it's not meant to be pretty

Its for a good reason but it's kind of also undeniably funny. It really looks like that.

Bill Mayer, “Le Horla” [detail]

Buffy Helmetcrest (Oxypogon stuebelii), male, family Trochilidae, order Apodiformes, endemic to Colombia

Spotted: Deep-sea besties doing deep-sea things 🐙💞⁠

there have been several instances of young baleen whales running afoul of something and being captured for rehabilitation, yes! they were mostly gray whales.

which makes sense, gray whales are slow enough to get caught in the first place and hardy enough to not immediately stress themselves to death over being poked and put in a tank (as long as hundreds of pounds of delicious shellfish are on offer, anyway)

none of them were ever kept very long, they were rehabilitated to a healthy weight and then released. (healthy weight for a juvenile gray whale is almost 20,000 lbs. BIG baby)

I'm going to try it.

First, let me preface this with something very important: you can treat all of this advice as SECOND-DRAFT ADVICE. It is so much easier to rewrite this kind of stuff once you have words on the page. Telling yourself the first draft is totally appropriate and acceptable.

What we’re talking about here are FILTER WORDS (and to some degree verbs of being). Yes, “thought” words are included. But so are “heard, saw, looked, tasted, smelled” etc.—most words having to do with the senses.

This isn’t black and white advice; sometimes you’ll use these words and that’s okay. They’re not WRONG. They’re just weaker. And they’re weaker because they create distance between the reader and the experience of the character.*

If you want your reader to feel like they’re experiencing the story right alongside the character, you want to cut down on filter words.

*This is particularly important with first person and close third POVs. The reader always knows whose eyes they’re seeing through and thoughts they’re privy to. So you don’t need to tell them “I saw X.” Or “I heard X.” Or “I thought Y.” You can just jump into the action/observation as it’s happening.

This is also where you want to pay attention to verbs of being.

you want to pay attention

to verbs of being.

That means that when you read a line like

John saw that the curtains were open.

It immediately takes you OUT of the character's perspective and instead tells you what they experience as a secondhand observation.

You don't have to get fancy or purple with how you rephrase things like this. Not everything needs a ton of breathing room.

You wanna know what's perfectly impactful while keeping a tight POV?

The curtains were open.