I agree - I didn't use the word "filler" in my post because I don't know what people mean when they say it. If they mean something totally unrelated and unimportant, then of course it shouldn't be in the book.
Well, my personal take on it is, if the scene is something that expands on the characters or plot in a meaningful progressive way, then it would (hopefully) be exactly that, another scene in the story. When I think of filler, and please forgive the reference, I think of those episodes in most Anime where the group of characters decide to go to a bath-house in the middle of an isolated forest just to enjoy the spas and take a break from the rest of the story, or the episodes at the beach. Those two are pretty common, but there are longer running shows that have different types of filler. Anime is a pretty extreme example, since filler episodes are in almost every series, and a lot of storytelling in Anime is pretty bad anyway. I mean, if what your adding to the story isn't filler, then it's just more story right? Filler is something that would be put in to "fill" the gaps of the actual plot, at least that's how I take it. Thoughts? EDIT: Here's a TV Tropes article on Filler: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Filler
Filler is padding, put in to extend the length of a piece. (As in the Merriam-Webster definition I quoted earlier, taken from their website.) The link given by @MythMachine gives more or less the same definition. In other words, filler is put in deliberately to satisfy the look of a page or to increase overall word count. It's a technical term for something you create on purpose, to affect the length of the piece. If we're talking about scenes that seemed to matter when you wrote them, but turn out later to be a distraction from the story, I wouldn't classify those as filler. You can either cut them out, or alter them in some way so they do matter. How to recognise these kinds of scenes is another topic, really, but one that's certainly worth discussing. These kinds of scenes probably have a name, but I can't recall what it might be.
