The problem is that for a long time, this catch phrase is all we really know about the character. He isn’t given much of a history, nor even much of a reputation. He’ll get argumentative about something, and drop the catch phrase seven or eight times, but then he’ll use it in jest in some other situation. It has no meaning. It isn’t clear what this phrase is meant to convey. Ollie’s catch phrase is a substitute for real character-building. Until Ollie’s character is developed, each time we hear “take it outside,” we’re actually hearing, “accept this hollow phrase as a substitution for the character I haven’t gotten around to building yet. ”

This isn’t the first time writers for Harry’s Law have done something like this. In the first season, attorney Josh Peyton isn’t given a catch phrase, per se. Rather, he has this annoying habit of repeating himself, rapid-fire, three or four times: “You-know-what-I-mean? You-know-what-I-mean? You-know-what-I-mean?” This, too, is meant to stand in for character until the writer could get around to writing a full episode dedicated to him.

We’ve come to expect quirks and catch phrases from our characters. They do make characters stand out—something about quirks helps us organize and sort through the people we know. But quirks alone are not character.

So if character is not a quirk or a catch phrase, what is? Characters are, quite simply, human beings. They are an amalgam of history, society, choices, motivations, desires, and appearance. A character, especially one as central to a story as Ollie is in Harry’s Law, needs to be rounded out and developed.

A catch phrase cannot stand in for the homework that ought to have been done for a character. In fact, an effective catch phrase can only come out of a person whose character is deeply understood. It is a brief embodiment of the person we know. The catch phrase should refer to what is already known about the character, so it can be a kind of shorthand for remembering what we’ve already learned.

Whether blatant or not, whether named or not, every story is told by someone at some time. This doesn’t mean that all narrators are the sort that intervene to tell you what’s happening in the story, à la the TV show Arrested Development. The narrator is the intelligence—or intelligences—whose point-of-view, voice, and psychic distance are used in telling the story. Those who study stories and storytelling agree that three well-established types of narrator exist: the first person narrator, the third person limited or third person subjective narrator, and the third person omniscient narrator. Each has its own character and technique. Each has strengths and weaknesses in telling a story. And the writer must carefully consider which narrative style works best for his or her particular piece.

As with any summary categorization of styles, there are inevitably a group of sub-styles that crop up. One sub-style that I have been thinking about lately is what I call the third person observant style. In my mind, this style falls under the third person omniscient technique, and is the ultimate example of “show don’t tell” writing. (For some examples of how to fix show-don’t-tell problem sentences read this post from Lane Diamond.) Where the typically third person omniscient narrator can move in and out of character’s thoughts, feelings, and observations, the third person observant technique eschews entering altogether. The narrator isn’t concerned so much with the thoughts and feelings of his characters as he is with sensory input. The narrator helps us access what is seen, smelled, heard, tasted, and touched. If these things happen to express a mood or emotion, so be it, but usually the reader has to infer the emotion felt from the sensory data the narrator provides.

For example, if we know a woman’s child has just died, the third person observant narrator isn’t going to delve into her agony, telling us that her hear wrenched or that she was filled with sorrow. Rather, he’ll tell us about her tears, her wailing, a tremor in her voice, or her silence. If the third person observant narrator has something of an expressionistic cast, he may focus on a corner of the setting that can also help us understand the emotion involved: peeling paint on the walls, a blood-red sunset, a cat pouncing on a mouse.

The primary rule of the third person observant technique is no delving. The narrator has to stay out of his character’s heads. He can only say what is sensed.

Does this mean that the third person observant narrator is more objective than the other narrative styles? No. Telling a story is still all about making choices. The narrator always chooses which details to include and which to exclude. By his choices, the narrator manipulates the reader’s perceptions. The third person observant narrator still has an agenda. He still draws the reader from point A to point B and beyond. He still sets the reader up to draw certain conclusions. The narrator chooses the details that make the story.

When is it best to use the third person observant technique? This technique is particularly effective for extremely heavy topics. If the writer is wrestling with the Holocaust, for example, accessing the thoughts and feelings of the characters can fall prey to two fatal shortcomings: levity or melodrama. Writing about heavy topics is hard. It can be frightening to enter the mind of someone who is truly suffering. The human reaction is to resist the entrance, which can mean that the writer doesn’t or can’t access his character’s emotions deeply enough to honestly and accurately portray them. Or, the writer is attempting to transcribe emotion into language, and failing. Some thoughts and feelings transcend words. Either way, the writing is too light for the situation.

Melodrama is a particularly dishonest form of storytelling. Rather than digging into the character’s experience, the narrator assumes he knows what the character is experiencing. If a mother has lost a child, then the narrator assumes that the mother would react by falling to her knees and sobbing. In melodrama, experience is reduced to an equation: if A then B; situation x leads to reaction y.

Heavy topics give rise to complex emotions and situations. To delve into the mind of the characters and sort through all the contradictory thoughts and feelings would bog down a story too much. To keep things moving, the third person observant narrator relies on the human ability to empathize. The reader is his own best storyteller. By focusing on the characters from the outside, the narrator gives the reader just the right amount of clues to be able to sense pain, joy, confusion, anger, etc. The reader fills in the narrative’s gaps with his own experience and ability to empathize.

Whether writing about the violence of frontier life or survival at the end of the world in The Road, the writer Cormac McCarthy makes the best use of third person observant storytelling. His novel Blood Meridian has some of the most harrowing scenes of violence anywhere in literature, and yet this violence is approached with little emotion.

The kid’s horse sank beneath him with a long pneumatic sigh. He had already fired his rifle and now he sat on the ground and fumbled with his shotpouch. A man near him sat with an arrow hanging out of his neck. He was bent slightly as if in prayer. The kid would have reached for the bloody hoop-iron point but then he saw that the man wore another arrow in his breast to the fletching and he was dead. Everywhere there were horses down and men scrambling and he saw a man who sat charging his rifle while blood ran from his ears and he saw men with their revolvers disassembled trying to fit the spare loaded cylinders they carried and he saw men kneeling who tilted and clasped their shadows on the ground and saw men lanced and caught up by the hair and scalped standing and he saw the horses of war trample down the fallen and a little whitefaced pony with one clouded eye leaned out of the murk and snapped at him like a dog and was gone.¹

McCarthy’s style is more like reportage than narrative, in some ways, because of its sole focus on facts. There is no meditation on emotions or thoughts, no necessary meaning derived from the violence. McCarthy lays that gigantic burden at the feet of the reader. And yet, his writing gives us the framework for a rich, meaningful reading experience because it opens the reader up to his own ability to empathize. McCarthy doesn’t tell the reader of the kid’s horror—the reader supplies that himself. But because the horror comes from the reader, it becomes all the more effective.

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¹McCarthy, Cormac. Blood Meridian or the Evening Redness in the West. (New York: Vintage, 1992), 53.

Ms. Saller’s suggestions are right on the money. I can remember countless times, both as a writer and an editor, where being just a little more aware of my writing made for a far better end product.

One of the biggest revelations of my MFA program was the idea of the personal tic. If you’ve ever done any transcription work, you’ve undoubtedly noticed how, when talking with a person, his or her speech is filled with um’s and ah’s and like’s. These are filler words that we throw into our conversation to fill time while our brains are thinking of what to say next and how to express it. I turns out that we do something similar as we write. Various filler words—”indeed,” “as though,” “in addition,” to name just few—litter our writing. Again, it’s usually a matter of continuing the physical act of expression, the writing or typing, while the brain is formulating what to say or do next.

My default filler word has always been “indeed.” It wasn’t until an MFA adviser brought it to my attention that I realized I was using the word entirely too often. Since then, I’ve tried to make myself aware of what words I’m putting down just for filler, and what words are bedrock content—the stuff that, if omitted, would undo what I want to say.

What about you? What filler words have you noticed in your writing? How did you become aware of them, and what do you do to try to edit them out?