‘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.  (more…)