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  • Unfiltered: How to Find and Fix Filter Words in a Manuscript

    Filter Words, Part 2 of 3

    A thistle leaf intruding on a bed of vinca and Itea virginica.
    A thistle leaf interrupting a fledgling Itea virginica’s sunbath.

    In Part 1, we talked about what filter words are and why they matter, how they place an invisible hand on the reader’s shoulder, holding them just outside the greenhouse glass of a story’s world. If you did the assignment at the end of that post, you’ve already gone looking for felt in a manuscript.

    How did it go?

    If the answer was “more than I expected,” not to worry. Filter words are endemic to first drafts. They are how our brains naturally narrate experience. The goal now isn’t to feel bad about them. It’s to learn to see them and then decide what to do about each one.

    That’s right, each one, because not every filter word gets cut. Some of them stay. Knowing the difference is the skill to build.

    Step One: Find the Filter Words

    Before anything gets fixed, you need to know what you’re dealing with. This is the audit phase, and it’s simpler than it sounds.

    Open the manuscript and use Word’s find function (Ctrl+F on PC, Cmd+F on Mac). Search for each of the following words and phrases one at a time, noting how frequently they appear. Word will tally the count in the Results tab in the Navigation Pane rather than counting by hand:

    Sensory filters: feel/felt, see/saw, hear/heard, notice/noticed, watch/watched, smell, taste, listen

    Cognitive filters: think/thought, know/knew, realize/realized, remember, wonder, decide, experience, note/noted

    Phrase filters: found –self, seemed to, appeared that, became aware of

    Don’t try to fix on this first pass. Just notice the numbers. Get a sense of the landscape before the weed pulling starts. A gardener always surveys the area before reaching for the weeding blade, even if only for the “Before” photo, because it makes the “After” shot so much more satisfying.

    Step Two: Ask the Right Question

    Once the filter words are determined, the question isn’t automatically should I cut this? The question is:

    Is this filter word doing work or just taking up space?

    A filter word is taking up space when it simply relays information the reader could receive directly:

    She heard thunder rumble in the distance.

    The reader doesn’t need to know she heard it. They’re already in her head. Just give them the thunder:

    Thunder rumbled in the distance.

    But a filter word is doing work when the act of perceiving is itself meaningful:

    She heard thunder rumble in the distance and pulled the blanket tighter, as if that could help.

    Here, cutting heard doesn’t actually improve anything. The hearing is busy doing emotional work; the filter is earning its place.

    The distinction comes down to this: is the character’s perception the point, or is the thing being perceived the point when perception itself is the focus? When perception itself is the focus, when how or that a character notices something tells us something important, the filter can stay. When it’s just a conduit, cut it.

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    Step Three: The Fix

    When a filter word isn’t earning its place, the revision is usually straightforward. Here are the most common patterns and how to handle them.

    Simple deletion: The filter verb disappears and the sentence continues uninterrupted.

    She noticed the candle had burned down to nothing.

    –> The candle had burned down to nothing.

    Restructuring for immediacy: sometimes deletion alone leaves a sentence feeling flat. In those cases, rework the idea to land the sensation harder.

    He felt cold air rush in when the door opened.

    –> Cold air rushed in when the door opened.

    –> The door opened and cold air hit him like a wall. (If you want the physical impact.)

    Replacing with embodied reaction: instead of filtering the sensation, show what the body does with it, how it manifests or plays out physically. This is where deep POV sets its hooks and roots under the reader’s skin.

    She felt her stomach drop.

    –> Her stomach dropped.

    –> Something fell through her, fast and cold. (If you want more specificity.)

    The further down that list you go, the deeper into the character’s physical and emotional experience the reader descends. The right choice, however, depends on the moment’s weight in the story. Not every sentence needs maximum intensity.

    The Tricky Ones

    Some filter words disguise themselves better than others. Watch for these:

    “Found –self” – Almost always cuttable and usually signals passive construction hiding underneath.

    She found herself wondering if he’d come back.

    –> Would he come back?

    The shift to free indirect discourse puts the reader directly inside the thought. Notice how much more immediate the beat becomes.

    “Seemed” – This one is subtle because it can indicate a character’s uncertainty, which is sometimes exactly right, but it’s often just hedging.

    The house seemed abandoned.

    –> The house was abandoned. (If there is certainty.)

    –> No lights. No movement. The house had that hollow look of a place no one had come back to for a very long time. (If the reader needs the uncertainty without direct telling.)

    “Realized” – A reliable signal that a revelation is coming, which means it’s often working against the revelation itself. Let the reader have the realization with the character rather than being told one happened.

    She realized she’d never actually loved him.

    –> She’d never actually loved him. The thought arrived quickly, without drama, and now she wasn’t sure what to do with it.

    A Note on Voice

    Here’s where I’ll pinch back the “always cut filter words” advice you’ll find in a lot of craft resources; voice matters enormously. This is something writers who’ve worked with me can confirm: I’m as likely to leave a comment saying, “This filter word is doing real work. It can stay,” as I am to suggest a cut. Complete elimination isn’t possible nor desirable. But intentionality is.

    Some narrative voices are inherently more filtered than others. A first-person narrator with a contemplative, observational personality might naturally think in filter constructions, and stripping them all out could sand away the very texture that makes that voice distinctive. A close third-person thriller probably wants them gone almost entirely.

    Know the genre. Know the narrator. Use that knowledge to calibrate, not just to cut.

    Your Assignment Before Part 3

    Take one scene, just one, from your current project and do a full filter word audit. Find every instance, apply the “Is it earning its place?” test, and revise accordingly.

    Then read the scene aloud, start to finish, before and after. Notice where the rhythm changes. Notice where you suddenly feel closer to the character, more inside the moment or inside their head.

    That feeling is what Part 3 is about: how filter words and expectations shift across genre, and how to use that knowledge to make intentional craft decisions rather than just following “rules.”

    Aime Sund is The Narrative Gardener —a fiction editor and horticulturist at Red Leaf Word Services, where she helps genre fiction authors grow stronger stories through her Narrative Ecology™ framework.

    Part 3: Filter Words Across Genre – coming soon.

  • Grammar Rules vs. Authentic Voice

    Why Fiction Isn’t an Essay

    Pruned rose cane
    Pruned raspberry cane

    Sharing one’s work with a critique partner takes guts, and the wait for it to come back can be excruciating, not to mention the sinking feeling that blossoms when the file opens and it’s covered with colored text and lines. Sentence fragments marked wrong. Verb forms in dialogue flagged. Split infinitives highlighted. Every sentence that starts with “And” or “But” has a note in the margin.

    During the subsequent self-edit, the changes are made, perhaps reluctantly so, but in the name of improving the writing according to feedback. The fragments become full sentences. The initial conjunctions get folded into the sentence before.

    Now the characters sound like they’re reading from a grammar textbook instead of talking like people.

    Fiction isn’t an essay, and the grammar rules that serve clarity in academic (or journalistic) writing can kill authenticity in creative work quicker than a flame.

    Same Rule, Different Plants

    Pruning guides say to cut stems at a 45° angle above an outward-facing bud. That’s sound advice for a rosebush. Apply it to a summer-bearing raspberry cane, which fruits on second-year wood and needs the oldest canes removed near the ground instead, and the next year’s harvest is cut off while following the instructions perfectly.

    The rule wasn’t wrong. It was just meant for a different plant.

    Most grammar rules were created for a different kind of writing. Prescriptive grammar tells you how language should be used. Descriptive grammar describes how people actually use it. Academic writing sits in prescriptive territory, and for good reason: quality and precision are the whole point.

    But fiction lives on another plane. The fiction author’s job isn’t to uphold a rule; it’s to capture how a person actually thinks, speaks, and moves through a world, and all of us real people break grammar rules constantly, without noticing and without apology.

    A fair number of the rules writers were taught in school were never really rules to begin with. Some are the arbitrary preferences of eighteenth-century grammarians, who decided English should behave more like Latin, which is where the prohibition on splitting infinitives comes from. Latin infinitives are a single word (example: scribere = to write); they can’t be split. English infinitives are two words, so the rule against separating them imported a constraint from a language where it was never even a thought.

    Others are class markers dressed up as correctness, ways of signaling education and status that have less to do with clarity and more with determining where someone belongs. Language is constantly shifting. What was correct in 1950 sounds stiff now, and holding a manuscript to that older standard erases the regional and cultural speech patterns that make a character sound like someone specific and someone interesting.

    Many times it’s not a matter of whether a sentence is grammatical or not. It’s whether the sentence serves the story, the scene, and the character speaking it.

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    Where This Shows Up First: Dialogue

    Dialogue is where the gap between grammar and authenticity stands out the most. Real people don’t speak in complete sentences all of the time.

    Grammatically correct: “I do not know where he went. Did you see him leave?” “I did not see him leave.”

    Authentic: “No idea. Did you see him leave?” “See him? No.”

    Real speech is fragmented and interrupted, full of trailing thoughts that never get finished because the other person already knows what was meant. Dialogue polished to grammatical perfection reads like a script being performed, not two people talking.

    The same gap shows up in constructions writers overcorrect out of habit.

    Overcorrected: “It is I,” she said. “To whom should I give this?”

    Authentic: “It’s me,” she said. “Who should I give this to?”

    “It is I” is technically correct and also how no one talks unless they are a butler in a period drama or somebody totally taking the piss. Ending a sentence with a preposition is ordinary English. Restructuring a sentence to avoid it produces a stiffness that serves the rule instead of the reader.

    Different characters break different rules, and the differences are what characterization actually is. A highly educated character might speak in longer sentences and precise vocabulary and still break rules constantly in casual speech because of written diction. A working-class character might use regional grammar flaws, word contractions, double negatives, or sentence fragments that carry more weight than a complete sentence ever could. A teenage character might use “like” as a verbal tic, trail off mid-thought, let text speak slip into dialogue or internal narration. Correct these fragments into standard grammar, and it’s not cleaning up the prose. It’s erasing the character.

    One specific example is the fading of the subjunctive mood in wished-for or imagined states. Formal grammar calls for a plural verb form even when the subject is singular.

    Formal: “I wish I were taller.”

    Informal/Authentic: “I wish I was taller.”

    Most English speakers couldn’t name the subjunctive mood if asked. That’s the point, though. Nobody needs to know the rule to feel the difference in the formal version as opposed to informal. And the informal subjunctive isn’t a mistake creeping into dialogue. It’s what real people do with tenses when they speak, yet many of us know when it’s better to use the formal.

    This is a language shift in progress and is common enough in print that a critique partner marking it “wrong” is expressing a preference, not a rule. Both have their place. The choice is about the tone you want the line to have. (This is one I consider carefully with every case. Sometimes the informal just “sounds” better with the surrounding text, even in narrative prose.)

    It’s Not Only Dialogue

    Fragments in narration are also a tool, not an error. “She opened the door and saw the room was empty, which was surprising.” and “She opened the door. Empty.” are not conveying the same thing, even though they describe the same event. The fragment creates a pause that mimics the actual shape of noticing. Cut every fragment from a manuscript and the prose ceases to feel alive.

    The old rule against starting a sentence with “And” or “But” doesn’t hold up against how often published fiction does exactly that, because the full stop–new sentence construction does work a comma can’t. “She didn’t want to go. But she went anyway.” carries a hesitation the comma-joined version smooths over. Split infinitives fall into the same category. “She wants to double her subscriber count by spring” states a goal. “She wants to more than double her subscriber count by spring” is the actual goal, and there’s no other way to say it. Move “more than” anywhere else in the sentence and the math changes or it stops making sense.

    Language keeps evolving, and a manuscript either reflects that or doesn’t. Singular “they” has moved from workaround to standard; “someone left their coat” has mostly replaced the clunkier “someone left his or her coat,” and prose still defaulting to “he” as the generic pronoun reads as dated immediately. Dialogue conventions are shifting too, toward em dashes for interruption, toward dropping “said” tags when the action already tells who is speaking. The same loosening shows up in punctuation more broadly—the comma after a short introductory word or before a sentence-ending “too” is increasingly treated as optional rather than required.

    Where the Rule Still Holds

    None of this means grammar has stopped mattering. It means the question is always what a rule is advocating for.

    Follow it when clarity is genuinely at risk, such as when a misplaced modifier changes what a sentence means rather than just how it sounds.

    Follow it when the formality is the point, in historical fiction with an elevated narrative voice, or literary prose crafted around precision.

    Follow it when the rule is doing characterization—when a grammar-obsessed professor would catch and correct themselves mid-thought, or a formal character would genuinely speak more correctly than the people around them.

    Break it when authenticity requires it; when the dialogue needs to sound like an actual person and not a stand-in for one.

    Break it when the rule itself is a leftover, a Latin-shaped prohibition, or an eighteenth-century preference with no functional reason for existing in English fiction written now.

    The difference between authentic rule-breaking and sloppy writing isn’t whether the rule was followed. It’s whether the choice was made on purpose.

    Authentic rule-breaking (the best kind, hands down) is consistent with a voice already established, serves the rhythm or the clarity of the moment, and shows up constantly in published books in the genre. Sloppy writing just drifts. The voice shifts without reason from one page to the next, and if you ask the writer why they made a particular choice, they don’t have an answer, because there wasn’t one.

    Read any suspect part, whether dialogue or narrative, out loud. If it sounds like a script being performed instead of a person talking, the grammar has gotten in the way of the story it’s supposed to help tell.

    An Editor’s Role

    The critique partner from the opening didn’t do anything unusual; they just did more than what they needed to. Highlighting every fragment and flagging initial prepositions is proofing for correctness, and correctness was never the question or ultimate goal. It’s always whether the sentence is doing what the story needs it to.

    A professional (human) editor starts with this question and doesn’t stop at asking it. When a manuscript comes across my desk, I have to decide, sentence by sentence in a line or copyedit, whether something is a slip the author didn’t notice or a choice they made on purpose—a working-class character’s double negative, a sentence that leaves out a comma because the moment is fast and tense, a fragment doing important work a full sentence couldn’t. If it’s intentional or serves the scene and story, my job isn’t to correct it. It’s my task to understand the context and see the author’s vision.

    But leaving it silently unflagged creates a different problem several steps down the line. A manuscript typically passes through more than one set of hands: a developmental edit, a copyedit, a proofread, sometimes more than one proofreader if it’s with a publisher. Someone reading that manuscript without the context I had when I made the call sees a comma splice or a sentence starting with “And” and has no way of knowing whether it’s intentional or a miss that made it through the last pass. Proofreaders, in particular, are trained to catch exactly these things, because many times, they are misses.

    That’s what a style sheet is for. Every intentional pattern or nuance gets documented as it’s decided, not left for the next person (or me again in a few months) to guess at.

    This character’s sections run in fragments during moments of panic, not to be changed.

    This dialect includes consistent double negatives, STET.

    Dialogue and narrative situations where it feels more natural can use the informal subjunctive (I wish I was taller versus I wish I were taller).

    It’s where every deliberate break from style guide convention gets its reasoning explained, so the next editor down the line doesn’t have to relitigate the decision, or worse, undo it.

    That’s one of the big differences between what happened at the top of this piece and what a professional edit does. Not the red text versus no red text. Instead, it’s the willingness to ask why a sentence looks the way it does, decide on purpose, and leave a record for whoever reads next.

    Grammar is another tool in the writer’s toolkit. It was never the main focus. The focus is a character or a narrator who sounds like someone specific, with a voice consistent enough to trust and alive enough to feel like it belongs to a person and not a one-room schoolhouse primer.

    Aime Sund is The Narrative Gardener—a fiction editor and horticulturist at Red Leaf Word Services, where she helps genre fiction authors cultivate stronger stories through her Narrative Ecology™ framework. www.redleafwords.com

  • Root-Bound Stories

    A matter of ratio, not prose.

    close-up photo of a root-bound plant resting on a pink pot.
    Root-bound and ready to plant!

    Fictional worlds take time and energy to build, and for some (like me) creating in this manner fuels the fire within. In no time at all, ten thousand years of history exists on the screen, and the protag’s genealogy is mapped eight generations back. The magic system has internal logic that would survive peer review. Individual cultures have their own cuisine, their own lunar rites, their own slang. A new calendar system is in place, certain regions produce certain crops, and specific families have specific abilities, but there are always wildcards (true story).

    Readers all say the worldbuilding is impressive.

    They also say they’re having trouble getting into the world. Or worse, they get into the world just fine and still don’t care what happens to the people in it. This is an often-encountered situation, one I can draw a direct parallel with in horticulture: the condition of a plant being root-bound.

    What “Root-Bound” Means

    When a plant stays too long in a container, or when it’s never transplanted at all, the roots run out of room to expand outward. So they circle. They layer. They grow back into and over themselves, filling every available inch of the pot with root mass so dense there’s barely any soil left.

    From the outside, the plant may look fine. It leafs out, takes up water, it survives. But it doesn’t thrive. Growth is stunted and yellowish. Flowering is sparse or doesn’t happen at all. In an effort to find more nutrients, the plant pours energy into its root system, which becomes an increasingly elaborate underground architecture, while the visible structure above the soil stays thin.

    The roots aren’t the problem, though. Roots are necessary. A plant with no root system dies immediately. The problem is ratio: when roots fill every inch of the container, there’s no growing medium left to hold water and nutrients. At a glance, the plant can still look fine, the way a great blurb, a phenomenal cover, intriguing About copy can look fine. Underneath, it’s suffocating on its own overgrowth.

    A root-bound story works the same way. The worldbuilding is extraordinary—years of work, sometimes, building the history, geography, culture, magic, economics, and religion the story will root in. The architecture is vast, detailed, internally consistent. And then the story itself struggles to grow.

    This is root-bound.

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    How to Recognize It

    The signals show up in feedback first, usually. Impressive is the word that should give you pause—impressive worldbuilding, impressive detail, impressive scope. Impressive, by nature of the word, is admiring something from a slight distance, though. It’s not the same as immersed, or invested, or I couldn’t put it down.

    Readers may say the worldbuilding is overwhelming. Not that it’s too much worldbuilding in an abstract sense, but too much arriving before they have a reason to care about it. The information is present; the hook for why it matters and why the reader should care isn’t.

    Characters can feel thin despite their elaborate setting. This one feels counterintuitive because the writer has often done significant character work, detailed their backstory, and provided clear motivation. But the characters are competing for page space with the world itself, and in a root-bound manuscript, the world is winning. Readers spend so much cognitive energy processing setting, history, and systems that character has to work harder than it should to register.

    Plot is episodic. The story moves from location to location, culture to culture, set piece to set piece—each one an opportunity to reveal more of the world. But the throughline is the world itself, not the character’s want or need or transformation. Readers follow the tour. They don’t feel the pull.

    The first fifty pages are heavy. This is where root-bound manuscripts are most tangible. The writer knows that readers need context to understand what’s happening, so they provide it— upfront, thoroughly, before the story has generated enough momentum to carry the weight. By the time the actual story begins, some readers have already let go.

    And there’s a subtler signal, one the writer might recognize in themselves before any reader names it: the scenes that feel most alive to write are the ones that reveal the world. The magic system clicking into place. The cultural detail unfolding. The history surfacing through dialogue in an old library. Writing the character moments feels harder, less satisfying, more like obligation. That preference is useful information for diagnosis.

    Not the Same as World-as-Character

    There is an important distinction to make about certain world-centered stories, however.

    Some stories have the world functioning as a character in its own right. Gothic fiction, cozy fantasy, and plenty of science fiction novels, to name but a few, are built that way on purpose—an academy house with its own rules, a village whose seasons shape the plot as much as any person does, a ship or station whose systems create real stakes—those aren’t root-bound. Those worlds are doing narrative work the story assigned to them, and the human characters are written to share the stage rather than dominate.

    Root-bound is different. It’s not the world claiming a character’s role. It’s the world crowding out the space where a character role needs to exist and yet doesn’t.

    Why This Happens

    Often the story idea itself is the size of a shelf of books, and the writer tries to grow it in the space allotted for a few volumes.

    This isn’t a failure of discipline or that the writer refuses to hold anything back. Many root-bound writers have already cut, trimmed, and simplified considerably from what originally lived in their heads. The world may genuinely have enough material to sustain something much longer than this: enough history, enough incident, enough scope for a trilogy or more. But the story living on top of that world—this cast, this plot—doesn’t have equivalent depth. The plot and character development runs thin at half the length, so the page count fills with world instead. The writer isn’t hiding the story; there isn’t enough story yet to hide. The world was conceived as an ecosystem. The story was conceived as a single season within it, and the season isn’t long enough to need everything the ecosystem contains.

    **Sidenote: I’ll admit this one hits close to home. I’m sitting on a fantasy world I can see completely, clearly big enough to outlast the story I’ve actually got, so I’m stalled. See, it even happens to editors when they can name the problem. Advice, anyone?…

    What Root-Bound Is Not

    It is not a story where the writer needs to reveal less, though that is an actual issue and a different one, with its own conversation. Root-bound is not about a writer who built the right-sized world and mishandled the reveal.

    Root-bound is a writer who built a world sized for something larger than the story currently in front of them and hasn’t yet decided which direction to resolve that mismatch: grow the container or right-size the contents.

    Growing the container might mean the standalone becomes a duology. It might mean the novel was always a series pretending to be one book. Right-sizing the contents might mean the eight-generation genealogy is real and rich and simply doesn’t belong to this story. It belongs to the next one, or the one after that, or a page in the world bible the reader never needs to see.

    Neither direction is a failure. Both are decisions the writer must consider. What doesn’t work is refusing to make either one, trying to keep the full-scale world and the single book container at the same time. The mismatch lives in the fundamental agreement between what the world requires and what the story promised to deliver, not in any sentence-level revisions.

    What Root-Bound Feels Like From the Inside

    If you’re writing a root-bound story, you probably already know something is off. The feedback has been consistent enough to stop feeling like reader error. Revisions to-date haven’t fixed it. You’ve tightened the prose, trimmed the exposition, added a faster opening… and the fundamental problem persists.

    That persistence is the tell.

    Here’s what makes root-bound manuscripts hard to diagnose from the inside: the world is real; it’s unique and excellent, and admitting it might be the problem feels like admitting years of work were wrong. They weren’t. But that fear is exactly why so much root-bound revision stays at the sentence-level—tightening prose is safe. Questioning whether the world itself needs to shrink, or the story needs to grow to meet it, means being willing to treat your own favorite thing as a variable instead of a fixed point. That’s a harder kind of objectivity than craft skill alone provides.

    The roots are still there. The canopy is still in place. Only real objectivity about the current ratio, not more polish, can show what actually needs to shift.

    Root-bound manuscripts need a different kind of revision than most writers expect—not line-level, and not structural in the conventional sense, but ecological. A Story Ecosystem Assessment™ maps the current balance of elements in your manuscript to identify where energy is stalling and what the visible story needs to grow. If your worldbuilding is impressive and your story still isn’t connecting, that’s worth looking at closely.

    Aime Sund is The Narrative Gardener—a fiction editor and horticulturist at Red Leaf Word Services, where she helps genre fiction authors grow stronger stories through her Narrative Ecology™ framework.

  • POV and Emotional Distance: Why Readers Can’t Connect With a Character

    It’s not the character. It’s how close you’re letting readers get.

    Picture of fringetree flowers close-up
    The fringetree (Chionanthus virginicus) I saved last fall blooming earlier this spring.

    Beta readers are saying they can’t connect with your main character. She has clear motivation, compelling backstory, relatable flaws. She makes tough choices and has an active arc. Structural character work has been done.

    So why does she feel distant?

    The problem might not be who she is. It might be how close you’re letting readers get.

    This is narrative distance—and many times writers are inhibiting it without knowing it.

    The Camera Analogy (A common comparison, but it works best)

    Think of a narrative like a camera with a zoom lens. At close range zoomed all the way in, readers are inside the character’s head, experiencing thoughts and feelings as they happen. Pull back to medium range and readers see the character clearly, understand her, but with some observational space between them. At wide range, readers are watching from outside; events feel detached, almost reportorial.

    All three levels are valid. All three ranges have uses and readers and authors who prefer them. However, sometimes writers don’t choose a level intentionally, either within individual scenes or overall. They write in third person and hover somewhere around medium-wide, then wonder why beta readers feel disconnected.

    Disconnection may not be a flaw in your character. It may be a flaw in the narrative distance (lens) level.

    What Third-Person Narrative Distances Look Like On the Page

    Distant third person reads like this:

    Erin walked into the café Stella had chosen. She was nervous about the impending conversation. Her sister had seemed angry on the phone.

    We understand what’s happening. We’re watching Erin from across the cafe, receiving information about her emotional state. Nothing is wrong with these sentences. But readers aren’t with her. They’re observing her.

    Close third person reads like this:

    The cafe door stuck. Erin yanked it, pulse jumping. God, she was already sweating. Through the window, her sister sat rigid in the corner booth, her arms crossed. This was going to be worse than the phone call.

    Same scene. Different distance entirely. Readers aren’t observing Erin now; they’re occupying her. The door sticking, the pulse jumping, the involuntary “God,” these are immediate sensory and cognitive experiences, not reports about them. Notice there’s no “she thought” tag anywhere. The narration is the thought.

    Medium third person lands between them:

    Erin pushed through the cafe door and spotted Stella in the corner booth. Her stomach tightened. This conversation was going to be difficult, but it had to happen.

    Some interiority, some observation. Close enough to care, distant enough to think. This is a comfortable default for many genres, and it works—until emotional peaks require you to get closer and you haven’t built the habit.

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    First Person and the Distance Illusion

    First-person POV defaults to close distance by design—the narrator is the character, and “I” creates an assumption of intimacy. But first person can still hold readers at arm’s length, and writers sometimes assume the pronoun is doing work it isn’t.

    Close first person reads like this:

    The door stuck. I yanked it, already sweating. God, why had I agreed to this? Through the window, I glimpsed Stella sitting rigid in the corner booth, her arms crossed. Worse than the phone call. Definitely worse.

    Distant first person reads like this:

    I walked into the café and saw my sister waiting. I was nervous. We hadn’t spoken properly since the argument.

    The pronoun is the same. The distance isn’t. Distant first person often shows up as reflective narration—the narrator looking back on events with perspective rather than inhabiting them in real time. That’s a legitimate technique, but it’s a choice, not a default.

    I was young then. I didn’t understand what she was trying to tell me.

    That’s distance used intentionally—the narrator has lived past this moment and is observing her younger self. The gap between narrator and experience is the point. When it’s unintentional, readers feel the glass wall without knowing why. First-person POV doesn’t guarantee intimacy, but it does naturally lend itself to a tighter relationship between reader and character. The following questions can still apply.

    How to Tell What Narrative Distance Is in Play

    Two diagnostic questions will reveal most of what you need to know.

    Is filtering present?

    Filters are constructions like: she saw, she noticed, she heard, she felt, she realized, she thought, she wondered, etc. Each one inserts a reporting layer between the reader and the experience. The reader gets a summary of Erin’s perception rather than the perception itself.

    Filtered: She saw her sister stand up. Direct: Her sister stood.

    Filtered: She realized they were going to argue. Direct: They were going to argue.

    An instance of filtering occasionally is invisible. Consistent filtering creates a glass-wall effect—readers can see the character clearly but can’t quite reach her.

    Are emotions labeled or are physical experiences shown?

    Erin was nervous is an emotion label. Readers receive it as information. Erin’s palms were slick. She wiped them on her jeans, and her hands still wouldn’t stop shaking—that readers feel. Not because shaking hands are more dramatic than nervousness, but because physical sensation is something readers can inhabit. Abstract emotion labels aren’t.

    This isn’t a rule against ever naming an emotion; there are times when naming fits the situation. But think of it as a diagnostic tool: consistent labeling rather than grounding indicates the reader is likely further from the character than they are meant to be.

    Situations That Create Unwanted Distance

    Overfiltering is the most common. Go through a scene and find every instance of she saw / noticed / heard / felt / thought / realized / wondered / could see / could sense / it seemed / it appeared. Delete them. Then revise what’s left to be direct. This exercise alone will reveal the narrative distance, and often it creates a cleaner, more direct reader experience.

    Narration that doesn’t sound like the character is the subtler one.

    Distant: Erin observed that her sister appeared to be experiencing significant emotional distress.

    Close: Her sister looked like hell.

    If the character wouldn’t think in formal, observational language, the narration shouldn’t either. Close POV means the character’s voice bleeds into the narration. Her vocabulary, her observations, her particular way of seeing things. The test is to remove her name from a paragraph and still know whose head you’re in.

    Staying at one distance for the entire manuscript flattens everything. Even predominantly close third needs variation. Transitions, logistics, the passage of time—these don’t require emotional immersion. Pulling back briefly for those moments makes the close scenes land harder by contrast. Distance management is rhythm, like a sound wave function. A flat line isn’t rhythm.

    When First-Person Distance Is the Point

    First-person narration filtered heavily through “I noticed / I felt / I realized” constructions creates a particular kind of distance—the narrator observing herself, reporting on her own experience rather than inhabiting it. This isn’t always wrong. A character in shock processes events from behind glass; a character spiraling may perceive her own reactions as if watching someone else. Confusion, dissociation, emotional overwhelm, these states have a naturally filtered quality, and prose that mimics that filtering puts the reader inside the experience rather than outside it. The distinction is intentionality: filtering as a deliberate choice to reflect a character’s fractured state reads as craft. Filtering as a default state becomes distance.

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    Getting Closer When the Default Is Too Distant

    For prose that feels distant, three exercises can help close the gap:

    Remove filters first, as above. It’s the quickest intervention with the most immediate results.

    Then find every instance of she was [emotion] and replace it with physical reactions or signals. Nervous becomes hands shaking, stomach tightened, shallow breath. Angry becomes jaw locked, heat rising, vision narrowing. Sad becomes throat closing, chest heavy, eyes that won’t focus. It’s not being more dramatic; it’s giving readers something to feel and experience rather than something to know.

    Finally, rewrite a paragraph in the character’s speaking voice. If she swears, let the narration swear. If she’s sarcastic, let the narration be sarcastic. If she’s a chef who notices food everywhere, let her notice it in narration the way she would in dialogue. The gap between how a character speaks and how the narration sounds is often where distance hides.

    When the Lens Is Close but Readers Still Feel Distant

    Sometimes the narrative lens is close and the complaint persists. Here are a few things to check.

    Deep internal thoughts paired with dialogue that’s all exposition and no subtext. The internal narration is intimate, but the characters are saying exactly what they mean out loud. Readers sense the mismatch.

    Interiority without physicality. Lots of she thought (or its filterless equivalent) but the character has no body, no location, no sensory experience of the space she’s in. Thought alone doesn’t create presence.

    A character who won’t let herself feel. This one is worth naming separately because it’s often intentional—and it still needs to be written as emotional content. A character resisting feeling is a character doing something. Write the resistance. That’s the reader’s invitation in.

    Distance Is a Choice

    If it’s accidental, it might be a problem. If it’s intentional, it’s craft.

    For example, prologues often benefit from distance—they’re establishing territory before intimacy is earned. Transitions need it. Some literary fiction maintains detachment as a deliberate effect, and the detachment is the point.

    But in contemporary genre fiction, especially in romance and romantasy, where readers expect to be inside a character rather than observe her, unintentional distance is usually the culprit when emotional connection fails. Not the character’s likability, not her motivation, not her arc.

    The question isn’t whether a character is compelling. It’s whether readers are allowed close enough to feel it.

    If your manuscript has strong characters but something isn’t connecting emotionally, narrative distance is worth looking into further. Story Ecosystem Assessments™ examine execution-level patterns—POV, voice, filter words, showing versus telling—alongside structural issues, to identify where reader distance is coming from. www.redleafwords.com

    Aime Sund is The Narrative Gardener—a fiction editor and horticulturist at Red Leaf Word Services, where she helps genre fiction authors grow stronger stories through her Narrative Ecology™ framework.

  • The Microclimate Problem: Why Cozy Fiction Is Harder Than It Looks

    The stakes are real. The author just has to build them from the inside out.

    picture of a terrarium shaped like a house.
    One of my Wardian cases. It holds my longest living Venus flytrap.

    The word cozy does something to people’s assumptions before they’ve read a single page.

    Low stakes. Easy read. Simple pleasures. These aren’t wrong, exactly, but they describe the reading experience, not the writing challenge. The two are not the same. A cottage garden looks charmingly haphazard. Achieving that apparent spontaneity—the right plants, the right succession, the right controlled chaos—is another thing entirely.

    A microclimate isn’t a lesser climate. It operates at a different scale, under its own pressures, with its own specific points of failure. The alpine meadow above the tree line isn’t a diminished forest. It’s a specialized system; more intricate, more fragile, and in many ways more demanding to sustain than the sprawling ecosystem below it. Remove one element and the whole thing destabilizes. There’s no redundancy. That’s not weakness. That’s the nature of a system built with precision and intent.

    Cozy fiction is a microclimate. And building one that holds is among the more demanding stakes work in genre fiction.

    Scope and Stakes Are Not the Same Thing

    This is where the assumptions go awry, for readers who become writers and carry the wrong premise with them.

    Stakes are what the character cannot afford to lose. Scope is the scale of the world in which she might lose it. Cozy compresses scope. It does not compress stakes.

    A protagonist who wants nothing more than to run her tea shop in peace, stay out of other people’s business, and keep the life she’s built intact—she’s operating under stakes as real and urgent as any thriller hero. The difference is that cozy offers less external scaffolding that affects the protagonist. No ticking bomb, no global threat, no mechanism borrowed from outside the character to manufacture urgency. The stakes have to live entirely inside the character and the reader’s belief in them.

    When writers internalize “low stakes” as a genre description and accidentally apply it to character desire, the result is a specific kind of drift. The tea shop matters a little less. The friendships become decorative. The disruption is inconvenient rather than genuinely threatening. The reader drifts too, and they usually can’t name why. The plot is functional. The mystery resolves. Yet something is still missing.

    What’s missing is the tangible weight of what’s at risk. And that weight doesn’t come from the size of the threat. It comes from the depth of the want.

    The Calibration Problem

    Before stakes can land, the reader has to be calibrated to the character’s world. This is the work that precedes everything else, and it’s where most cozy manuscripts have the most to do—not in plot structure, not in mystery mechanics, but in the quieter accumulation of evidence that this particular life, to this particular person, is worth protecting completely.

    Calibration isn’t intellectual. Readers can understand intellectually that the protagonist values her independence, her shop, her small routines. That understanding doesn’t make them feel the cost when those things are threatened. Calibration is felt. The reader absorbs, through repeated contact, why this specific thing matters this much, until the character’s priorities become inescapable rather than observed.

    It requires specificity of desire. Not “she wants peace” but the precise texture of what peace means to her—what it cost her to build, what it looked like the morning she first had it, what she does to protect it that she’d never admit to. Vague desire produces vague stakes. The more precisely the author knows what the character wants, the more exactly the reader can feel what losing it would mean.

    This requires consistency across the whole manuscript, not just the crisis beats. Every scene is an opportunity to reinforce what matters. How she answers a question she’d rather avoid, what she notices first when she walks into a room, what she gives up quietly when protecting something she won’t name out loud, why she prefers to stay in on Friday night. The calibration isn’t a passage or a chapter. It’s the texture of the entire story.

    Reinforcement Is Not Repetition

    Most cozy manuscripts that need work don’t need the author to tell the reader more clearly what the stakes are. They need the author to stop telling and start accumulating.

    Reinforcement is not repetition. It’s not restating the protagonist’s desire at intervals, or returning to it in moments of explicit reflection. It’s the steady, quiet presence of what matters in every choice, every reaction, every scene so consistently that the reader absorbs it without registering it as information delivery.

    When reinforcement is working, readers don’t consciously think she wants her quiet life back. They feel the cost of every scene that threatens it. The stakes operate below the surface. The reader is inside the character’s priorities rather than observing them.

    In a functioning ecosystem, no single element announces its importance. The mycorrhizal network running beneath a meadow doesn’t declare itself. It’s simply there, doing invisible work that holds everything else up—moving nutrients, signaling stress, connecting root systems that appear separate above ground. Reinforcement is the mycorrhizal network of cozy stakes. You don’t see it. You feel the difference when it’s missing.

    Why This Is Precise Work

    High-concept genres have external pressure to lean on. The thriller reader feels urgency because the threat is visible and ticking. The author still has to do the character work, but the scaffolding exists; the mechanism provides some of the tension on its own.

    Cozy doesn’t have that. The urgency has to be built from the inside out, through the character, through the reader’s belief, through the accumulation of small moments that together make the quiet want feel inescapable. There is no borrowed machinery.

    This is not easier than writing toward external stakes. It is a different and more precise skill—one that requires the author to trust specificity over escalation, depth over drama, the small true thing over the large obvious one.

    The authors who do it well don’t reach for bigger threats when the stakes feel flat. They go back to the character and find the more exact want. Then they put it everywhere.

    A Note on the Reader’s Side of This

    Some readers choose cozy precisely because they want lower emotional investment—the pleasure of a contained world, a resolvable problem, a gentler demand on their attention. That’s a legitimate reading experience and not what this post is arguing against.

    The craft question is separate from the reader’s preference. A reader who wants to feel at ease inside a cozy world is still best served by a microclimate built with precision; one where the stakes are proportional and fully realized, where the character’s world has weight and texture, where the resolution satisfies because something real was at risk. The reading experience of ease and warmth is the outcome of craft, not the absence of it.

    The cozy reader who says a book felt thin isn’t asking for higher stakes in the conventional sense. They’re asking for better calibration. More of the invisible work.

    The Microclimate Has to Hold

    The alpine meadow doesn’t need to be a forest. It needs to be itself—fully, specifically, with no element left inert.

    Cozy fiction at its best is sustained persuasion: convincing the reader that this world, this person, this particular quiet want is worth caring about completely. Not because the stakes are large. Because the author never let them look away.

    That’s the work. It isn’t less than other genres demand. It’s a different demand—interior, cumulative, precise. A microclimate that thrives because every element in it is doing its job.

    If your cozy manuscript has the right structure but the stakes aren’t landing the way you expect, it’s often a calibration issue—the kind that shows up in the texture of individual scenes rather than in the plot. Story Ecosystem Assessments™ look at how a manuscript’s elements are working together, including where reinforcement is thin and where the reader is being kept at arm’s length from what matters.

    Aime Sund is The Narrative Gardener—a fiction editor and horticulturist at Red Leaf Word Services, where she helps genre fiction authors grow stronger stories through her Narrative Ecology™ framework.

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  • Micro-Wants: How to Build Stronger Scenes

    Macro-wants drive your story. Micro-wants drive your scenes.

    yellow-edged hosta growing among lily of the valley
    Wanting something specific, right now, in this soil.

    The scene has all the right pieces. Sumptuous setting. Compelling conflict. Soul-wrenching stakes. The dialogue has undergone three revisions, the prose is tight but voicey, and extraneous description is gone. But it’s still flat. Readers will skim it, and you know it.

    Here’s what’s probably missing: the character doesn’t want anything in this scene.

    Not in the story overall— that’s taken care of in external goals, long-arc stakes, the whole structure. But in this specific moment, on this page, the character has no immediate want driving their choices. And scenes without micro-wants feel aimless no matter how well-written they are.

    The Difference Between Macro and Micro

    A macro-want is story-level: win the election, solve the murder, overthrow the king, earn a parent’s approval. It’s what the protagonist wants across the entire narrative.

    A micro-want is scene-level: get this person to leave the room, avoid answering a specific question, make someone laugh, hide fear, find out what the other person knows.

    Macro-wants create story stakes. Micro-wants create moment-to-moment tension. They operate on completely different scales, and both are necessary.

    Readers don’t experience a story in macro. They experience it line by line, beat by beat. If a character isn’t actively wanting something on this page, there’s no pull. The scene exists, but it doesn’t pull and hold reader focus.

    What Micro-Wants Look Like on the Page

    Here’s a scene without a micro-want:

    Ellie walked into the cafe and sat across from her sister. They talked about their mother’s health and the upcoming holiday plans. Ellie ordered coffee. Her sister seemed distracted.

    Things are happening. Nothing is at stake in this moment.

    Now give Ellie something she wants:

    Ellie walked into the cafe, spotted her sister in the corner booth, and immediately regretted coming. She needed to get through this lunch without mentioning the loan. Just one hour. She could do that.

    She slid into the seat, smiled too brightly. “You look lovely.”

    Her sister’s eyes narrowed. “You only ever compliment me when you want something.”

    Ellie’s micro-want—avoid the loan topic—creates tension in every line of dialogue, every gesture, every choice. Nothing else changed about the scene’s function. The sisters still meet for lunch. But now the scene has a charge.

    Finding the Micro-Want in Your Scene

    The question to ask is simple: What does my character want from this specific interaction?

    Not what they want in life. What they want right now.

    Some common micro-wants, organized by type:

    Information: Confirm a suspicion, find out what the other person knows before revealing anything themselves.

    Emotional response: Make someone laugh, earn approval, provoke guilt, create distance.

    Control: Dominate the conversation, redirect a topic, end the interaction before it gets to something dangerous.

    Protection: Hide a secret, avoid vulnerability, keep a façade intact.

    Connection: Be understood, be seen, repair something without having to explain why it broke.

    Avoidance: Escape the room, dodge a question, prevent certain topics from surfacing.

    These are all immediate, scene-specific, actionable. They’re not character arcs. They’re what the character is trying to accomplish in the next ten minutes.

    How Micro-Wants Build Tension Line by Line

    When your character wants something in a scene, every line becomes tactical. They choose words carefully because they’re trying to get something. They react when they don’t get it. They adjust when the first approach fails.

    This is what makes dialogue feel purposeful instead of just people talking.

    Take this micro-want: Get Mom to leave the room so I can search her desk.

    “Mom, didn’t you say you needed to pick up groceries?”

    Her mother glanced up from her book. “Later.”

    Damn. Ellie tried again. “I think the store closes at six.”

    “It’s four-thirty.”

    “Right, but traffic—”

    “Ellie, why do you want me out of the house?”

    Every line is Ellie trying. Every line is her mother resisting. That’s scene tension, and it comes entirely from the micro-want. The scene earns its length.

    When Micro-Wants Conflict With Macro-Wants

    This is where scenes get genuinely interesting.

    Macro-want: reconcile with an estranged father. Micro-want in this scene: make him feel what he missed.

    The character wants reconciliation overall, but in this moment, they want something that complicates it. That internal conflict—acting against their own long-term interest because the short-term feeling is too strong—is exactly how people actually behave. It creates complexity without requiring the author to state it.

    The reader doesn’t need to be told the character is conflicted. The micro-want shows it.

    When Scenes Feel Informational Instead of Experiential

    A scene without micro-want tends to deliver information rather than experience. The reader learns things but doesn’t feel anything. This is the scene that exists to get plot across, to cover exposition, to move characters from point A to point B.

    Some red flags:

    • Dialogue that functions like an interview—characters asking and answering questions without stakes

    • Characters saying exactly what they mean with no subtext

    • A scene you could summarize in one sentence without losing any emotional content

    • Dialogue beats that could be swapped for other dialogue beats without changing any meaning within the scene

    If these describe the scene you’re revising, the problem isn’t the prose. It’s the absence of a micro-want.

    Adding Micro-Wants to Existing Scenes

    If you have a scene that functions but doesn’t live, here’s a straightforward approach.

    First, identify what the scene currently accomplishes at the plot level. “Character A tells Character B about the plan” is a mechanical description, not a scene.

    Then ask: what does Character A want from Character B in this moment? Not just to deliver information—that’s logistics. Maybe they need Character B to believe the plan will work, and Character B is skeptical. Maybe they need approval without appearing desperate. Maybe they need to avoid admitting they don’t have all the answers.

    Rewrite with that want driving every choice. Character A selects words carefully. Character B resists or questions. Character A adjusts tactics. The same information gets conveyed, but now the scene has texture, subtext, and friction.

    The “plan explanation scene” becomes something worth reading.

    A Note on Quieter Scenes

    Not every scene needs an aggressive micro-want, and forcing one into a scene designed for rest or processing will make it feel wrong.

    Quiet scenes—a character absorbing news, grieving, coming down from action—can carry softer wants: avoid breaking down in front of someone, hold composure for five more minutes, find a moment of stillness before the next thing.

    Or no immediate want at all. Sometimes a character simply exists in a moment, and the scene earns that by being brief and purposeful.

    The distinction worth holding onto: if there’s another character in the scene, if there’s dialogue, if two people are in a room together—give your character something to want in that moment. The quieter scenes where a character is alone with their thoughts operate differently. Trust yourself to know which you’re writing.

    Before You Revise That Scene Again

    Macro-wants give your story direction. Micro-wants give your scenes life.

    Readers don’t experience stakes in the abstract. They feel them beat by beat, line by line, in the specific words a character chooses when they’re trying to get something they may or may not get. If your character wants something right now, readers will lean in. If they don’t, readers will skim—and no amount of prose revision will fix it.

    Before you touch that flat scene again, ask the question: what does my character want on this page?

    Then let them fight for it.

    If your scenes feel flat despite strong character arcs and clear stakes, it’s often a scene-level construction issue—not a sentence-level one. Story Ecosystem Assessments™ look at both macro structure and micro execution to show you where the energy is stalling.

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  • When Stories Blossom: Recognizing Your Manuscript’s Growth Stages

    Your manuscript is growing. It just might not be blooming yet.

    My fringetree, Chionanthus virginicus, about to bloom. I saved it from the compost pile last fall.

    There’s an ornamental bed I’ve been slowly adding to for years that I worked on last October. I know exactly what’s in there—the plants, the shrubs, the colors, the transplants I made. I’ve been watching that bed since February, and until a few weeks ago (given our fickle New England weather), there was nothing to see but wood-chipped ground and my own impatience.

    Then the shoots finally appeared.

    I didn’t make that happen by checking more often. The plants emerged when the conditions were right: enough cold, enough warmth, enough time in the ground. My job was to plant correctly and stay out of the way.

    Stories work in much the same way. They have growth stages, each with its own requirements, and the most common mistake writers make isn’t revising too much or too little. It’s applying the wrong intervention at the wrong stage. Pruning a seedling. Watering a plant that needs sun. Harvesting before the fruit is ripe.

    Knowing where a manuscript is changes what it actually needs from the author.

    The Seedling Draft

    A first draft is fragile in the specific way seedlings are fragile: it has just broken ground, its root system is minimal, and the wrong kind of attention will kill it faster than neglect will.

    What this stage needs is completion. Not polish, not perfection, just reaching the end. The structure is visible but may be weaker than necessary. Some sections thrive; others wilt when the sun comes out. That’s expected. The author is still discovering what this story wants to be, and the only way to find out is to keep writing.

    A potential danger here is editing while drafting—going back over yesterday’s pages, trimming, second-guessing. That’s like leaf pruning a seedling. You’re cutting growth before it has a chance to flourish, and the plant doesn’t have the reserves to recover. Many writers who do this may find themselves at chapter four, forever. The seedling never gets its larger true leaves.

    However, for some writers, this approach is helpful and can re-root them in the story, especially at the start of a writing session. I’m one of those. The trick here, then, is to know when to step out of the sticky clay and move on with the next ideas and let the words flow.

    Both approaches lead to the same place: Write forward. Leave the mess. The mess is where the roots grow from.

    Established Growth

    By the second or third draft, the manuscript has roots. Its shape is there. You know what the story is, even if you can’t fully articulate it yet, and the structure is strong enough to handle bright, sunlit attention.

    This is the stage where strategic revision earns its place. Cut what isn’t serving the plant. Strengthen what is. Deepen the character arcs, clarify the stakes, look honestly at the structure and ask what’s holding weight in scenes and what’s decorative. This is also the right moment to bring in outside perspective—beta readers, a manuscript assessment—because the manuscript is established enough to survive scrutiny without collapsing.

    The signs of this stage are: the story can be explained clearly, the major beats are in place, the characters have arcs even if those arcs need refinement. It feels close but not there yet. That feeling is accurate. It’s not there yet. Let it keep growing.

    Budding

    Late revision is its own distinct stage, and writers often miss the transition. The work now shifts from structural to granular. Sentence-level changes, prose polish, the difference between a scene that does what it needs to and a scene that sings. The story knows what it is. Small refinements make large differences in this stage.

    The danger at this stage is the opposite of the seedling problem: instead of pruning too early, writers may over-revise. They keep restructuring when the structure is sound. They rewrite scenes that were working because they can’t quite believe they’re done. Prolonged stress on a plant that’s ready to flower doesn’t improve the bloom. It depletes the plant.

    If beta readers are saying “this works really well, just needs polish” but scenes are still being moved around, pay attention to that. The reactions signal the stage and the shifting work is likely too much.

    Flowering

    A manuscript that’s ready is ready. Not perfect—what garden is ever perfect?—but complete in the sense that it’s doing what it was always meant to do. The story is vibrant and whole, and it’s time to let it be seen.

    This stage has its own particular difficulty. After months or years of growth, the habit of tending can be hard to break. There’s always one more thing on the list to examine. One more pass. One more scene to reconsider. But a flower held in a vase too long fades there.

    When you’ve done multiple revision passes, incorporated substantive feedback, and can’t identify what to fix without breaking something that works, that’s the signal. It’s done. Let it bloom and be admired.

    When the Manuscript Won’t Move

    Some manuscripts stall. They stay in vegetative growth for a long time, not quite budding, and no amount of additional revision seems to move them forward.

    This usually indicates a root problem rather than a surface one. The foundation isn’t strong enough to support flowering—something in the core conflict, the stakes, or the character’s central need isn’t fully developed yet. Or there’s a condition mismatch: the story is being forced to grow in the wrong environment, and it’s not as robust as it could be. A quiet character study being pushed toward thriller pacing. A cozy mystery being revised for tension it was never designed to hold.

    None of this means the manuscript is lost. It means the conditions need to change before growth can continue. Sometimes that means setting it aside and coming back when the creative well is refilled or the writer’s craft has grown. Sometimes it means a more honest look at the foundation. The plant isn’t the problem. The soil is.

    Right now, in my garden, things are at different stages all at once. The lilacs are just finishing flowering. The peonies are budding out. The Asiatic ginger groundcover in the back is already spreading, ahead of everything else. None of them are in the wrong. They’re just on their own timelines, doing the work appropriate to the environmental conditions.

    A manuscript has a timeline too. The best thing to do is figure out which stage it’s actually in—not the stage you wish it were in—and give it what that stage requires.

    The bloom will come. It just needs the right conditions and enough time.~

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  • The Drought-Stressed Manuscript

    A resource problem mistaken for a craft problem

    a dry spider plant in a pot
    I know… I should do better

    The beta reader feedback comes in with the ambiguous “good” in the comments. “Good” doesn’t convey much and isn’t the hoped-for emotional response (positive or negative). Maybe one or two say “it feels like something’s missing” but they can’t quite explain what. So, you delve into revisions—a snappier opening, a more detailed scene, a beefed-up subplot thread—and the next round of feedback says the same thing. “Good.” Maybe even “great.” But the reactions still aren’t there, and nothing is specific enough to pinpoint what’s keeping the readers from having the experience you want them to have in your world. Something’s just not quite right.

    This is one of the more disorienting phases of a manuscript, because there’s no obvious dangling thread or pacing problem to tackle. The prose is competent. Individual scenes work. The characters have clear motivations. And yet the story feels exacting to read, like moving through humid air in the summer.

    What’s usually happening isn’t a craft failure. It’s a resource problem.

    When the water doesn’t go far enough

    In horticulture, this has a name: drought stress. In its later stages, it can look very much like death: desiccated leaves, collapsed stems, brown and spent. But looking like death and being dead aren’t the same thing. A drought-stressed plant is fighting to hold on, drawing down whatever reserves it has, suspending growth entirely, waiting for water that may or may not arrive in time. If it does, the plant recovers. If it doesn’t, it perishes, maybe for the season, maybe permanently. Either way, nothing is growing. Everything is directed toward survival. And the problem may not be an absence of water. It may be that the available water is spread too thin, across too many plants and plant systems competing for the same limited supply.

    Story energy works the same way. It’s finite. Every element of a story—every POV, subplot, secondary character, worldbuilding system, thematic thread—draws on the same source. When a manuscript tries to run all of them at full capacity simultaneously, nothing gets enough. Everything survives, but nothing flourishes.

    This is what I think of as a drought-stressed manuscript.

    What it looks like from the inside

    Drought stress has a recognizable set of symptoms, though they’re easy to misread.

    Revision rounds that feel like rearranging furniture. You move things around, tighten this scene, cut that chapter, shift a subplot, open the story in a different place, and the story feels neither better nor worse. Each change is absorbed without visibly improving the whole.

    The instinct to add. When a story feels thin, the natural response is to put more in: another character to generate interest, a new subplot to create momentum, more worldbuilding detail to make the world feel real, oh, a love interest! But in a drought-stressed story, adding more doesn’t help. It dilutes what’s struggling further.

    Beta readers who shrug or say “It’s good.” Not because the story is bad, but because there’s nothing specific to point to. “I couldn’t connect with it” or “it didn’t quite grab me” are also responses that feel frustratingly vague, because the problem genuinely is diffuse. It’s systemic, not localized.

    Craft competence without emotional connection. The sentences are clean. The story structure is sound. And yet something that should feel high-stakes reads as flat. This is often the signal that the story is spending energy maintaining its own complexity instead of directing the energy toward connecting with the reader.

    What it isn’t

    Drought stress is not a failure of craft. This is worth saying clearly, because writers who find themselves here often assume they simply aren’t skilled enough, that better prose, sharper dialogue, more careful plotting would solve it.

    Sometimes that’s true. But often the individual elements are genuinely well-executed. The problem isn’t quality. It’s distribution.

    A subplot can be beautifully written and still be consuming narrative energy the story can’t spare. A magic system can be internally consistent and still be drawing attention away from the character arc it’s supposed to serve. A secondary character can be vivid and still be competing with the protagonist for the reader’s investment (even though we love them and they will have their own book!). None of these is a craft failure in isolation. Together, they create a story where the water doesn’t go far enough to sustain.

    The harder question

    The instinct when a manuscript isn’t thriving is to work harder on individual elements. Write the scene again. Deepen the character. Tighten the pacing. This is understandable; it’s where craft lives, and craft is what writers know how to improve.

    But consider what actually works in a drought-stressed garden. Watering individual plants more attentively can save that one plant, but it doesn’t solve the underlying system shortfall—the same number of plants are still competing for the same baseline supply. The more sustainable solution is reduction: fewer plants drawing on the same water, so those remaining can be adequately supplied rather than merely maintained. And the most elegant solution of all is to stop fighting the climate—to plant species that are built for those conditions, that root deeply and direct energy precisely, that don’t require individual intervention to thrive.

    A story can be held to the same test. Drought stress doesn’t respond to more effort applied to individual elements. It responds to a different kind of question: not what needs to be better, but what is consuming resources it hasn’t earned, and what is being starved as a result. Sometimes the answer is reduction: doing twelve things at full capacity rather than twenty things at seventy percent. Sometimes it’s structural, needing to be built into the story from the beginning. Everything done with intentional economy, every element load-bearing, nothing purely decorative.

    That second approach—learning to write drought-tolerant stories, shall we say—is its own conversation, and one worth having separately.

    For now, the first step is recognizing that “fine but not thriving” is a symptom with a cause. Not a reason to add more. A reason to look carefully at what’s already there and ask what the story actually needs to flourish.

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  • The Gate

    On finally showing up as the thing I’ve been building.

    Photo of me as The Narrative Gardener

    I came to editorial work as a horticulturist.

    That was the plan, anyway. Twenty-three years of professional horticulture, a plant science degree, hands that knew soil before they knew manuscript markup, surely the niche was obvious. Gardening books. Horticulture titles. Stay in your lane.

    It didn’t work out that way, at least not immediately. I fell into fiction editing instead, which was also somewhere I wanted to be, so I didn’t resist it. But I carried the horticulturist’s brain with me anyway—the way I thought about ecosystems, about what was thriving and what was starved, about intervention versus patience. I just didn’t recognize I was doing it. It was simply how I read.

    From the beginning, I knew I needed something to distinguish me. The editorial field is not small and not quiet, and “experienced fiction editor” is not a differentiator. I looked for the niche. I tried angles. Nothing quite fit, or nothing felt fully true, which amounts to the same problem.

    What I didn’t see—for five years, I didn’t see it—was that I’d been doing the thing the whole time. The horticulture wasn’t separate from the editing. It was the lens I’d been using on every manuscript without naming it. The framework existed. I just hadn’t looked directly at it yet.

    I looked this winter. Named it: Narrative Ecology. Started this Substack. Watched the two halves of my professional life finally stand in the same space and recognize each other.

    And then I understood why I’d always needed a face for the brand that wasn’t quite my own.

    The Narrative Gardener arrived three years ago as an avatar. An illustrated version of me in my garden, purple plaid shirt, pruners in hand. She could be on the website, front and center. She could anchor the brand, be someone distinct from just “Aime Sund, editor.” The idea of me, accurate in every meaningful way, but at a slight remove.

    Which is so Gen X of me to say.

    We grew up with a specific inheritance around self-promotion: don’t. Competence was supposed to speak for itself. And then the internet arrived and said, “Actually, you need a personal brand,” and an entire generation quietly had a small crisis and found workarounds. Mine was a drawing. She could take up space I wasn’t ready to claim yet. She went first.

    The Narrative Gardener was always me. I knew that when I named her. She wasn’t a persona; she was a way of stepping onto the stage without fully stepping onto it. The anxiety of visibility dressed up as a brand decision. It worked well, when I remembered to use it.

    Over time, my working framework became real and specific enough that I started thinking about it outside of edits, building services around it. The Narrative Gardener became more persistent; she wanted to be everywhere. I, however, stayed slightly behind her.

    What shifted wasn’t sudden. It was a slow kind of shift, the kind where I looked up one day and realized the distance had closed without me quite deciding to close it. Once the framework had a name and a place to exist outside my website (here), once the two halves of my work were finally visible as one thing, hiding behind a drawing started to feel like a mismatch. Not dishonest. Just incomplete.

    I needed updated and brand-centric photos. And now photographs of the actual person seemed less like exposure and more like accuracy.

    I was still nervous about it. Privacy, imposter syndrome, the introvert’s particular discomfort with being looked at, all of it was present, none of it gone. But underneath the nervousness was something steadier. I’d been building toward this without knowing I was building toward it. New photos weren’t a vanity project. They were the next true thing.

    During the shoot, the photographer suggested I go barefoot for a couple shots.

    I hesitated for approximately one second. The reflex formed—is that professional enough—and then dissolved. I work for myself. I spend summers with my feet in grass, mulch, and soil. More than thirty years of horticulture is not incidental to how I think about story structure; it’s the whole point. Bare feet weren’t a quirky choice. They were accurate.

    I said yes.

    What I noticed as the camera clicked away, was that the millisecond of hesitation was the interesting part. Not the decision; the decision was easy once I actually made it, but the reflex to check myself against some external standard of what a professional is supposed to look like. I’ve now been editing long enough to recognize that reflex in manuscripts and stories. It’s the same impulse that makes writers sand down their most distinctive sentences or ideas because they don’t sound like what a novel is supposed to sound like. The voice that’s most distinctly theirs is the one they second-guess first.

    One of the barefoot photographs is me, actually me, sitting among my tools and potting soil bags and empty pots against a whitewashed brick wall in bright sun, looking directly at the camera. It matches the avatar. That coherence was intentional—I wanted the brand to feel like a single continuous thing—but I didn’t anticipate what it would feel like to see it in digital existence. To look at a photograph and think: yes, that’s the person who does this work.

    She went first. Now, I’m here.

    Authors will recognize this moment too. There’s a point in revision where you stop seeing your manuscript as a collection of problems and see it as a thing that exists—finished, imperfect, yours. The work was always real. Being seen in it is the part that costs something. It’s also the part that matters.

    I’ve been building toward this visibility for a while. It feels right to arrive at it with bare feet.

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  • Filter Words, Unfiltered

    What These Common Words Are Really Doing to Your Story

    a variegated hosta right after rain
    Hosta ‘Striptease’ post-rain; the garden unfiltered.

    Part 1 of 3

    Imagine you’re standing in a garden just after it’s rained. The air is heavy with petrichor, the soil dark and alive, water still beading on the leaves of the hostas. You can almost feel the cool dampness against your skin.

    Now imagine standing at the edge of that same garden, but this time, behind a pane of glass.

    You can see everything. But you can’t smell a thing.

    That’s what filter words do to your readers.

    So What Are Filter Words, Exactly?

    Filter words are verbs, usually sensory, perception, or cognitive verbs, that place a layer between the reader and the character’s sensory experience. They’re the literary equivalent of that glass pane.

    They typically appear in constructions like this:

    She felt the cold seep into her bones. He noticed the door was ajar. Maya realized she was alone.

    The character perceives something, and the reader receives that perception secondhand. It’s a subtle layering; so subtle that many writers don’t notice they’re doing it. But readers feel it, even when they can’t name it. That slight remove, that almost-there quality, that sense of watching the story rather than living inside it.

    That’s the filter at work.

    The Usual Suspects

    Filter words most commonly show up as sensory and cognitive verbs:

    Sensory: feel/felt, see/saw, hear/heard, notice, watch, smell, taste, listen

    Cognitive: think, know, realize, remember, wonder, decide, experience, find (as in she found herself)

    They’re familiar words. Useful words in everyday language. Which is why they slip through so easily during drafting; they feel like good, solid anchors for the point-of-view character. And that instinct isn’t entirely wrong, which we’ll come back to.

    Why We Write Them (And Why That Makes Sense)

    Here’s something I want to be clear about: filter words aren’t a sign of weak writing. They’re a sign of a writer who is genuinely trying to stay inside their POV character’s head.

    The instinct to write she noticed the letter on the table comes from a good place. The author is thinking about the character, grounding the observation in her perception, being careful not to slip into an omniscient perspective. That’s solid craft instinct.

    The problem is that deep point of view—the kind that makes readers forget they’re reading—doesn’t actually need that anchor. When we’re truly inside a character’s perspective, the filter verb becomes redundant. Of course she noticed the letter. She’s the one telling us about it.

    Removing the filter doesn’t lose the POV. It deepens it.

    What’s Actually Happening in the Reader’s Brain

    Every time a reader encounters a filter word, there’s a micro-interruption. It’s tiny, almost imperceptible on its own. But fiction works cumulatively. One filter word is a hand on the reader’s shoulder, holding them just outside the garden gate. A manuscript full of them and they never get in at all.

    What readers are experiencing, without being able to articulate it, is narrative distance. They’re aware—just slightly, just enough—that they’re being told about someone else’s experience rather than having one of their own. The immersion isn’t broken or distorted, exactly. It’s just never quite complete.

    Think of it this way: in a healthy story ecosystem, the reader is the character for the duration of the book. Filter words remind them they’re not. They’re observers. Visitors to the garden, not gardeners themselves.

    The goal of deep POV is to hand them the trowel.

    See the Difference

    Let’s put this into practice. Here are three filter-heavy sentences, followed by their unfiltered versions:

    With filter: She felt her heart rate spike as she heard footsteps on the stairs.

    Unfiltered: Her heart rate spiked. Footsteps on the stairs.

    With filter: He noticed the room smelled of cigarettes and something chemical, something wrong.

    Unfiltered: The room smelled of cigarettes and something chemical, something wrong.

    With filter: Maya realized she’d been holding her breath.

    Unfiltered: She’d been holding her breath.

    Notice what happens in each revision. The sentences get shorter, yes, but more importantly, they get faster. More immediate. The reader lands directly in the sensation rather than reaching for it through the filter first. The glass comes down. The garden opens up to all the senses.

    A Word of Caution (Because Rules Exist to Be Broken)

    Filter words aren’t inherently wrong. Sometimes they earn their place.

    When a character is meant to feel distanced from their own experience, as in situations of dissociation, shock, emotional numbness, a filter word can actually do precise, intentional work. She watched herself sign the papers lands differently than She signed the papers, and sometimes that distance is exactly what the scene needs.

    The difference between a crutch and a tool is awareness. We’ll dig into that distinction, and how to develop the judgment to know when to cut and when to keep, in Part 2.

    Your Assignment Before Part 2

    Open your current manuscript or any chapter you’ve been working on recently and use the Find function to search for just one word: felt.

    Note how many times it appears. Don’t change anything yet. Just look.

    See how often it’s doing necessary work, and how often it’s simply standing between your reader and your character’s experience. Sit with that for a few days.

    Part 2 will give you the tools to do something about it.

    Part 2: How to Find and Fix Filter Words—coming soon.

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