Swear Words

IdiotsRUs said:

I'm afraid I shall have to call bollocks on that one.

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As I said, I don't agree 100% but I do think there is something to it. It's more linked to something like "show don't tell" (if I got that one right). Show how the person feels and reacts rather than throwing out curses with nothing or little to support it. It's not about never using curses but what you wrap them in.

There is no doubt it can be used as a crutch. So can just about anything - adverbs, adjectives, lazy characterisation, stereotyping....

Swearing isn't automatically a sign of the uncreative writer. Swearing for the sake of it (as well as gratuitous anything else) might be. Thing is, if you're character would show they are pissed off by shouting fuck at the top of their voice, well then, they do - if it's a part of their character. How you decide to show it is up to you and what you want to achieve.

But I think your teacher may have been a little extreme, from the sounds, which is what I was calling bollocks on. It's like saying never use adverbs! There's pretty much no 'never' in writing. Except possibly 'never put bestiality into a children's picture book' and 'never bore your reader'.

Saying never is what is restricting(or always, as in always show don;t tell. Sometimes the tell is the right thing to do). Work out when it works and when you're using it as a crutch, and you're gold.

IdiotsRUs said:

There's pretty much no 'never' in writing. Except possibly 'never put bestiality into a children's picture book'

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Why did nobody tell me this before?

People swear. If there are people in your book, maybe they should too??

IdiotsRUs said:

Except possibly 'never put bestiality into a children's picture book' ...

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You are evil.
I'll never be able to scrub that picture out of my mind... together with the unicorn dildo you mentioned in another thread...

Not boring the readers (or driving them insane) is probably the most important thing of all.

I write mostly male characters and my characters swear. Not constantly, but when angry, during sex, and when excited, the f-bomb drops. Yep!
I'm sorry, but men cuss...flat out cuss. They may not do it in front of an audience, but I'll tell ya what! I have worked around men my whole life (chose a male dominant profession) and I don't care how proper they are in the office/garage/kitchen...get them in a room with the 'buds?' Watch out! Hahahhaahahahha! Hell, work with them long enough like I have, and there's no censorship at all! Some of the funniest things I have ever heard were men chatting it up amongst themselves and the language flies! Pays to be the boss with an open ceiling on your office! BWahahaahahha! Too F'n funny!

Seriously though, it depends. I agree with many others for the most part, but.... Here's the thing with character stereotypes. If a character is a mellow, withdrawn computer geek, one might assume they may be more 'proper' with their language, but who's to say what that person might be like with a drink or two, in bed, blah, blah, blah. Follow me? If you want realism...really think about your characters persona, environments, associated characters. Really research men in their own environment, women too. Hit a club, a bar, a convention, a concert. Be a fly on the wall so to say. Oh...and get a bunch of women together? Holy Crap! Sometimes I think they are WORSE!

The only made-up swear word that I can recall ever liking was "Puckernuts" from Elfquest. The reason I enjoyed it, as opposed to abysmal censor copouts like "frak," is that it paired with other cultural dialogue to provide an alternate societal picture. You feel like puckernuts is what these people would actually say, rather than what they're saying because you want to keep a PG rating.

So, if you're contemplating using replacement swearing, I would encourage you to go the extra step and come up with other cultural dialogue so that it doesn't just look like you're just making lame attempts to skirt the "seven words you can't say."

Harlan Ellison never seemed to have a problem using profanity. That was a dude who, you read his stuff, you know that's how he talked. He knew how to swear.

The first chapter of my novel contains a lot of profanity and OVERWHELMINGLY it's the one piece of negative feedback I've gotten. Not "too much profanity," just any profanity. At a fundamental level a lot of Fantasy readers obviously come to the genre with certain expectations and having one character call another a "pigfucker" sorta kicks those expectations in the nuts.

One reader said "But did people really talk like that back then?" Now this is, to me, a very revealing question. There is no "back then," here. This is not a novel set in Medieval England. It's set in a deliberate riff on that kind of culture, but with critical and deliberate differences underneath the hood. But she, thanks to the genius of a certain Mr. Tolkien, just assumes *all* fantasy novels take place in a kind of shared universe. "Fantasyland."

The other issue is that...yes. People really did use all kinds of inventive invective "back then." They even wrote it down. There are fart jokes in Chaucer. But quite obviously people come to Fantasy for a certain *illusion*, they want to spend time in a certain kind of world and if they're committed to that, then I have to conclude I am not the author for them.

I think the choice has to be down not only to what kind of work you're producing, but how comfortable *you are* with the language. I wouldn't attempt it if it doesn't come natural to you. Readers will detect that.

Modern swearwords throw me from a fantasy novel just as much as if someone cried out, "She just totally unfriend me!" "What do you mean, unfriended?" "Well, she said we couldn't be friends...I'm sooo totally mad!" Modern swears screams modern to me. I guess it's also jarring because most people I know don't swear -- men included. Not really part of the culture where I am, so I always find it's odd that people stick it into fantasy cultures, as if the f-word is some kind of cross-cultural phenomenon.

Mistborn did a great job of this; everyone swears by saying "Lord Ruler", the name of their immortal, god-like tyrant-king. It adds to the worldbuilding and it's seamless in the narrative -- it's not just people in coats with modern speech patterns. I thought Scott Westerfeld also did a great job in his YA novel "Leviathan" of giving the airmen a jargon that sounded like a bunch of turn-of-the-century kids swearing without using any modern swear words. I guess I just like worldbuilding, but I'd always rather see an author come up with something that matches the world and feels intuitive rather than throwing in modern swearing.

Smeg! My daughters are now Red Dwarf fans as well and use this all the time. LOL.

Unless it's a satire, swears throw me off in some sci-fi because language always changes and evolves. My current WIP takes place in the far future, and I use a made-up swear. I made sure it was short and contained at least one plosive. It's working well in my story, and I can use it liberally without getting pulled out of the story. Interestingly, my dialogue also has less slang in comparison to another WIP I finished.

My WIP is now being read by a beta reader. I hand him a few chapters at a time, and he liked how I used made-up words. Science fiction is fun that way!

I've been on this board for a year, and I swear I've seen this topic come up at least a dozen times since then. It's all been said before. Do what you want. It's your story. Just be aware of what you are doing and why. And read the other threads. There is some good advice in there (and lots of ranting and stupid comments too -- very entertaining).