After putting my writing on hold for several weeks, I decided to jump back in. I expected to find all sorts of problems with my story–inconsistencies in the plot, lack of transitions, poor characterization–the works. But what began to stick out to me was something to which I’d given little thought in writing.
Filter words.
What are Filter Words?
Actually, I didn’t even know these insidious creatures had a name until I started combing the internet for info.
Filter words are those that unnecessarily filter the reader’s experience through a character’s point of view. Dark Angel’s Blog says:
“Filtering” is when you place a character between the detail you want to present and the reader. The term was started by Janet Burroway in her book On Writing.
In terms of example, you should watch out for:
- To see
- To hear
- To think
- To touch
- To wonder
- To realize
- To watch
- To look
- To seem
- To feel (or feel like)
- Can
- To decide
- To sound (or sound like)
- To know
I’m being honest when I say my manuscript is filled with these words, and the majority of them need to be edited out.
What do Filter Words Look Like?
Let’s imagine a character in your novel is walking down a street during peak hour.
You might, for example, write:
Sarah felt a sinking feeling as she realized she’d forgotten her purse back at the cafe across the street. She saw cars filing past, their bumpers end-to-end. She heard the impatient honk of horns and wondered how she could quickly cross the busy road before someone took off with her bag. But the traffic seemed impenetrable, and she decided to run to the intersection at the end of the block.
Eliminating the bolded words removes the filters that distances us, the readers, from this character’s experience:
Sarah’s stomach sank. Her purse—she’d forgotten it back at the cafe across the street. Cars filed past, their bumpers end-to-end. Horns honked impatiently. Could she make it across the road before someone took off with her bag? She ran past the impenetrable stream of traffic, toward the intersection at the end of the block.
Are Filter Words Ever Acceptable?
Of course, there are usually exceptions to every rule.
Just because filter words tend to be weak doesn’t mean they never have a place in our writing. Sometimes they are helpful and even necessary.
Susan Dennard of Let The Words Flow writes that we should use filter words when they are critical to the meaning of the sentence.
If there’s no better way to phrase something than to use a filter word, then it’s probably okay to do so.
Want to know more?
Read these other helpful articles on filter words and more great writing tips:
Tag: writing
If you’re not in a group and you want to learn how to write characters in that group respectfully and realistically
1. Read media by people in the group. Fiction, nonfiction, blog posts – anything from “how my day went today” to 300-page epic adventure novels to history pamphlets. (By people in the group, not just about them. This is important.)
2. Google “How not to write a [the group] character” because the odds are that at least a few people in the group have written blog entries rattling off all their least favorite tropes representing their demographic. I’ve seen lesbians writing about how not to write lesbians, Asians talking about offensively-written Asians, etc. Refraining from writing the overused, negative, one-dimensional tropes listed in posts like this is probably a good start.
The royal family employs no bodyguards. A would-be assassin discovers why.
“Please?” the crown prince said hopefully.
The assassin hesitated. “I’m not sure I’m comfortable with this.”
“Come on, you’re doing great. Just one stab, it’ll be easy-peasy.” The prince spread his arms wide, leaving his throat and chest vulnerable.
“Look, I’m going to level with you,” the assassin said. “I took this contract on the assumption that you were a bad dude. Usually when a country goes bankrupt this fast, it’s because whoever’s in charge is raiding the treasury. But once I infiltrated the guard, I actually had to spend time around you, and you’re just.” The assassin threw her hands up in disgust. “You’re a really nice person! There’s no getting around it! So I’m not super on board with murdering you now. Nothing personal.”
“But if you don’t, my sisters won’t get the life insurance payout, and the country will be in debt for the next century!”
“I’m pretty sure arranging for your own assassination is insurance fraud.”
“Your whole job is to commit murder,” the prince said, “and now you’re worried about a little insurance fraud?”
The assassin pinched the bridge of her nose. “Okay, let’s back up and think about this rationally. Have you considered faking your own death?”
This was not what I was expecting, and it is glorious.
more ridiculous things i’ve done for writing:
– weighted a grapefruit in my hands to see if i could justifiably describe something as “weighing as much as a grapefruit”
– done jumping jacks for 5 minutes straight so the memory of how exertion feels would be fresh in my mind
– googled images of butterscotch to see if “butterscotch” could be a hair colour
– casually stared at people at bus stops trying to figure out how i would hypothetically recreate their image in words
– written 7 different beginnings for a story to see which one i liked best
– gone to venice
– enthusiastically spoken dialogue aloud to myself to see how it sounds
– tried to read 3 books in one day
– experienced terrible things, reacting with “i can write about this”
– screamed incoherently at someone for turning on the tv while i was in the room, writing
– sat there perfectly still staring into space trying to imagine what getting a boner feels like
– “hey re-enact this scene with me”
– sat upside-down for ten minutes trying to get my brain to work
– squandered schoolwork and free time alike for years
– writtenI’m alarmed by how familiar some of these feel to me.
Build a fantasy religion
i didn’t see around a lot of indications about this, so i decide of making some short, direct and usefull indication based even on my experience. (feel free to add tips)
Why create a religion for my world?:
Religion is a big part of every culture that can influence the daylife of larg group of people so it’s important to define it if present in your world. The other thing is that is a good way for worldbuild, you can define the life of people, the way cities are built and the way of think of the population.
Where to start:
– Polytheist or monotheist: choose the type of religion that fit better your world, it’s important because polytheist and monotheist religions have some differencesthat have relevance when you write. (not only the number of gods but for example how gods are workship or how are build temples)
-Read about real religions: this is a good base and you are going to see a lot of aspect that you have to take count of. Reinterpret is a way of creating a new one, so you can take prinples for example.
–Decide the characteristics of the God/s: After have a clear idea of what you want to do (example: religion similar to Romans’ one or a mix between Egyptians and Greeks gods) you have to put cleare some poits:
- Is you god/s good or bad? : so how is see by humans, what is famous for, which is their temper, is revengeful or their forgive, if it is feared or loved or both. If you create more gods then you can decide to make them represent somenthing.
- Did your god/s in contact with humans?: The relationship with humans; so if they are between humans and if humans know about it. In this case when and how they do so. If they don’t meet humans you have to decide if they communicate with them and how.
- Physical appearance: if they had a physical appearance describe it or describe characteristics that the god have when in physical form.
– Worship: While the poits before where about the poit of wiew of the God/s, you have always to define how humans venerate God/s. Some points:
- Is all the population religious?: This is important because there you can determine the relationship between who belive and who not or between different religions. Or say if is imposed.
- What role have religion in the State: So if religion have a political power, how much power have and if is used for good or for bad.
- What are the religion institutions: There is a leader of the cult, what are the offices and how they are built, how much the istitutions influence the population.
- Where: where is workshiop God/s (temples or churches or at home)
- HOW: this is probably the most important aspect but the more compless too. Here you need to define how people practice their own religion so if they only pray or do make sacrifices, if there are rules that influence the daily life, if there are festivity or particular ritual, if there are simbols that are workship.
The Name: The name can be 1 word or more but it’s better if not more than 4 because it have to be somenthing that affect. It can be a word or a period that describe a foundamental principe of your new religion, or somenting like “The believe of X” .
A thing that is always good to keep in mind is that religions tend to give a sense of belonging to the believers. This can be use in a lot of way and is a important specially if your new religion have political power or a big influence on population.
I hope it help someone. (feel free to add tips)
Feedback culture is dead, long live feedback culture!
AO3, fanfiction, and comments: the system isn’t working.
Fic authors have a problem with feedback – or rather, with the lack of it. Fanfiction has a notoriously low ratio of comments to hits, and many of us have expressed our frustration that we can get a hundred, two hundred, five hundred, even a thousand views on our stories, but only a handful of readers will leave kudos, let alone comments.
Unfortunately, this only gets worse for long, multi-chapter stories (aka, the longfics we know, love, and would sell our souls in a second if it meant an update), which also happen to be the stories that authors need the most support to continue and complete. Law of diminishing returns, y’all, and it sucks.
We’re not here to guilt you into leaving comments.
We want to address the problem by changing the format, and we need your help to do it.The goal is to increase the amount of feedback authors get from readers, especially on stories with multiple chapters, and to make it easier for everyone to show how much we love fics. We’re opening a discussion with ao3 to figure out how/if any of these options can be implemented, but first we need options to present!
Some of our current ideas:
- Ability to leave a form of kudos on every chapter, instead of only once on the entire story: this lets authors know that you’re here and you’re reading their updates, so their hard work isn’t getting tossed into the internet void.
- Comment templates: suggested comments that can be customized or posted as-is. Many of us draw a blank or get nervous when we try to think of a comment, so having pre-made options will both increase the total level of feedback and serve as practice, making it easier to leave more in-depth comments in the future.
- Upvoting/leaving kudos on comments themselves: positive reinforcement makes giving feedback more fun and rewarding, and it lets the author know that readers are present and agreeing with other comments, even if they don’t leave one themselves.
We’ll contact AO3 to discuss the possibility of adding any of these as native features, and if that won’t work, we’re looking into creating and sharing a user script.
What you can do to help:
- As a reader, what would you like to have? What would you be most likely to use? New ideas, opinions on ideas that are listed here, they’re all good.
- As a creator, how would you feel about each of these options? Can you think of other ways of receiving or encouraging feedback?
- Pros and cons of these (note: our thoughts on this are discussed in this google doc)
- GET THE WORD OUT! Reblog this post, send it to your friends, link to it from your stories. We need as much input and support as possible to get this off the ground.
Feedback makes for happy authors. Happy authors make for more stories. Let’s keep this part of fandom alive!
More details about our thoughts, discussions, and ideas can be found in this google doc.
Me, imagining a scene in my head: beautiful poetic prose that gracefully and artfully describes the scene in vivid detail, giving the reader concise imagery and beautiful wordplay to ruminate on.
Me, actually writing: The angry man throwed his chair through the window angrily and bigly. “I’m angry and pissed off.” He said because he was mad.
Do you ever see people whose faces echo another era?
I’ve seen women with the round faces, sparse brows and high foreheads of medieval illuminated manuscripts.
Men with dark brows that meet in the middle, olive skin, strong noses and jaws–Byzantine men, ghosts of Constantine, reanimated faces from the Fayum Mummy Portraits.
Women with soft figures and the large eyes and prim, petaled mouths of the 19th century.
Grizzled men whose brows predicate their gaze, whose wrinkles track into their thick beards and read like topographical maps of hardship and intensity–the wanderer, the poet; Whitman, Tolstoy, Carlyle.
Faces sculpted into the perfect, deified symmetry of the pharaohs–almond eyes, full lips, self-assurance 3,000 years in the making staring at you at a stoplight.
Plump, curved white wrists curled over purse handles in the waiting room and you think Versailles, Madame Pompadour, Marie Antoinette, Catherine the Great. Wide cheek bones, courage and sorrow in the scrunched face of the old man in line behind you and it’s Geronimo, Sitting Bull, Tecumseh. Reddened skin, thick forearms, hair and beard and brows burned by the cold into a reddish corn silk and you think Odin, the forge and the hammer and skin stinging from the salt of the ocean.
Virginia Woolf’s quiet brand of gaunt frankness surveys you in passing in the parking lot. Queen Victoria’s heavy-lidded stare and beaked nose are firmly, uncannily fixed on a sixth-grade classmate’s face.
Renaissance voluptuousness on the boardwalk by the beach. Boticelli’s caramel androgyny in a youth smoking on a bench outside the mall.
Jazz age looseness spurs the tripping gait of the man who watches you paint with his hands in his pockets, and he smiles a Sammy Davis Jr. smile and tells you that you look familiar, that he’s sure he’s seen you somewhere before, but he doesn’t know where or when.
tag yourself: writers edition
willowfoot 