is having a character realize something. But you can also have them see something, hear something, decide something or feel something.
For those of you not antiquated with filter words, you’re likely thinking the same thing I did. That you have to have your characters see and hear things and realizing things is an action. But if you put these words into the search function of your current work in progress and look at it carefully, I think you’ll find, as I did that most of the time you can change things easily to make them far more immediate with little difficult. For example, “Joe saw that Mary was making a sandwich” can be changed to “Mary was making a sandwich.” Assuming that Joe is the point of view character, your reader will know he saw that without you saying it. But it’s not just shorter. You avoided reminding your reader they’re not Joe by removing the filter.
If you would have asked me before I searched out these words I would have said I don’t use them that often and changing it won’t matter that much. But having searched them out, I’ve discovered that any filter word is a clue that I need to look more carefully at that sentence. Sometimes it’s fine, but most of the time I can make something happen instead of having someone see it happen. In my most recent work I could cut the time I used the word realized from twenty-five to five times when there was an actual revelation. That may not seem a lot, but it’s only one of the filter words and putting a gap between the action in your book and the reader twenty times is twenty times too many.
But as I alluded to in the last sentence, you don’t want to cut out all the filter words. The exception to cutting them is when the realizing, seeing, hearing or thinking is the action. For example, how many times did a young wizard under an invisibility cloak hear something he wasn’t supposed to? But even then is it better to say, Harry heard Dumbledore say or have Dumbledore say it? It depends on which part is most important.
As with many points of style, I would strongly suggest you ignore this while writing your first draft. In the first draft, the most important thing isn’t making the reader forget that they’re reading a story but getting the writer to forget that he’s telling one. If you can get into the flow of writing where you feel as if the things are happening then you’ll get far more words down and experience one of the best moments in writing. But once you’ve done a few drafts this, along with removing hedge words can dramatically improve the immediacy of your writing.
