Profanity in your writing

[sknox]

I tend to regard it as lazy writing because it so often is, right up there with intesifiers like "very" or use of punctuation as intensifiers. The rest of the writing is going to have to compensate. It certainly can, but if it doesn't, then I'm out.

I would distinguish between narrative and dialog. For dialog, a number of good comments have already been made. If the obscenities are in the narrative, even if in a first person narrator, I'm going to be more critical.

 

[Extollager]

In keeping with the Law of (presumably) Unintended Consequences, the effect of pervasive profanity and obscenity in current fiction is to make older fiction, where they are absent, increasingly alien to today's readers, as does our stringent avoidance of "man" for the human species (and similar usages), which were uncontroversial for centuries. Likewise, the predominance of extensive passages of dialogue, but the reduction of description, in current fiction makes older fiction, with its often abundant word-picture-making, that much more forbidding to readers unfamiliar with it, who may indicate how uncomfortable they feel by referring to (say) Dickens or Charlotte Brontë or Jane Austen as having written "Old English."

 

[JunkMonkey]

You are right about this. They greet each other with "Feck" and "Arse" and ask where the "Gurls" and the "Drink" are.

I don't think that was the CoE .

 

[Jo Zebedee]

I don't think that was the CoE .

That would be an ecumenical matter

 

[Swank]

I wonder if this is genre-specific? The question (or concerns) are remarkably proscriptive when it comes to fiction.

Don’t overdo it. Write authentically and it’ll be no different from any other book on the bookstore shelf; irrespective of profanity.

Each to their own, of course, but the amount of advice against swearing makes me wonder about the generational impact on this question. Just because one does not like or approve of swearing should have no bearing on what we push on others in terms of expectations.

As far as the market is concerned swearing is a non-issue. Don’t overdo it and it’s fine and if anyone clutches at their pearls in horror, that’s their business.

To clarify, I'm not against swearing. I think curse words are conspicuous, like exclamation marks. So you should use them conscious of the way they stand out on the page.


Some stories have enough swearing that they just become part of the vernacular the reader becomes accustomed to.

 

[Montero]

And if there is going to be swearing in dialogue, you probably want the first occurrence in the first couple of pages, so any reader coming to it won't think it is sweetness and light, buy the book and then go "oh bother and drat look at the language" when they're a bit further in.

 

[Extollager]

J. D. Rajotte, cursing, obscenity, etc. are different from other objectionable things in writing in an important way that introduces an ethical consideration. I may write about violent crime, feelings of hatred, wicked acts, etc., but I'm writing about them. But when I write profanity, obscenity, etc., I'm writing them. If I write about an act of cruelty, I don't bring that event into actual existence. If I write obscene language, though, I have brought it into existence. My act creates an instance of obscene language that didn't exist before. It doesn't matter that it's Joe, a character in my story, who says the brutal thing, because the whole story is my saying, my verbal act.


This is not to say that there is no ethical issue also in the description of cruel actions. While a description of a cruel action is not a cruel action, it does invite a reader, through use of the medium of words, to consider to contemplate, such an action in imagination. The odds are great that the reader will not attempt to enact the cruel action, but it may remain alive in his or her imagination, and, myself, I don't see imagination as somehow a compartment in my consciousness in which any amount of "radioactive" substance may be safely stored. But this is a separate matter from the one your initial posting raised. It might help to clarify the uniqueness of the topic you did raise and its relationship to other things that might be wrong in storytelling.

 

[Steve Harrison]

I consider swear words to be words first and profanity second, and, like all other words, available for use when required and justified.

Now if only I knew when they were required and justified...

 

[Brian G Turner]

Some of my beta readers, (My wife and mom) think that it's a bit much and that the frequency of the swears takes away from the impact that they could have with less.

A couple of pointers here:

- family aren't the best beta-readers, unless they are big readers in their own right
- it's true that swearing can be made much more impactful the less it's used...
- ...but if that's the criticism that stands out, I'd suggest it's illustrative of an underlying problem such as too much dialogue and not enough happening to engage

 

[sknox]

>illustrative of an underlying problem
This is great advice. Regardless of what your beta reader notices, it's always a good exercise to ask yourself if there isn't something more at issue than just what the reader reported.

 

[paranoid marvin]

Swearing might be realistic, but something being common and real doesn't mean that it is necessary or useful. We all use the toilet multiple times a day, yet it is rarely mentioned in literature or film. When it is, there is usually a purpose. Swearing is generally similar.

Swearing also runs the risk of making a character or situation comedic when not intended.

Yes, we all go to the toilet, blink, break wind, cough, scratch ourselves etc every day. There are also long periods - even in the life of an adventurous character - where nothing of any consequence at all happens, but it doesn't need to be mentioned in a story to make it realistic. We also occasionally stumble, stutter, slur, mis-pronounce or forget what we were about to say; want we don't do is to deliver perfect lines of dialogue. It doesn't detract from the realism of a story not to have 'natural speech' or natural mannerisms in a story. I think that the dialogue in books is usually what the characters would have intended to say, rather than what they did say or how they said it.

 

[AllanR]

It doesn't detract from the realism of a story not to have 'natural speech' or natural mannerisms in a story.

If one tried to write as people actually speak, it would be very hard to read imo.

 

[Vladd67]

I can agree about not delivering perfect lines, last night I was reading a book about farms to my sons, and when it got to a part about pigs being trained to find truffles instead of saying pigs are noted for their good sense of smell, I told my sons that pigs are noted for their good sense of humour.

 

[Astro Pen]

I use f*** very rarely. Usually at a moment of catastrophic realisation. Then it has impact. Occasionally with capital 'f' which adds emphatic pressure to the delivery. It must be nearly spat out.
Excessive swearing becomes tedious, out of character swearing breaks the immersion bubble, you don't want either of those.

Worth noting that even A Clockwork Orange uses far less "regular" profanity than you think it does.

I don't use the c word. Not because I'm prissy, but because it would feel contrived and disappoint rather than shock.

 

[The Big Peat]

Swearing is fairly common in mainstream literature these days best as I can tell, particularly in the UK.

Me personally, I went through a phrase of liking it, but now find it mostly a bit meh. It just feels unreal and forced most of the time. I'm dropping it from a lot of what I write.

That said, I 100% want to write an Urban Fantasy set in South London that really goes for it.

In short - use if it feels right, don't feel like it'll doom you, but accept that some won't like it.

 

[JunkMonkey]

If one tried to write as people actually speak, it would be very hard to read imo.

I guess it would sort of in a way be like you know.... because. well; it's . etc.

I was listening to my wife trying get round to tell me something she thought important yesterday and I suddenly realised I was hearing the inner working of her head. She was telling me all this stuff which she thought I needed to know (which I didn't) in random dribs and drabs. as she remembered them. Bringing all sorts of extraneous details which were in the end of absolutely no importance to the subject in hand just so she could work out what it was she was trying to get round say. It was a bizarre stream of consciousness rambling. It was, I realised, like watching the "Previously on (Insert Name of Show Here)..." bits that precede the teaser section of an episode of an American show where they bring back an all but forgotten, semi-recurring character from the previous season .

No, writing like people actually speak would be very hard to read - unless you were to transcribe the speech of an incredibly erudite and elegant speaker.

To get back on topic, during the course of this rambling she didn't say 'tits, winkle, or vibraphone' once.

 

[Toby Frost]

I wonder if this is genre-specific? The question (or concerns) are remarkably proscriptive when it comes to fiction.

Don’t overdo it. Write authentically and it’ll be no different from any other book on the bookstore shelf; irrespective of profanity.

Each to their own, of course, but the amount of advice against swearing makes me wonder about the generational impact on this question. Just because one does not like or approve of swearing should have no bearing on what we push on others in terms of expectations.

I agree.

What people tolerate varies hugely, even within the English-speaking world. Frankly, so long as children aren't being exposed to this sort of thing, I think there are much bigger fish to fry.

The story has to convince. If that means that the characters need to swear, so be it. It may be that the swearing is of the light fantasy "Zounds!" (itself derived from "Christ's wounds", a serious medieval oath) type, or uses some made-up space word (which tends to sound silly, to my mind, and hard to take seriously). If that's what's needed to convince, so be it. On the other hand, a darker story will need stronger words.

I may write about violent crime, feelings of hatred, wicked acts, etc., but I'm writing about them. But when I write profanity, obscenity, etc., I'm writing them.

I disagree with this. If a character curses, I am depicting him cursing by using a swear word on the page. I expect my readers to be able to tell that I'm neither agreeing or disagreeing with whatever he says and how he says it. I also think it's pretty irrelevant, in that if someone reads a swear word in a book I've written, they're hardly likely to start cursing where they wouldn't have done before. At the end of the day, they're grown-ups. I'm not forcing them to read it and I very much doubt that someone who buys a fantasy novel about murder is going to be pushed towards being a foul-mouthed cretin by reading rude words in it. If the question is "Does the swearing in X novel make the world worse?" my answer would be "Almost certainly not".

 

[Swank]

To get back on topic, during the course of this rambling she didn't say 'tits, winkle, or vibraphone' once.

I did have a conversation about Wankel rotary engines yesterday.

 

[JunkMonkey]

If one tried to write as people actually speak, it would be very hard to read imo.

But, I just realised - as I was listening to Stewart Lee talking about writing stand-up - it's something that some writers have to do.

 

[AnyaKimlin]

I've always taken it on a character by character basis, story by story basis even a chapter by chapter basis - some characters are just more sweary than others. They're just words and deciding to never use them is removing a rich and fertile part of our language.

In my big (taking me years to get the research right work) - I have five point of view characters and three story arcs - only one of them uses swear words and only in one of the arcs.

In a ninety minute script (my work in progress from distract me from big work's first draft) I use the f word once and very loudly. It fits. It's the only heavy duty swear word in the entire piece but it's based on the Helen Mirren quote in which she indicates she had wished she had learned to use the word earlier in life. No doubt if a national broadcaster ever used it then it would be edited out or changed. ("I pished myself, pass me a mop" had to go through compliance to get permission to be used). I kind of got a kick out of the fact it got me an adult humour/parental guidance warning.