An Idiot's Guide to Line Editing

Chapter One -- I realized I was filtering

Filtering is like those stereogram things. Do you know the ones I mean? They're a page of seemingly randomly coloured pixels. And you kind of stare at them a bit boss-eyed, and suddenly a three dimensional shape jumps out at you. And then you can do them, and they just always work, and you can never unsee them.

Well, when you can see filtering, that's you, too, although seeing filtering is something of a curse, because it's rarely welcome and we want to cut it. But, like a stereogram, filtering is easier to show than to explain.

So, here's a sentence. This is from a deeply touching scene. Our main character, Janet, has just murdered Slicken von Blicken, and is sitting on her jet-ski in the supermarket car-park. She's lost in thought; and then...

Janet watched the rhinos waltz in the early morning sun.

Is that so bad, you might be asking yourself? Well, maybe.

Filtering is like you're picking up a sheet of coloured plastic, and you're putting it on top of the scene. You're forcing your reader to see the world through this, rather than using their own eyes. And by doing that you're pushing them a little away from the experience, and you're padding it out with words you don't need, bogging it down.

Well OK. But what's the filter?

The filter is the perceptions of the character. It's Janet. If Janet is your main character, you don't need to describe what she watches: whatever the reader reads is what Janet experiences. So, when Janet is watching the rhinos waltz, you simply have to write this.

The rhinos waltzed in the early morning sun.

You've deleted two words; and, importantly, you're not distracted by looking at yourself. Remember, 'you' is Janet, because that's who your narrator is. You're looking at the dancing pachyderms, not at yourself in the jet-ski wing mirror. Oh, and if you've never seen a rhino waltz, seriously, you've missed nothing. They've got two left feet.

Let's try another one.

She heard the thunder of their feet on the tarmac.

Can you see the filtering? You can do it!

Yes, there it is. Everything Janet hears, we hear. So, the sentence can be reduced to this:

Their feet thundered on the tarmac.

It's snappier, it's more immediate. We're more immersed in the world.

Getting rid of some filtering is harder than others. Let's try this one. This is the immediate next sentence.

She thought how happy they looked.

Filtering, eh? Yeah, you can see it now. We're showing the world through Janet, when the world is already experienced through her.

However, 'thought' is different to 'saw' or 'heard'. There's an important reason for that. To illustrate that, let's first treat it the same way we did the last two sentences, and cut out the filter words.

They looked so happy.

This is clearly simpler, but it misses the nuance of the original. When Janet was just looking at the rhinos dance, well, fine, whatever, we didn't lose anything when we cut away the filter words. But when we saw 'thought' we're being told that this is a thing that she thinks about., and presumably cares about. A better way of making this work is to switch to direct thought.