Filter Words, Unfiltered
What These Common Words Are Really Doing to Your Story
Part 1 of 3
Imagine you’re standing in a garden just after it’s rained. The air is heavy with petrichor, the soil dark and alive, water still beading on the leaves of the hostas. You can almost feel the cool dampness against your skin.
Now imagine standing at the edge of that same garden, but this time, behind a pane of glass.
You can see everything. But you can’t smell a thing.
That’s what filter words do to your readers.
So What Are Filter Words, Exactly?
Filter words are verbs, usually sensory, perception, or cognitive verbs, that place a layer between the reader and the character’s sensory experience. They’re the literary equivalent of that glass pane.
They typically appear in constructions like this:
She felt the cold seep into her bones. He noticed the door was ajar. Maya realized she was alone.
The character perceives something, and the reader receives that perception secondhand. It’s a subtle layering; so subtle that many writers don’t notice they’re doing it. But readers feel it, even when they can’t name it. That slight remove, that almost-there quality, that sense of watching the story rather than living inside it.
That’s the filter at work.
The Usual Suspects
Filter words most commonly show up as sensory and cognitive verbs:
Sensory: feel/felt, see/saw, hear/heard, notice, watch, smell, taste, listen
Cognitive: think, know, realize, remember, wonder, decide, experience, find (as in she found herself)
They’re familiar words. Useful words in everyday language. Which is why they slip through so easily during drafting; they feel like good, solid anchors for the point-of-view character. And that instinct isn’t entirely wrong, which we’ll come back to.
Why We Write Them (And Why That Makes Sense)
Here’s something I want to be clear about: filter words aren’t a sign of weak writing. They’re a sign of a writer who is genuinely trying to stay inside their POV character’s head.
The instinct to write she noticed the letter on the table comes from a good place. The author is thinking about the character, grounding the observation in her perception, being careful not to slip into an omniscient perspective. That’s solid craft instinct.
The problem is that deep point of view—the kind that makes readers forget they’re reading—doesn’t actually need that anchor. When we’re truly inside a character’s perspective, the filter verb becomes redundant. Of course she noticed the letter. She’s the one telling us about it.
Removing the filter doesn’t lose the POV. It deepens it.
What’s Actually Happening in the Reader’s Brain
Every time a reader encounters a filter word, there’s a micro-interruption. It’s tiny, almost imperceptible on its own. But fiction works cumulatively. One filter word is a hand on the reader’s shoulder, holding them just outside the garden gate. A manuscript full of them and they never get in at all.
What readers are experiencing, without being able to articulate it, is narrative distance. They’re aware—just slightly, just enough—that they’re being told about someone else’s experience rather than having one of their own. The immersion isn’t broken or distorted, exactly. It’s just never quite complete.
Think of it this way: in a healthy story ecosystem, the reader is the character for the duration of the book. Filter words remind them they’re not. They’re observers. Visitors to the garden, not gardeners themselves.
The goal of deep POV is to hand them the trowel.
See the Difference
Let’s put this into practice. Here are three filter-heavy sentences, followed by their unfiltered versions:
With filter: She felt her heart rate spike as she heard footsteps on the stairs.
Unfiltered: Her heart rate spiked. Footsteps on the stairs.
With filter: He noticed the room smelled of cigarettes and something chemical, something wrong.
Unfiltered: The room smelled of cigarettes and something chemical, something wrong.
With filter: Maya realized she’d been holding her breath.
Unfiltered: She’d been holding her breath.
Notice what happens in each revision. The sentences get shorter, yes, but more importantly, they get faster. More immediate. The reader lands directly in the sensation rather than reaching for it through the filter first. The glass comes down. The garden opens up to all the senses.
A Word of Caution (Because Rules Exist to Be Broken)
Filter words aren’t inherently wrong. Sometimes they earn their place.
When a character is meant to feel distanced from their own experience, as in situations of dissociation, shock, emotional numbness, a filter word can actually do precise, intentional work. She watched herself sign the papers lands differently than She signed the papers, and sometimes that distance is exactly what the scene needs.
The difference between a crutch and a tool is awareness. We’ll dig into that distinction, and how to develop the judgment to know when to cut and when to keep, in Part 2.
Your Assignment Before Part 2
Open your current manuscript or any chapter you’ve been working on recently and use the Find function to search for just one word: felt.
Note how many times it appears. Don’t change anything yet. Just look.
See how often it’s doing necessary work, and how often it’s simply standing between your reader and your character’s experience. Sit with that for a few days.
Part 2 will give you the tools to do something about it.
Part 2: How to Find and Fix Filter Words—coming soon.