whoa,

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.

And of course, his nemesis for most of the film is A Horse. An unusually competent horse, but a horse.

It all blows up after almost 12 years of posts, when Rumi is doing a “post your lunch for a week challenge“ from her Idol Insta. A Huntrix fan who follows Celine’s personal blog recognizes the same lunch from both. It quickly explodes across the web now everyone knows that Rumi has been eating little lunch boxes with little bears with bow ties made of rice and seaweed and other cute little decorations since years before her debut. Celine almost takes down her blog since the reveal is a little too intimate and she is such a private person. Rumi asks her to keep it up because it's a lovely record of their relationship over the years even through difficult moments, the love is still there.

'cause she's a simp.

I got hit by the most intense mental image upon seeing this post