Filter Words
Quick answer: Filter words like saw, heard and felt put a reporting layer between reader and scene. Learn to spot them, when to cut them, and when a filter is doing real work.
Watch what happens between these two sentences: She heard the door slam downstairs, and then, The door slammed downstairs. Filter words are verbs of perception and cognition, saw, heard, felt, noticed, watched, realised, wondered, seemed, that report a character perceiving something instead of simply rendering the thing perceived. In other words, they are a lens held up between the reader and the scene, reminding you that you are watching someone watch.
The term belongs to revision rather than drafting, and it matters most in close third person and first person narration, where the reader is already inside the character's head. Janet Burroway's textbook Writing Fiction popularised the concept, and it has since become one of the standard line-edit checks in workshops and editorial letters.
The term at work: Hemingway by the river
Ernest Hemingway's story Big Two-Hearted River (1925) follows Nick Adams fishing alone in burned country, and it is a masterclass in unfiltered perception. When Nick studies the trout holding steady in the current, Hemingway does not write that Nick saw the trout or felt the heat. The trout are simply there, keeping themselves steady against the pebbly bottom; the grasshoppers are simply black; the pack simply hurts his shoulders. Because everything on the page is by definition what Nick perceives, naming the act of perception would add nothing.
The effect is immersion. The reader stops observing Nick and starts perceiving as Nick, which is exactly what the story needs, since its whole subject is a damaged man steadying himself through attention to physical detail. One filtered sentence, Nick noticed that the river was there, would puncture it. The unfiltered version, The river was there, is the famous register the story actually keeps.
Why filters creep in, and what they cost
Filter words are natural to drafting because they mirror how we narrate aloud: I saw this, then I heard that. They feel like anchoring. On the page, though, each one adds a small step of remove, what John Gardner discussed as psychic distance, pushing the reader back from the scene toward the observer. Across a story, dozens of small removes add up to a reader who feels the glass between themselves and the events.
They also waste the sentence's strongest positions. She felt the cold creep up her arms spends its subject and verb on she felt, leaving the cold to trail behind. The cold crept up her arms gives the sentence to the thing that matters. Multiply that trade across three thousand sentences and you have the difference between vivid and vague.
When a filter is doing real work
Cutting every filter is a workshop superstition, not a rule. A filter earns its place when the act of perceiving is itself the event. She noticed his hands were shaking is correct if what matters is that she noticed, that she is the kind of person who catches it, or that she will have to decide what to do with the knowledge. Filters also mark transitions in and out of deep point of view, and they can control pace, holding a beat before a revelation lands.
The working question is always: is the story about the perception, or about the thing perceived? If the thing, cut the filter. If the perceiving mind, keep it, deliberately and sparingly.
How to hunt them in revision
Run a search for the usual suspects and judge each hit on its merits rather than deleting blindly.
A realistic target is to cut most of them. Writers who do this pass once report the same discovery: the prose gets faster and closer without a single new word being added. The trap is overcorrection, stripping filters from a distant, storyteller-style narration where they belong, and flattening a voice that was meant to feel told.
Neighbours and opposites
Filter words sit inside the larger show, do not tell conversation, but they are a narrower, more mechanical fault, and easier to fix. They are related to psychic distance, the measurable closeness of narrator to character, and to free indirect style, the technique of writing a character's thoughts as narration, which removes the need for she thought entirely. Overwriting is a different disease with a similar cure: both are about clearing extra material off the line so the reader touches the scene directly.
What poets can take from this
- Search your draft for saw, heard, felt, noticed, realised and seemed, and judge every hit.
- Give the sentence's subject to the thing perceived, not the act of perceiving.
- Keep a filter only when the noticing itself is the story beat.
- Cut could see and could hear on sight; they filter twice.
- Do the filter pass late, after the scenes are solid, so you are polishing real material.
Try it yourself
Write a one-page scene in which a character waits alone in a hospital corridor, using as many filter words as you naturally would. Then rewrite it with none at all. Read both aloud and mark the single place, if any, where a filter deserves to return.
Questions
Are filter words always wrong?
No. They are wrong when they merely report perception the reader would experience anyway, which is most of the time in close narration. They are right when the act of noticing is itself significant, or when you want to step back from deep point of view for a moment.
Do filter words matter in first person?
More than anywhere, because first person is already inside the perceiving head. Writing I saw the smoke rising doubles what I is already doing. The smoke was rising keeps the reader inside the experience rather than watching the narrator have it.
Is thought a filter word too?
Often, yes. In close narration you can usually render the thought directly, as free indirect style, instead of announcing it. He thought she was lying becomes She was lying, obviously. The announcement survives only where you need clear attribution.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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