I Am Beginning to Write a Post About Filters Or: A Post About Filters

By Jen Ponce

When I read M. A. Ray’s post about filtering, my mind went in a different direction than hers. She wrote about filtering as a way of going down deep into our characters to tease out their authentic selves, to make them live on the page. Excellent advice, that. When I first saw the word filter, it made me think of the way we keep ourselves from being immediate in our fiction. I asked her if she’d mind if I riffed off her post and she said no, so here it is.

First of all, what does filtering mean? It’s like a muffler for your ears when listening to music or your foot dragging the ground when riding the merry-go-round. In writing, it keeps the reader from being immersed in your story. It’s a hesitation to jump into the action; whether that hesitation stems from a lack of confidence or a bad habit you’ll have to determine for yourself.

Here are some examples of filtering and immediacy.

Filtered: “She began to run to him.”

Immediate: “She ran to him.”

Filtered: “She started to laugh.”

Immediate: “She laughed.”

Both these examples deal with the same type of problem. Instead of letting the characters do something, the author pulls her punch. Let me tell you right now, I don’t want to read about a character who is always beginning to do something. I want to see them doing it. “She began to make love to him.” Boring! “She took off his shirt.” Ah. Now we’re getting somewhere. See the difference? One holds me back and the other invites me in.

Filtered: “I felt that he was teasing me.”

Immediate: “He teased me.”

Filtered: “I thought he was a jerk.”

Immediate: “He was a jerk.”

When we are writing from a character’s point of view, we are showing the reader what that character’s world looks like through their eyes. Often, our need to remind the reader that, “Hey! You are inside the head of a fictional character!” creates padding that ultimately takes a reader away from the writing, rather than deeper into it.

Also, check out how weak those filtered sentences are. “I felt you were mean.” This isn’t therapy, this is a book. We don’t need no stinking “I” statements here (unless your character is in therapy and is the type who would use “I” statements, of course.)

Here’s a longer passage. See if you can identify the filtering before checking out the second, more immediate passage.

     Susan gazed out the window at the black cat sitting in a spot of 

sunshine on her lawn. She felt like the cat was a sign from the gods, 

though she didn’t know what kind of sign it could be. Death? Weren’t 

black cats bad luck? She thought that signs from the universe should 

come with handy labels. It would make things easier.

Did you spot the filters? Let’s see if we can eliminate them.

     A black cat sat in a spot of sunshine on Susan’s lawn. The cat was a

sign from the gods, though she wasn’t sure what kind of sign it could 

be. Death? Weren’t black cats bad luck? Signs from the universe 

should come with handy labels. It would make things easier.

When the filters are removed, it makes the passage tighter and puts you more directly into the character’s head. You don’t need to tell the reader that Susan gazed out the window because the reader already knows he is in Susan’s head. What she sees, he sees, so there’s no need to put a flashing neon sign there screaming, “We are still in Susan’s head!”

When you remove the filters in your writing, you unearth your writer’s voice. Think of it as chipping away the rock to find the gold. If you’re a beginning writer, you’re probably burying your voice in mounds of filtering. Eliminate it and let your voice be heard.

(Even more experienced writers fall into the filtering habit. Here’s this paragraph in its original form: “Removing filtering is also away to unearth your voice as a writer. Think of it as chipping away the rock to find the gold. I’m guessing if you’re a beginning writer, you’re burying your voice in mounds of filtering. Eliminate it and your voice will be able to be heard.”)

Filtered: “He noticed her hands were covered in mud from the garden.”

Immediate: “Her hands were covered in the mud from the garden.”

As long as you’ve established that we are in a particular character’s head, you don’t need to tell us he noticed something. Let us notice with him, which is what we do in the immediate example.

Filtered: “Jane remembered when her husband used to bring her flowers. Now he only brought trouble.”

Immediate: “Her husband used to bring her flowers. Now he only brought trouble.”

When you take us back into the character’s memory, let us go back with her. Don’t tell us she’s remembering, show us. (Hear that? Filtering is telling.) Readers are smart. As long as you have clearly established the view point character you don’t need to smack them on the head every time your character remembers something.

As with everything in writing, these are not hard and fast rules. Yes, the pacing is often improved when you eliminate filters in your writing. However, there are times when the story dictates that you need a filter. You are ultimately the master of your writing. If there’s a passage that needs filtering because you want to slow the pace, then for the love of all that’s unholy put it in. The important thing to know is that this filtering problem exists and it can water down and weaken your story.

Here’s a list of some filtering words to look out for:

She heard

He saw

She realized

He decided

She figured

He touched

She smelled

He started

She began

He would start

She thought she might

He felt

She believed

If you’re game, post some “Filtered” and “Immediate” passages of your own in the comments. If you can think of other filters, post them too. I’m always up for improving my writing.

Writing exercise: Take out the filters in this passage and rewrite it to make it your own. Post your results in the comments. Come on. It’ll be fun. (I think it will be fun, maybe.)

     Damion knew that the aliens were planning to take over the world and 

felt sad that he would never get the chance to tell Lydia how much he loved 

her. He began to cry, thinking about all the missed opportunities he’d had 

to ask her to marry him, to make love to her. The aliens would enslave them 

all and he would have to start wearing one-piece unitards. He didn’t think 

Lydia would love him once she saw him in a unitard. His body wasn’t made 

for Spandex, not at all.

Drawing Through, Drawing In

M.A. Ray here. Good day to you!

Let’s talk filtering.

First, an explanation of what I mean by the word: filtering, to me, is a way to pull my writing through the sieve of a character’s mind. It has the effect of drawing the reader close to the character, and I use it almost all the time, whether the reader notices or not. Primarily, I do the trick using word choice and sentence structure, but in the beginning—and still, on occasion—I used grammar.

In Menyoral I spend the most time looking through one of two sets of eyes: Dingus Xavier’s or Sir Vandis Vail’s. There are plenty of more minor viewpoints (mainly Father Krakus’s and little Stas’s), but the biggest contrast is between Dingus and Vandis, so I’m going to talk about that a bit, and also how you can bring that to your own work.

To do this, to draw my reader right into a character’s headspace, requires intense focus for me. I need to be right in there with the character. Maybe it would be different for you, but sometimes I’m in so close I feel nauseated when they do; I’m feeling what they’d feel, thinking the way they’d think, and for me being briefly someone else is one of the biggest attractions of writing. Interpreting the actions of other characters, interpreting events, through the brain of the POV character, is a lot of fun, even when something bad is happening. Being close, as a writer, to your characters, makes these gymnastics easier.

The mechanics of it are pretty simple. For example, Vandis: formally educated, high position, money’s not a problem, but he came up in the boonies, and some of that still shows in his attitudes—and in my word choice when I write him. He’s got a large vocabulary and he’s not afraid to use it. His sentences are put together more properly. As a dash of flavor, when Vandis isn’t controlling his big mouth, he curses like a soldier. That mostly shows up in his dialogue or thought patterns, but sometimes, if I’m using his point of view, I’ll toss an f-bomb into the narration to give the sense that we’re really inside him.

On the other hand, I’ve got Dingus: no formal education except what Vandis has given, dirt-poor peasant from the hills. His vocabulary is growing, but he has a much poorer grasp on proper usage, and particularly in the first book, he uses double negatives and some constructions unique to the American South—even in the narrative. The more he hangs around Vandis, whom he idolizes, the closer his language comes to baseline, if slightly more profane. Maintaining the uniqueness of his voice has been a challenge, so I’ve turned to sensory inputs more and more when I write him. Dingus has enhanced senses. When he looks at something, he’s not only seeing it, the way I’d write for Vandis. Often I’ll use his sense of smell to bring myself into his head. Vandis will pick up a strong odor or aroma, but Dingus will scent more, and more often.

So here are my tips for writing a very close point of view.

Try to capture the rhythms of speech in the narrative you write, choosing words your character would use particularly. Pull your writing through the filters in his or her mind: what does he perceive about the situations, people, and places before him? What is most notable to him? What sense or senses does he rely on the most? Remember that background and backstory have a lot to do with perception—and misperception. What is the character used to seeing from others? What’s the first thing that leaps to his or her mind when presented with a certain situation?

What I’m getting at here is this: get into their heads. Know your people and live in their skins while you write. The more real they are to you, the more real you’ll be able to make them for your readers. And hey, share in the comments. If you give this a shot because of my article, let me know how it went; if you already do this, give your tips!