Filler Before going into a discussion on filler, it’s probably important that we understand what filler in a story is. Filler is anything that does not directly influence the story line, the characters or the plot. When describing scenes, you can also get to a point where you are over-describing, at which point the descriptions would become filler. When reading, I hate coming across things that look like filler. It’s difficult though, because what looks like filler on page fifteen may turn out to be an important part of the plot or an important aspect of the character on the second to last page. A good example of overused filler (to me) was what I found in the book ‘The curious incident of the dog in the night time’ by Mark Haddon. In the book, the character keeps on telling us exactly how things are. He is so many years old, so many months, days, hours, minutes seconds. The character tells us exactly what he had in his pockets, down to the paperclip. This is all very amusing during the first few chapters of the book, and it helps to show that there is something fundamentally wrong with the character, he is different. Pretty soon though, it becomes boring. I don’t want to hear a conversation about exactly how the cake looked, unless it has something to do with the story. And so I stopped reading the book, it got shelved. Even Stephen King, in some of his longer novels, had me bored with things that turned out to be filler. We need to recognise that there is a line between description and filler, and on re-reads of our story we need to cut out the filler and leave only the important bits. I suspect that some people do re-writes to add filler and make a book thicker, and I’m also quite sure I can spot these filler pieces a mile off, and it puts me off the book. Terry Pratchett was a master of writing filler, but that was because his fillers were mostly hilarious. He could write a whole page that had nothing to do with the story and have me rolling off the bed laughing. Another such master is JK Rowling in the Potter series. She didn’t do the comedy bit, but she wrote a spellbinding story and her fillers were true fleshing out of the scenes. She was so good at this that one person I read somewhere described the school Hogwarts as a character itself. She brought the school to life in a way few other writers can. If you can write like Pratchett or Rowling, then go for it, write the filler and amuse your audience. The rest of us, I suspect, should stay as far away from fillers as possible.
Before going into a discussion on filler, it’s probably important that we understand what filler in a story is.
Filler is anything that does not directly influence the story line, the characters or the plot. When describing scenes, you can also get to a point where you are over-describing, at which point the descriptions would become filler.
When reading, I hate coming across things that look like filler. It’s difficult though, because what looks like filler on page fifteen may turn out to be an important part of the plot or an important aspect of the character on the second to last page.
A good example of overused filler (to me) was what I found in the book ‘The curious incident of the dog in the night time’ by Mark Haddon.
In the book, the character keeps on telling us exactly how things are. He is so many years old, so many months, days, hours, minutes seconds. The character tells us exactly what he had in his pockets, down to the paperclip.
This is all very amusing during the first few chapters of the book, and it helps to show that there is something fundamentally wrong with the character, he is different. Pretty soon though, it becomes boring. I don’t want to hear a conversation about exactly how the cake looked, unless it has something to do with the story. And so I stopped reading the book, it got shelved.
Even Stephen King, in some of his longer novels, had me bored with things that turned out to be filler.
We need to recognise that there is a line between description and filler, and on re-reads of our story we need to cut out the filler and leave only the important bits. I suspect that some people do re-writes to add filler and make a book thicker, and I’m also quite sure I can spot these filler pieces a mile off, and it puts me off the book.
Terry Pratchett was a master of writing filler, but that was because his fillers were mostly hilarious. He could write a whole page that had nothing to do with the story and have me rolling off the bed laughing. Another such master is JK Rowling in the Potter series. She didn’t do the comedy bit, but she wrote a spellbinding story and her fillers were true fleshing out of the scenes. She was so good at this that one person I read somewhere described the school Hogwarts as a character itself. She brought the school to life in a way few other writers can.
If you can write like Pratchett or Rowling, then go for it, write the filler and amuse your audience. The rest of us, I suspect, should stay as far away from fillers as possible.