When I started my self-study in writing fiction, I soon learned of the textbook by the same name. In Writing Fiction, Janet Burroway says that removing filters from your writing is the express lane to more vivid writing.
“As a fiction writer you will often be working through ‘some observing consciousness.’ Yet when you step back and ask readers to step back and observe the observer – to look at rather than through the character — you start to tell-not-show and rip us briefly out of the scene.”
For example, when I write “I remember,” you want readers to take in not just the memory, but also the act of you remembering. “She knew” or “he noticed” force readers into the same things. Also, people watching, thinking, deciding, or beginning to.
Burroway, whose book is on most college textbook lists, says filters also happen in more subtle I-not-I characters, writing outside of your gender, race or planet of origin. “Filters can creep into your writing when you create characters that are very unlike yourself, such as a serial killer, white supremacist, or Sherlock-like genius. Filters are the sometimes subconscious admission that you have no idea what a serial killer actually thinks. This is most likely, and hopefully, because you have never killed a person.”
Burroway says the filter removal lets readers stay inside the characters. The filters are barriers for the reader. They create a psychic gap:
Mrs. Blair made her way to the chair by the window and sank gratefully into it. She looked out the window and there, across the street, she saw the ivory BMW parked in front of the fire plug once more. It seemed to her, though, that something was wrong with it. She noticed that it was listing slightly toward the back and side, and then saw that the back rim was resting almost on the asphalt.
Remove the filters and we stay in Mrs. Blair’s consciousness, watching with her eyes, sharing understanding as it unfolds for her:
Mrs. Blair made her way to the chair by the window and sank gratefully into it. Across the street the ivory BMW was parked in front of the fire plug again. Something was wrong with it, though. It was listing toward the back and side, the back rim resting almost on the asphalt.
Removing filters can be a fun way of improving your book during a revision. Once you practice taking them out, it becomes an ingrained habit not to use them in the first place.
