Filtering is like those stereogram things. Do you know the ones I mean? They're a page of seemingly randomly coloured pixels. And you kind of stare at them a bit boss-eyed, and suddenly a three dimensional shape jumps out at you. And then you can do them, and they just always work, and you can never unsee them.
Well, when you can see filtering, that's you, too, although seeing filtering is something of a curse, because it's rarely welcome and we want to cut it. But, like a stereogram, filtering is easier to show than to explain.
So, here's a sentence. This is from a deeply touching scene. Our main character, Janet, has just murdered Slicken von Blicken, and is sitting on her jet-ski in the supermarket car-park. She's lost in thought; and then...
Janet watched the rhinos waltz in the early morning sun.
Is that so bad, you might be asking yourself? Well, maybe.
Filtering is like you're picking up a sheet of coloured plastic, and you're putting it on top of the scene. You're forcing your reader to see the world through this, rather than using their own eyes. And by doing that you're pushing them a little away from the experience, and you're padding it out with words you don't need, bogging it down.
Well OK. But what's the filter?
The filter is the perceptions of the character. It's Janet. If Janet is your main character, you don't need to describe what she watches: whatever the reader reads is what Janet experiences. So, when Janet is watching the rhinos waltz, you simply have to write this.
The rhinos waltzed in the early morning sun.
You've deleted two words; and, importantly, you're not distracted by looking at yourself. Remember, 'you' is Janet, because that's who your narrator is. You're looking at the dancing pachyderms, not at yourself in the jet-ski wing mirror. Oh, and if you've never seen a rhino waltz, seriously, you've missed nothing. They've got two left feet.
Let's try another one.
She heard the thunder of their feet on the tarmac.
Can you see the filtering? You can do it!
Yes, there it is. Everything Janet hears, we hear. So, the sentence can be reduced to this:
Their feet thundered on the tarmac.
It's snappier, it's more immediate. We're more immersed in the world.
Getting rid of some filtering is harder than others. Let's try this one. This is the immediate next sentence.
She thought how happy they looked.
Filtering, eh? Yeah, you can see it now. We're showing the world through Janet, when the world is already experienced through her.
However, 'thought' is different to 'saw' or 'heard'. There's an important reason for that. To illustrate that, let's first treat it the same way we did the last two sentences, and cut out the filter words.
They looked so happy.
This is clearly simpler, but it misses the nuance of the original. When Janet was just looking at the rhinos dance, well, fine, whatever, we didn't lose anything when we cut away the filter words. But when we saw 'thought' we're being told that this is a thing that she thinks about., and presumably cares about. A better way of making this work is to switch to direct thought.
How happy they look, she thought.
Now, we're in a deep point of view. We're straight in her head. We've stripped away another layer, and we have a much better understanding of her, and the world. This is a topic that (assuming I remember) we'll examine later.
OK. You're an expert now. So, here are some sentences for you to practice on. Oh, did I not mention? Yes, there's homework. Come now, we're all in this together! I honestly don't know what the right solutions are here, so it'll be fun figuring it out!
Darren smelt the rich scent of the coffee machine. He felt the soft leather of the chair under his butt. He lifted his hand and, cautiously, picked his nose.
Isolde panted, the gun still hot in her hand. She could hear the thing, its mandibles clacking, loud in the silence of the abandoned ice-cream parlour. Why had she forgotten its birthday?
I could see the cliffs, mighty against the setting moon. I realised, with a shock that went down my spine, that this was just the tip. I was going to need a bigger spoon.
How did you do? That last one's particularly interesting, because I switched my point of view to first person, and filtering is even more of a problem there. By definition, you're telling the story through your narrator's voice. Why slow it down with filter words? Literally everything you write has been experienced by your character, so there's no need to point it out. However, there are some important caveats to that, and we'll talk about those in the next section.
* * *
OK, so by now you, hopefully, know what filtering is, why we want to get rid of it, and how to do that. And, maybe, you ain't buying it.
Look, I get it. It feels like you're making the text poorer; you're stripping away some of the nuance of the characters. And the reality is, you are. So... whisper it... filtering isn't all bad. Here are three times that you can probably defend them.
The first is when it's not your main character doing the looking. You're not in their brain, so let them look around as much as they like! I would note that your character can only follow their gaze, so can't experience what this third party smells or hears or realizes. It's also... maybe... a bit boring recounting what other people are looking at? So ask yourself whether it moves the story along. This leaks into head-hopping, which we will cover later.
The next is when the actual focus of the sentence is the filter verb. If you knock your hero out, and she is slowly coming too in a room full of lavender on the back of a giant tortoise that sounds like James Earl Jones, you want to communicate her senses flooding back. Yes, she sees the shell, smells the flowers, hears the kindly rumble of his voice; the fact that she has experiences at all is the crux of the sentences. But make the sentences punchy here; filtering verbs are very weak, and you don't want to have wishy-washy text at such an exciting point. Likewise, if a key plot point revolves around noticing that the elderly butler has a robot head, realising that the dog actually loved you all along, remembering to take up extreme cross-stitch, well, then you have to communicate the noticing, realising and remembering. Just, ask yourself: am I showing or telling here?
Lastly, if you are in a first person point of view, your protagonist's thoughts will leak into the text. Filter words look very much like inner monologue words.
I decided to keep my end of the bargain: I didn't think they'd double cross me. There were only so many flower shops in Antarctica, after all.
Is that filtering? I mean, maybe yes, but also, maybe no. It's definitely veering into the telling versus showing, but it's also pretty key to the character's thoughts. We'll (hopefully) talk about that in a later chapter.
And, at the end of the day... Filtering isn't actually 'wrong'. It's not ungrammatical. There are no rules against it. It's a stylistic thing, and if you want to just ignore everything here, you're welcome to.
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To help you with your quest against filtering, here is a cut-out-and-keep list of filter words. (Note: actual cutting out and keeping may impair your phone or computer screen.)
Saw, watched, looked at, could see, spotted.
Heard, could hear, listened to.
Touched, felt, could feel.
Smelt, could smell.
Tasted, could taste.
Sensed, experienced, could sense.
Seemed to.
Noticed, realised, discovered, remembered, wondered, believed, knew (although note case two and case three in the 'reasons to keep filtering words').
Thought (but remember how we talked about thinking).
We're done! Give me your unfiltered opinions in the comments.