‘The more I learn, the more I realize how little I know.’ A much heard expression from those who pursue knowledge. In my ‘learn as I go’ path of writing a novel I came across an expression I’d never heard before, ‘Filter Words’.
What came to mind had nothing to do with writing. When we were kids we had a fish aquarium with a filter that kept the muck out of the water. Recently we took some of our apples from the yard and brought them to an apple press. There we took the juice squeezed out from our apples and poured it into a jug, through a filter to keep out the bits of solid apple. To me, a filter has always been something to let the good through and to separate the bad bits out. But words as filters? This took me a while to grasp.
Most writers use filtering in their writing without even knowing it. Instead of saying, ‘There was a cat,’ we write ‘John saw the cat’. Instead of saying, ‘The cat hissed,’ we write, ‘John heard the cat hiss.’ The filter words here are saw and heard. They are some of the words we use to unnecessarily filter the reader’s experience through a character’s point of view.
When you want the reader to know, to experience what’s happening in the story, filter words place a barrier between the story and the reader. Filter words divert the experience through a character, then onto the reader, instead of the reader directly experiencing the scene. Filter words often derive from writing using passive sentences as they tell about a character’s sensory experiences of: seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, tasting. Yet there is no real need to present these sensory experiences through a character. If the sensory experience is presented in the narrative, then it is a given that the character also experiences it (along with the reader). As in: The cat hissed. There was a cat. The seat was hard. Rather than having John, hear, see, feel.
Eliminating filter words from your manuscript will make it feel much more immediate, and make the reader feel closer to the characters. Writers are particularly prone to using filter words when writing in first person. When editing, try to eliminate filter words that have the reader looking at the character, rather than looking at what the character saw (heard, felt, smelled, tasted).
So there, all sorted on filter words? Ready to go out and kill them dead? Rid your writing of those pesky filter words? STOP. Don’t hate me for saying this, but sometimes they are helpful and even necessary. Sometimes the reader needs that distance from the narration and needs to focus on the character directly. ‘I see the gun, but it doesn’t seem real to me.’ Have the character use a filter word(s) if it’s important to draw attention to the act of the character feeling, hearing, watching. Filtering is used in the omniscient point of view and is not considered incorrect, because of the multiple points of view and the need to identify which character is experiencing what.
The most commonly used filter words used are: see, feel, and can. Here are some more of the most common filter words to watch out for: hear, think, touch, wonder, realize, watch, look, seem, decide, sound, know, experience, begin, start (There are dozens).