do i need a title?

Female birds with confusing names.

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.

The Story Brook Mural

The following month, we read a dark romance where the hero (who briefly met the heroine while she was dating his friend/roommate and became obsessed with her after she started commenting on his kinky online account where he wears a mask but no shirt) uses his near-supernatural hacker skills to put secret cameras in her house and otherwise stalk her. Her reaction is "this guy is fucking insane and probably dangerous...but this is really hot and actually I have a feeling he's not dangerous." Which is validated by the story. The handling of the dark subject matter is basically a shrug before a continuous jerk-off sesh. And the book club LOVED this story. Everyone was like "oh, he's not really a bad guy and this is barely a dark romance."