De-Filtering Your Draft

Why filtering matters, what to do about it, and twenty words which point towards filtering

The pleasure of de-filtering your draft is that it’s one of the easiest and least disruptive means to improve your prose and storytelling - and cut the wordcount too.

The exasperation of de-filtering your draft is that filtering is a natural product of your imaginative process, and so many writers find that the darned stuff gets everywhere!

What is filtering?

My original post about filtering is here, so this is a quick recap. John Gardner in The Art of Fiction compares these two sentences:

• Turning, she noticed two snakes fighting in among the rocks.

• She turned. In among the rocks, two snakes were fighting.

and points out how the first one includes

… the needless filtering of the image through some observing consciousness… Generally speaking… vividness urges that almost every occurrence of such phrases as “she noticed” and “she saw” be suppressed in favor of direct presentation of the thing see.

It’s Janet Burroway in Writing Fiction¹ who nails what’s going on: