Ziglar and Success: Define It For Yourself

After you turn three,
success might be more complicated than a fist full of sand.

Zig Ziglar joins the ranks of a number of white, heterosexual, able bodied, rich, cis, thin, Christian American, male motivational speakers who I can't help but roll my eyes at every time they start talking about how positivism will take you anywhere.  I wish all motivational speakers would be more honest and say positivism can't help you do anything you dream.  I've been dreaming of groupie threesomes for YEARS now, and it hasn't happened. Positivism can't make anything possible.  For starters, at its most basic, it simply has a limited return on those whose lives exist at the less fortunate end of social inequality. Positivism also fails epically when it comes to defying physics.  And no matter how positive you are you won't sell your NaNo "novel" that hasn't been revised since December 1st. All positivism can really claim to do is take you further than negativity can. But "further" might just mean someone has only rolled their eyes instead of blacklisting you.

Still once you acknowledge the limitations of this kind of motivational advice, it's much easier to take the whole line of thinking more seriously.  Just bring your grains of salt and take three or four any time anyone says the word "anything."  To Zig's credit, he kept talking after a fall in 2007 left him with some memory problems and the "abled bodied" part was less true.  He recently passed away.

Ziglar was really good at the zingers.  Gems like:  "People often say that motivation doesn't last. Well, neither does bathing - that's why we recommend it daily," or "a lot of people quit looking for work as soon as they find a job," were often part of his speeches and got him quoted a lot which led to his continued success in motivational speaking.  Most people can't really remember his complex arguments about success.  They remember his zingers.

Failure is a detour, not a dead-end street.   -Zig Ziglar

One thing I have always remembered of his is a description of putting a blindfold on an archer and turning them round and round and round and then telling them to hit their target.   This scenario was written to illustrate a single point.  It is very, very difficult to hit a target that you can't see.  To this end most people struggle to get somewhere but they don't really have a sense of where or what that might be.  I'm pretty sure my archery instructor would have had an aneurysm from hearing this story--all those arrow safety rules...ignored.

I talk a lot about success being a vague concept.   Almost more than I talk about threesomes. That's because it is.  I usually put scare quotes around success or add the caveat "whatever that means" when I talk about it.  That's because success isn't just a concept that differs from person to person (though it is).  Success is a concept that most people don't even understand within themselves.

Success is dependent upon the glands - sweat glands.  

-Zig Ziglar

At first that question may seem absolutely simple.  It may even seem almost insulting.  "Success is....SUCCESS man!  Being successful!  Making it!" a friend of mine yelled at me once.  But the more you think about it, the more you will realize that it is actually probably a harder question to answer than you might think.  What does success even mean?  And more importantly, what does it mean to you?

Recently a friend of mine working in the game design industry asked everyone on her various social media how they defined success and got answers ranging from financial independence to making the world a better place to being approached for projects instead of having to look for them.  A lot of people think success is paying the bills, though you might be surprised how many have other answers.  One person told me (not on this page but somewhere else) that she defined success as not questioning every single day whether or not she was a real writer or just a faking imposer who no one had yet recognized.  She's on her eighth novel, and lives quite well off from her writing, but is still struggling with success in her mind.

Many of these answers were vague even when they were specific as well.  "Paying the bills" could possibly be broken down further.  Is that scraping out the rent on a crummy apartment, walking everywhere, eating Raman three or four times a week, and a health insurance plan that involves power crystals and prayer?  Or is that a townhome, private school for the kids, an economy car that still has a good stereo and airbags, a Kaiser insurance plan, and eating out three or four times a week.  Because I assure you, those two goals are very, very far apart even if they both might technically be "paying the bills."  Seriously just the Raman alone might mean hundreds of dollars.  That stuff is criminally cheap.

The point is there is a huge disparity about what success even means.  Not just between folks, but usually a painful ambiguity within each individual as well.

A lot of aspiring writers (and artists in general) talk about "making it" or "success" but they don't really take the time to think about what that means to them.  They struggle, but don't seem to know exactly what they're struggling for.  And Ziglar has at least one part of achieving your dreams dead-on right--if you don't know what success even IS, what is the chance you're going to stumble across it.  I mean I guess if everything in your life simply explodes into awesomeness, then you will reach your equally undefined sense of having "made it."  But if you had to work toward one vision (and really...you do), what would it be?

Publication?  A published novel?  Three published novels?  A published novel every year without fail?  "Paying the bills" with writing even if it means renting a room and learning to love rice?  Paying the bills with writing and making a middle class income?  $53,500--for no particular reason?  Chairing a panel at Wondercon?  A good home life?  Raising a decent kid?  A fish tank with exotic fish and a male whore who you call "fish guy"?  Asian cheerleader threesomes?  If you cannot define success for yourself, no one else is going to be able to define it for you.  How will you know if you're getting close.   How will you even know if you're working in the right direction.  How will you know you aren't wasting time doing something that has some aspects of what you want (I'm writing!) but not others (but it's tech writing, not fiction, and I'm miserable) if you don't have a sense yourself of what you want?

When we struggle for nebulous goals, we often have nebulous struggles.  Leaving the world a better place might be noble, but it lacks the concreteness of "publish one critically acclaimed game."  The latter is, ironically, an easier goal to work toward and a goal one could be satisfied in achieving.  With the first we could satisfy ourself of success if we smile at a stranger one day, or we could spend a lifetime working for Greenpeace and still convince ourselves we'd never quite made it.  This is why any major goal setting effort involves specific and measurable results.  And the biggest goals of your life--the all pervasive idea of success with your most meaningful endeavor--should be no different.

A lot of writers feel liberated when they consider what success means to them.  They don't feel so pinned by a dream, but almost like "Fuck now I can actually figure out how to GET there and start working."  They find that "making it" was just too big.  But "one published novel" seems like it's actually manageable.   Or "financial independence" is just too open.  But "contribute 25,000 to the household expenses annually" gives them something tangible and reachable to work toward.  By defining success, they not only figure out where to go and how to get there, but that it's closer than they think.

So....what would success look like to you?

Quiet Reflection

I posted yesterday's post, and then went to look at my Facebook.  The first reports of another mass shooting were starting to show up.  This one was worse than any before.  Maybe not in terms of numbers, but in the horror of what happened and the age of the victims.

At first, I was just stunned.  It was like part of me couldn't believe this was happening.  Not again.  Not to little kids.  It had to be wrong.  Someone made a mistake.  It was an Onion article--a sick sick fucking Onion article.  This just couldn't be happening.

I want to scream.  I want to kick something.  I want to write, and I want to post.  I want to use what I've built here as a way to reach people.  Mostly, I want the issues of elementary school children's safety not to be a political issue.  I want to be able to have an argument--a terrible, furious, table pounding row that maybe even ruins a few friendships--without being shamed for daring to speak because it's "too soon" or I'm "politicizing the issues."  I want this because they were just fucking little kids dammit!  It seems like it couldn't possibly be too soon, and that if anything, we were too late.  We should have been talking about this last week.  When is it no longer too soon?  When we're numb?  When people aren't thinking about it?  When we're back to caring about analytics and page-views?  When the rage has faded to the point where our distraction and apathy eclipse it once again and gun control is a fringe debate that doesn't really effect us?  When we are so desensitized that a nearly perennial horror seems sad and commonplace but inspires no change?

But it is a political issue.  And it's a complicated issue.  But mostly it is a political issue.  And this isn't a political blog.  And it wouldn't be right of me to soapbox--not here.  Perhaps not now, but certainly not here.  I'm already holding back Facebook posts and posting things and then pulling them back down five minutes later because I realize they aren't really helping anything but my own self-righteous indignation.

But I also can't just plug along like my heart isn't breaking.  I can't write about Octorians and the A-team not being able to hit targets and the fine line between reaching for the stars and getting your ass to work, as if the image of fifteen terrified kids stuffed in a single bathroom, trying to be silent because their teacher says "bad guys" are outside isn't tearing me apart.  I can't stop thinking of the kid standing on the toilet so that one more could fit in there.  I just can't pretend that it's business as usual here at W.A.W.

So instead, I offer simply quiet reflection.  There was one horrible person at work yesterday.  But there were dozens of heroes, some who even literally sacrificed themselves so that a room full of small children could live. There are people crawling out of the woodwork to help with money and skills, and I doubt we've heard the last of the stories of selfless good.  People always react with dubious sentiments about their faith in humanity during these moments.

I see them differently.  I see them as moments where we rise to our potential.  We become who we really are when the chips are down and the shit hits the fan.  Lean us over the volcano, and you will see that humanity is something extraordinary.  In fire, we achieve our finest, noblest moments.

"When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, 'Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.'" -- Fred (Mister) Rogers

Guy Goodman St.White Reviews Nathaniel Hawthorne--Genre Hack

Hawthorne in one of his LESS bushy mustache phases.
Image courtesy of Library of Congress.

Good evening.  I'm Guy Goodman St. White, your excessively British accented host, and tonight I'll be stepping out of my usual timeline to say a few words about Nathaniel Hawthorne.  Apologies for the disruption in the continuity.  I was only just reminded that I am to be switching guest blogging positions with Lt. Lambaste this month in order to give her more time to come up with something non-crime-against-humanity-ish to do with her cloning machine.  I had fully intended to slip out this weekend, leave a post-it on my desk and return in January from my vacation in Melbourne acting faux innocent.  Then Chris busts into my office and demands to know where the hell my guest blog article is.  Mores the pity.

Regardless, there's always something nasty to say about Hawthorne, not including the bushiness of the mustache he grew in later life--which ranged from "epically bushy" to "HOLY SHIT."  Those quotations are not my personal opinion, but the reactions of his contemporaries.  I would never lower myself to such tomfoolery.  Hawthorne mustache jokes are low hanging fruit.

Let us be frank.  When we think of genre crap, it is difficult NOT to think of Nathaniel Hawthorne, furiously scribbling some speculative fiction onto paper with a quill in hand.  His dark romanticism that flirted with some of the earliest examples of surrealism is a non-stop barrage of speculative imagery.  Writing just at the time when the Romantic period was tipping into the Gothic, his works are filled with deeply psychological themes and horrors within the human heart that never quite revealed externally.

This in itself would not be problematic, but Hawthorne insisted time and again on portraying these themes through speculative elements.  Hinting at dark, supernatural forces.  Casting obsessive scientists as protagonists.  Even strangely mutable marks.  We might be able to chalk these things up to the twisted minds of the characters involved, as so many of these events occur when it isn't fully clear if the character is dreaming or awake, but Hawthorne's willingness to tap that ambiguity time and again, and exploit those moments of doubt without later revealing their absurdity as unrealistic means he was not exploring the human condition so much as gleefully exploiting the commercialism cash cow of putting the supernatural into fiction.  He is, as the yanks would say "a hella sellout."  Not once did a protagonist discover that they were really living in a seedy halfway house, detoxing from opiates, and disowned due to their prurient sexuality.  Seven Gables without a Scooby Doo explanation at the end is really just a ghost story.  As such, his writing has no chance of being genuinely literary.

Besides, there can be little doubt as to the genre status of something like "P's Correspondence" as an alternate history.  This guy is a genre hack who just likes to leave things open ended so Harold Bloom will still like him. Hawthorne may get close to real literature--in as much as his prose is dry and he is a dead white guy--but his insistence on not clarifying his supernatural elements as his characters' insanity or crystalizing seemingly supernatural elements into something realistic, and preferably more gritty, means that he falls time and again into the trap of just being one more genre writer.

The Mailbox- Comic Sans

http://www.questionablecontent.net/
Please check out their funny stuff!

[Remember, keep sending in your questions with the subject line "W.A.W. Mailbox" and I will answer them each Thursday.  Until/unless I have more questions than I can handle, I'll answer anything that has anything even peripherally to do with writing, art, inspiration, creativity, or anything else I blather on about here on Writing About Writing.]   

Just one today since that's all I have from all of you.  Keep sending questions, and I'll keep answering them!
  
Dana writes:
 Did you really turn in a college essay in Comic Sans just to piss off a teacher?

My reply:

While I have a sort of canned response to those "did-you-really..." questions, I'll answer this one. Yes, I really did this. Actually, it happened more than once, but it was always less just to piss off the instructor, and more to mess with them. I'm a heckler but not intentionally an asshole. I knew how to play the game in college (as my GPA attests to) but I was always pushing the limits in my own ways. A lot of people don't realize how "accidental" it was that I was a good student. I probably should have done much, much worse on several occasions.

I knew I had written a spectacular paper, and you may have noticed that I'm fond of poking at the authoritative pedagogy of academia, especially those who think their advanced degrees gave them the right to treat undergrads like idiots. I teach undergrads too. I know it can be like herding cats, but that's no excuse for assuming that people can't think unless you tell them exactly how to do so.

The thing is, Dana, I don't recommend doing it. I got snippy comments on papers, points off, and one very uncomfortable office meeting because of this prank. I was going to school for the education, not the degree, and the amount that I cared about grades had more to do with doing my best than the grades themselves. So I wouldn't have cared if I'd done poorly on a paper because it was in the "wrong font" as long as I knew the paper kicked ass. Three of my worst grades of my whole college career got the most unconcerned reactions from me because I hadn't understood the assignment and I'd done my best and if they were going to take off points because of unclear expectations, that was on them, not me. One of my most hand-wringing moments was an A minus that I got when I hadn't done my best and I knew it.

I wasn't really as concerned about the consequences of my actions as a "proper" student should be.

I liked putting the profs in the position of knowing that if they failed me for the font of an otherwise fandamntastical paper, they would be proving the worst things that everyone says about academia absolutely true, and they would be demonstrating that they're not actually there to "help people think critically and actualize their potential" but to follow directions like good little future workers of America. I liked the idea of them having to face those values and confront whether or not they would be egotistical autocrats who demanded contrition to their "authoritaaaaah" and not so much the compassionate mentors who encourage free thinking that they liked to think themselves.

These days, having seen the number of guest blog submissions that can't follow a simple fucking direction, I would have gone back and slapped old me.

Unfortunately, at least once, this sort of backfired. (Sort of.) I got dragged into an office meeting intended to find out why I "shouldn't be given a zero on the paper since [I] obviously didn't take it,\ [him], or the class seriously." We talked about why I had done it, and I explained some the reasons I gave above. Sometimes, when I'm feeling super bad ass, I imagine it as a speech with swelling music behind me and my words about the tyranny of the ivory tower flowing from my mouth like golden honey in a way that made a single tear slip down the young adjunct's face.

But having been in the other chair a few too many times, I know he probably was looking for any excuse not to do something that would ruin an A student's grade.

I ended up with extra credit.

The Big Changes ARE Happening In Literature, you n00bs.

Nothing here but us same-old-books.

Blinded by prejudice towards speculative fiction, the lit snobs try to find innovations in literature....other than the stuff happening right in front of them, of course.

For many years, one of the most consistent criticisms that I hear literary sommeliers level against literature is that the art form hasn't changed significantly in nearly a hundred years.  The main literary form is still the novel, with short stories a distant second, and its supremacy has been almost unchallenged.  We've dabbled in flash fiction (or microfiction) but for the most part the art of literature hasn't experienced any major shifts.  This is such a common criticism that if you turn on NPR at any given moment (except for during "All Things Considered"), there is actually a 13.8% chance that you will immediately hear someone talking about it.

I would contest these assertions.  Literature has experienced huge tectonic upheaval in the time I've been alive and reading, and it's still changing.  And it's exciting.   And all you have to do is pull your head out of your ass to see it.

For starters there are fundamental aspects of storytelling that have not changed in recorded history.  Things like a story having beginning, middle, and end.  Certain aspects of story like tension, climax and denouement.  From Sophocles to Stephen King, these aspects have endured without fundamental alteration, so they probably aren't going to change much going forward.  There is even enough evidence from neurology and psychobiology to indicate that storytelling is actually so fundamental to our lives that it could be considered something that makes us human.  In the same sort of niche within our basic humanity as we find culture and language, we find stories and our desire to hear them, tell them, and retell them.  Indeed what is culture if not a series of stories we tell over and over and over again to help us order and categorize the world?  Change those stories, and you end up with a fundamentally different culture.

Trust a Creative Writing MFA to muck around with human, biological need in an effort to try and make something "more artistic."

The result is about what you might expect.  A melange of highly experimental pieces that attempt to transcend "what literature is doing today" as an art form.  These pieces usually run in university literature journals that are produced by other Creative Writing MFA programs, (are usually read almost exclusively by other creative writing students,) and are highly inaccessible to almost any other readers.  This is so much the case that many undergrands consider the terms "experimental" and "confusing beyond my ability to understand why anyone would willingly read this shit" as absolutely synonymous.  The grad students just roll their eyes at this, and it's like a big joke that everybody thinks is actually about the other guy.

These experimental writers continue to attempt to break new ground within writing, even while ignoring cultural trends.  They think the artist must pioneer and forge ahead beyond cultural trends rather than being at the cusp of the input/output threshold between art and culture where at an almost preconscious level, the two echo and reflect each other, and is why the question about art reflecting life or vice versa is never going to be answered definitively.

There is nothing inherently wrong with this.  It wouldn't be so bad if everyone was just doing what found meaningful and letting the chips fall where they may but every generation more and more critics and sommeliers estrange themselves from the "mainstream," ignore cultural changes, scoff the tastes of anyone not sophisticated enough to like what they tell them they ought to like, and then absolutely lose their fucking shit when authors they can't stand get canonized.  Over and over and over and over and over again.  It's almost as if writing something people will actually read and understand-- something that sparks on cultural relevance--might be important to literary perpetuity.

The writers themselves of this caliber of material seem more fond of the term "avant guarde," missing both the irony that the movement within modernism was so generally confusing EVEN AMONG ARTISTS as to create its own cultural reactionary swing of returning-to-basics in post-modernism, and also the irony that the avant guarde movement was as much opposed to MFA's and "high art" and institutions like university fine arts programs as it was to commercialism and mainstream culture.

About this situation, even the irony demons have been heard to say "What is this?  I don't even.."

How much irony would you say is here?  50 irony?  60 irony?

But wait...there's more.

The series is a huge development in literature.  Go back forty years and you will find only a few series.  Go back fifty years and you will find almost none.  Today the series has exploded as a supremely popular medium for storytelling complete with its own conventions and unique challenges.  I'm not talking about the same character in a completely new adventure, but actually increasingly long plot arcs where multiple books are telling intensely rich stories with complex tapestries woven by a myriad of very involved character arcs.  The trilogy is so common these days that it is practically the form of choice for many authors.  Series of five to ten books are not unheard of.  This is basically one long story of thousands and thousands of pages and it tracks with the general growth of the novel that really started in the seventies and eighties.

This development of length tracks also with shifts in other media.  Television shows (once fans of the weekly "reset") have begun to be more unusual if they don't have a sort of running continuity.  I remember growing up how people used to think The Facts of Life was very strange for its ongoing changes of the kids graduating and moving on with their lives.  That just didn't happen in sit-coms.  Now it's harder to find a sitcom that doesn't have developments and changes that affect the characters through the episodes. Plot arcs that take up whole seasons and culminate during fanales (or cliff-hang into the next season--the bastards) are increasingly pedestrian.  Even entire multi-season arcs are not unheard of (pioneered by Babylon Five, they have since shown up in Angel, Stargate, Carnivalle, Battlestar Galactica [the remake], and more).  This is such a fucking thing that they are splitting up ONE kids book, The Hobbit, into three movies--the first of which comes out in a couple of days from this writing..

This development is also consistent with other cultural shifts.  In a world of increasing turmoil and chaos and increasing feelings of anonymity and powerlessness, the rise of escapism has been noticed by artists, entertainers, and social workers alike.  The rise of MUSHs MUDs and MMORPGs shows an increasing dedication to worlds that exist mostly within the borders of imagination.  "Immersive" has become one of the best things you can say about many forms of art and entertainment.  People don't seek a few minutes of distraction--unless they're on their smart phones.  What they want is to lose themselves.  Wholly.  Utterly.  They want to enter a world where they (or the protagonist they relate to) can actually make a difference.   As shorter stories get shorter and longer books get longer, they follow exactly the same sort of cultural "distract-me-or-immerse-me" social phenomenon as other media and other arts.

We are, as a culture, and within arts, are rejecting stasis and the quick epiphany.  We are much more interested in exploring the slow and measured changes that make big differences over time.  Is it any wonder that that's where our art is given our recent cultural shifts (that seem so small day to day but are gigantic decade by decade) our final scientific acceptance of evolution (small changes that make a big difference over time), and the mass communication that has forced us to understand linguistic drift (small changes that make a big difference over time) and not simply be snobbish assholes about the "one true language".

Most lit sommeliers don't consider this development worthy of literary analysis because they are "so commercial."  Series books (like the ones that have been the subject of the recent polls) aren't considered real literature.  Thus the sommeliers spend their time ignoring the innovation, which decry the lack of, largely because when it happens as a reflection of culture, it is seen as commercial.

How much irony would you say is here now?  80 irony?  90?

But...hold on.  There's even more.

Mixed media and multi-media developments are happening in literature all the time.  Interactive books.  Increasingly literary audio visual media.  Video games with mostly linguistic story development.  Blogs.  Collaborative writing projects made possible by technology.  And even new developments that are splicing different media together on tablets and computers like stories with occasional movie clips and such are popping up everywhere.  Of course, our lit snobs don't think any of these are literature.  Literature must be words...in a book.  Preferably a paper book with a booky smell and not one of those newfangled Kindle thingies.  "Get off my lawn with your fancy microchips and your non-homogenous media you whippersnapper smoochers!  Don't make me get my twelve gauge!"

And where do these lit snobs think all the past literary "innovations" came from?  Many of them came from technological advancements.  The novel didn't explode until after literacy (among the plebs, I might add) skyrocketed due to the printing press.  The short story gained traction in England where cheap paper and binding techniques made putting together pamphlet sized "books" viable.  Novels started to gain girth almost directly as printing technologies made printing longer books more viable.  Microfiction was never really popular until the ubiquity of the internet made shorter and sweeter reads much more compelling.  And now as wireless everything and tablets begin to change the industry yet again, our sommeliers don't get excited about what could happen or how the new technologies could lead to new innovations.   No, they decry it as not "real" literature.

How exactly will we see any innovations if every time there is one, it is immediately discounted as non literary?

Now how much irony would you say?  100 irony?  More?  Here we have the most significant developments in the literary world occurring right in front of people who not only claim that they aren't real, but who continue to complain about the lack of innovation and development.

And we haven't even reached the most ironic part yet...

Because here's the kicker....   As usual, these developments are happening in speculative fiction.  The interesting conventions, the explorations of culture sans bias through the magic of allegory, the isolation of morals through metaphor, the "literature of ideas"...it's all right there for the reading.  It's all happening in science and speculative fiction.

While "that's not art" is such a familiar reaction to anything new as to be cliche, most art forms take about a generation to accept pioneers into their ranks.  But in literature, the majority of the critics are still caught in 1960s when the scifi dime novel became insanely popular as mass entertainment and really, really, really (really) BADLY WRITTEN science fiction became enjoyable to the plebs and their "puerile" interests.  Despite ten decades of innovation beyond those dime novels, major and incredible stories in the genre both before and after (and even during) those "dark days," huge shifts and developments in the forms themselves, and the fact that speculative fiction is almost  the "ford finder" of the literary world, they do not acknowledge their achievements and dismiss the entire genre outright for being subliterary.  But the worst part is, then they turn around and grouse about the lack of developments. It's like someone in the trench of Moses's parted waters yelling to the sky for God to show them a miracle.

So really, actually, the only thing that isn't changing and developing is the lit snob themselves.

Now how much irony would you say?

50,000!!! Thank you!!!!

So...a little earlier today, this happened:

Fifty thousand page views!!!  Fifty.  Thousand.  That's like the population of San Louis Obisbo (including some tourists even!).  It still blows me away.  It wasn't even nine months ago that I was completely excited about getting twenty hits in a given day.  I knew we would make it here, but I honestly thought it would take two or three years to get to this point, not ten months.

And it's all because of you guys!  Of course, it's every time you clicked the link for solidarity or just because it was me (even though you weren't REALLY that interested in writing).  But it's more than that too.  Even as obnoxious as I am about pimping W.A.W. out on social media, over half of these hits come from all of you!  When you "+1," "Upvote," or "Like" an article, it gains lots of traction in how far and wide it goes (and how quickly it gets there), and if even one or two of you actually share an article, it does amazingly well.  Several of my top ten articles happened because a small handful of you (three or four) just hit the "share" button on G+ or Facebook.

So I can't thank you all enough.  Our success is as much about you guys being awesome as me doing my thing--maybe even more.  I don't know if I'll keep growing or plateau or just finally dwindle to a trickle instead of going to bed each night looking at numbers that a month before were our upper ceiling.

Anyway, the Hugh Grant/Love Actually dance is long overdue!  So, without further bloviation...

Filter Your Filtering

Sometimes licence-free images really leave me wanting.
Seriously.  

Fiction writers pick up a few questionable habits from the world around them, but not every habit that works well in expository writing is good for fiction.  (And a lot of it isn't always even that superfly for expository writing either.)  In many cases expository writing attempts to strike a tone that is impartial or unbiased.

A perfect example of this is passive voice.  Even though there are plenty of reasons to use the passive voice, one of the main reasons most people actually do so is because they think it sounds scientific or "official."  Because journalists use passive voice, everyone thinks that's the ticket to writing journalistically.  The problem is that journalists use passive voice for a reason.

Young Newt from Aliens voice:  Journalists mostly know what they're doing when they use passive voice.  Mostly.

(Then again sometimes it becomes a terrible, terrible feedback loop of journalistic self-wankery where and it's a wonder the moguls of print media can order lunch without saying, "A hotdog will be liked.  Can a drink be added to that, by you?")

While this is dangerous enough in expository writing, it is extra super dangerously dangerous in fiction.  The problem is that such language is all around a modern reader, and so it is almost impossible to be aware of it in one's own prose without a conscious filter.  This is part of the reason that the reactionary swing to passive voice is often a brute squad going around and beating the shit out of people in the streets who don't use active voice, even though passive voice has its place.

Filtering language?
Oh! My! God!
Consider it......expunged.

Another example is filtering language. Words and phrases that draw attention to the filter of the focalizer may seem more objective or impartial, but they pull the reader from the scene.  It may not seem significant at first but through continuous use it can create much less vivid and urgent writing.  Filtering language creates a buffer between the consciousness of the reader and the experience of the character.  Most writers probably do not actually intend this buffer to be there and the result is a sense of weaker narrative that they can't figure out how to correct.

Fortunately, as common as filtering is to do for modern writers, and as honest as a mistake as it can be in the modern world, it is quite easy to find and remove once one knows what to look for.  And your prose will be much stronger for it.

Consider this simple example:

Jeff walked across the street.  He saw a child playing in the middle of the intersection.

Or...

Jeff walked across the street.  A child was playing in the middle of the intersection. 

We already know that we're in the consciousness of Jeff.  We don't really need to be reminded of that. It is more vivid and direct to consider the image directly.  The additional filter of "he saw" serves to make us more aware of Jeff himself than of what Jeff is experiencing.  It is a subtle form of telling instead of showing...which is usually not what a writer wants.

If you can't see the difference in this minor example, let me continue the scene in a slightly overblown way to illustrate the point further.

Jeff walked across the street.  He saw a child playing in the middle of the intersection. Jeff noticed that the child didn't seem to realize that he had wandered from the sidewalk into the street.  He gazed down the road, and there he saw a big rig truck tearing towards the intersection.  Jeff guessed the truck was doing at least fifty or sixty.  Jeff could see that the driver was looking out the left window at a pretty girl.  It looked like he hadn't even noticed the intersection, much less the child.  It seemed impossible to Jeff that the truck could stop in time.

Now there are other problems with this prose because I've overblown the filtering.  You deserve a kick in the soft bits if you use your protagonist's name this many times in a single paragraph, but you get the idea.  Now, we already know this is about Jeff.  We don't need to draw so much attention to him as the observer.  Consider:

Jeff walked across the street.  A child was playing in the middle of the intersection, not realizing that he had wandered from the sidewalk into the street.  Down the road, a big rig truck tore towards the intersection doing at least fifty or sixty.  The driver was looking out the left window at a pretty girl, and hadn't even noticed the intersection, much less the child.  It would have been impossible for the truck to stop in time.

Notice the immediate sense of increased urgency?  Notice how much more this scene pops?  Now we're not watching Jeff live his life.  We're living Jeff's life.  From a purely pragmatic point of view, pulling out all the filtering phrases also gave us access to a much more natural sentence flow.  We were able to use complex and compound sentences more organically since we didn't have to constantly stop and remind everyone that this was according to Jeff.

It reminds me of The Golden Child cinematography.  They kept showing these quick takes in the action sequences of people turning to see things.  THEN they would show us what it was they saw.  It got distracting after a while.  Don't show me the characters looking at things.  Show me what they're looking at.

I will concède that he is fun to look at, if you will concède that two hours of watching him looking around is only made even minimally acceptable by the demon at the end and the "just want some chips" joke.

A special kind of filtering occurs during flashbacks, so be careful there as well.  ("Chris remembered how he had once eaten an entire extra cheese pizza all by himself.  He recalled how the next day he had sat on the toilet and prayed to God.  He thought back to how, by the end, he had wished for death's sweet embrace.")  Your reader is a smart cookie.  They weren't born on a cabbage patch and spend their days drooling over copies of Byron.  They are at least literate if they're reading you, and that means they can follow the fact that you are setting a scene in the past.  You do not need to constantly remind them with phrases like "thought back to" and "he remembered" and "she recalled."

If you're really worried about ambiguity, you can do it once.  Reiterate it every once in a while if you're writing an extended flashback or using other tricks of narrative time (like I did with "Falling From Orbit") and then let it go.  ("Chris once ate an entire extra cheese pizza by himself.  The next day he sat on the toilet and prayed to God.  In the end, he wished for death's sweet embrace.")  The filter just serves to pull your reader out of the flashback and make them aware of the awareness.

Of course (speaking of golden things) the golden rule of writing is that if you can "earn it" then you can use whatever kind of language you want.  If you have a conscious reason to put an additional layer of separation between your reader and the focalizer then filtering language might be exactly what you want.

Prompts Related to filtering:  Prompt 1