Sometimes, Fillers Are Good
A Small Piece of Writing Advice
Sometimes, it makes sense to use fillers in your writing. I just realised that while I was doing Point Edits for my manuscript.
I don’t know if “Point Edits” is a valid expression, but I use that term for the edits I do with the search bar. I type in a word or sentence that I use often and then click through the whole document to weed out those I don’t really need, in case I just used them as fillers.
Right now, I’ve been clicking through my “for a moment”s, and I’m keeping quite a lot of them, even though they do nothing for the content. But they do things for the reader. Here’s why:
In a narrative, we have two concepts of time. Those are narrative time and narrated time.
Narrative time, is the time the narrator needs to tell the story (and, so to speak, the reader to read it).
Narrated time is the time that passes in the narrative.
Now, I want my dialogues to be as organic as possible (maybe you want yours to be different--that’s all right), so it makes sense for narrative time and narrated time to be congruent with each other.
Here’s an an excerpt from my WIP to show you what I mean:
“I don’t have any siblings. And I’m glad about it.”
Morten says nothing. “Because of your father?”
So, in this instance, I want Morten to have a moment to think before he comments on what Kristen just said. But if you read that dialogue with the insertion as it is right now, it takes very little time for you to do so, and does hence appear to you as if very little time passed in the narrative between what Kristen said and what Morten said.
If I do this now--
“I don’t have any siblings. And I’m glad about it.”
Morten says nothing for a moment. “Because of your father?”
--the “for a moment” is redundant for the content per se, but it stretches the insertion and therefore the time it takes you to read it, making you feel like more time passes in the narrative.
To stretch it even more, I could, for example, add an inquit:
“I don’t have any siblings. And I’m glad about it,” I say.
Morten says nothing for a moment. “Because of your father?”
And if it takes even longer for Morten to answer, I could do this:
“I don’t have any siblings. And I’m glad about it,” I say.
Morten says nothing for a moment and looks at the ground. “Because of your father?”
Of course you can and should (or shouldn’t) use “for a moment”s and inquits in other instances, but they can be a great device to organically match narrative time and narrated time.
I should add that, for your writing to be appealing, it’s--as you probaly know--generally recommended that you add description and action to dialogue. That will automatically stretch the narrative time/slow down the narrated time and can make your dialogue incongruent. That’s okay. Your readers will get this. Your readers are smart. (But then, if you would want a fast-paced dialogue but still needed description or action for some reason, it would be better to not not use fillers or even inquits.)