I Felt That

Sometimes filter words are okay, but most of the time they're not.

If you've been writing for a while, you probably know about filter words. Filter words are one of the main culprits for your writing being a "telling" snoozefest. "Telling" as in "showing" vs. "telling." If you don't know what showing vs. telling is, you should definitely read up on it, especially if you write fiction. Showing vs. telling is the biggest, biggest reason your writing might not draw readers in and why people will toss your book after the first chapter, and why agents will go down the "your story just didn't grab me as much as I'd hoped" road rather than the "hello, next Stephen King" (or insert your favorite author's name) street.

Filter words explicitly separate the reader from whatever's going on in your story. One classic example is, "she felt the rain on her face." In this phrase, the writer is intentionally inserting a barrier between the reader and what the character is experiencing: "she felt." Why is it there? If you think about it logically for even a second, it should strike you not only as bad writing, but also kind of odd. Of course she felt it. Who else would be feeling it? Good writing puts the action right in front of you: "the raindrops hit her face." Okay, that's still bad writing, raindrops hitting a person's face sounds unnecessarily violent (maybe it's a storm, you don't know), but you get the idea.

Most of the time, filter words can be deleted without much fuss, though you may have to change a few of the other words around to make the "unfiltered" sentence sound better or to fix the grammar and syntax. Sometimes, you have to change a lot, because the sentence after deleting the filter word is just weird: "she felt the raindrops on her face" vs. "the raindrops hit her face." The corrected version (ignoring the violent raindrops for a sec) feels truncated and you kind of wonder, as the reader, why the writer is telling you this without any elaboration to indicate why I should care. As you work to delete filter words more and more, you start to realize that this is why people say writing is hard. Which is not really true: writing is easy, writing well is hard.

It's my opinion that filter words can sometimes be okay, though. Like passivity in writing, sometimes it's worse to try to omit the filter word. Sometimes "feeling" or "seeming" or any of the other common filter words are the right words to use. An example might be to describe a character's internal thoughts: "Jim felt like he should be trying harder, but it seemed everyone was standing in his way." We have two filter words here: "felt" and "seemed." These seem (pun intended) like great candidates to dump, but are they? To get rid of the first, you'd need to jump through some torturous hoops to get the same meaning: Jim seems uncertain whether he should be trying harder or not; he's only partially convinced. To get that meaning without the filter word, you'd have to offer some kind of parallel description to convey that uncertainty. In this case, it may not be worth it: the "felt" here is the action. We aren't separating the reader from what's happening, the "feeling" is what's happening. It feels cleaner and clearer to leave it. By the same token, the "seemed" looks like a filter word that can be deleted. But if we do, the meaning changes: "but everyone was standing in his way." The "seemed" in the original sentence conveys a possibility that Jim is casting about for a reason not to try harder, and may have just seized upon people standing in his way as a convenient excuse. It is not a fact that people are standing in his way, so removing the filter word changes the meaning and intent of the sentence. In this case, I might make the effort to reword the sentence to omit the filter word and to better explain why Jim felt this way. But sometimes that's a bad idea as well. Words have a cost, and the reader has to pay for some of that when they try to decipher your writing. If you have to write a paragraph to capture the uncertainty inherent in that "seemed," is it worth it for the reader? Maybe. Maybe it says something about who Jim is that he is inventing obstacles. Maybe you need to rethink the whole idea you're trying to convey, and it's not as simple as you thought on first writing. Or maybe you're going to write that paragraph and the reader is going to wonder why the hell you made them read that when it could be succinctly captured with the uncertainty of "seemed."

Writing is hard, but it shouldn't be impossible. My approach hearkens back to the old saying "don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good." It's the same advice I rely on when it comes to adverbs and passive writing: do your best, but KISS (keep it simple, stupid: another piece of good advice).

Once you get some experience—say, the first excruciating editing pass through your book to get rid of filter words and passive language—you get better at not using filter words in the first place. Painful, time-consuming editing will do that for you. But sometimes filter words are the only words that make sense. There are arguments—good ones, even—that I'm wrong here, and that filter words always separate readers from or obscure the action. My process is a two-step one when I encounter a filter word when editing: can I delete it easily? If yes, do it. If no, can I reword it easily? If yes, do it, if no, what am I trying to say? Is the entire sentence or paragraph not reflecting a coherent idea? If yes, rewrite it. If no, rewrite it.

And if all else fails, leave it and get a drink.