Your Special Little Friend, Profanity

By Phil Elmore

How often should you swear? How often should your characters swear? Even among earnest authors telling serious stories, this can be perplexing. If you never use profanity, you may find yourself engaged in “Breakfast Club” editing, replacing terms that make much more sense with nonsense words. (The TV edit of Breakfast Club famously replaced profanity with ridiculous dubs like “Flip you!” and so on — things that no human being would ever say in a moment of anger.) But if you do use profanity, you run the risk of offending or alienating part of your audience. So what do you do?

Some of this is genre specific, although I’ve been surprised a time or two. For example, the Young Adult (YA) market is one in which I would have thought cleanliness was prized, yet not long ago I did a voice over for a successful YA novel that included what I would consider quiet a bit of profanity. I remember swearing a blue streak in Junior High when my parents weren’t around, so it’s not the case that kids preteens and teens don’t know the lingo. Still, it surprised me that swearing was acceptable to that particular market, perhaps on a case by case basis.

I’ve had readers thank me for writing “clean” stories that I did not intend to sanitize, specifically a couple of my Executioner novels for Gold Eagle/Harlequin. These are books where profanity is generally accepted as part of the genre. I didn’t set out not to do it; it just never came up. The audience for action novels, though, is generally pretty tolerant of profanity, at least overall. Assuming you haven’t been given a directive to keep a manuscript clean, or the genre doesn’t demand it, you still have a choice to make: Do you swear, or don’t you?

Recent serious problems with his past aside, Bill Cosby once exemplified the “clean” comedian. I can think of hearing him swear only once, and that was during his famous Bill Cosby: Himself special. Reacting to people who claimed they used drugs to enhance or intensify their personalities, he quipped, “Yes… but what if you’re an asshole?” It was hilarious specifically because Cosby didn’t usually curse.

I tend to think curse words are our special little friends, who should be brought out for emphasis only. Most of the time, you should hold them in reserve. If you overuse them, they lose their punch. If you use them sparingly, they can punctuate a dramatic or comedic moment in a way that is very powerful. When writing an action story, for example, my baseline is one “major” swear word, up to and including an f-bomb, per novel or novella. This allows me to use it for punch or emphasis for major scenes or moments. I’ve made exceptions and there are times when realistic dialogue demands some profanity — but these moments are fewer and farther between than you might think.

Unfortunately, there is a trend in mainstream online outlets to use profanity even in headlines, often when cursing out conservatives or other public figures who are considered fair game by the more popular infotainment sites. Here I’m thinking of sites like Buzzfeed and the Daily Dot, but there are other online news portals that have begun resorting to profanity in what used to be a professional setting. I dislike this practice intensely. I think that, rather than making the author or the outlet look hip, raw, and cutting-edge, it just makes everyone involved look amateurish and sleazy.

In parallel to that, I’m aware that some authors use profanity to appear edgy. Producing a vulgar manuscript, a book that is full of profanity in every sentence, isn’t good or bad. Neither is employing low-brow bathroom humor. If you can do it well, nothing succeeds so much as success. The problem is that I’ve rarely seen this done well. More often than not, an author who does this is just overcompensating for a lack of skill or finesse. It’s a gimmick, and if you have to rely on gimmicks, you’re not producing quality work. You don’t look edgy or down-to-earth when you do it; you just look childish. Giving your book a subtitle like, “Shit’s about to get real,” will ultimately hurt you more than it will help you– mostly because it makes you look stupid.

Refusing to use profanity as a crutch forces you to focus on language, on dialogue. Ultimately, this will produce better writing, which is the true reward for your time and effort. You don’t need gimmicks and you don’t need to risk alienating potential readers. Let your work speak for itself on its quality, not for its parental rating.

This entry was posted
on Monday, October 26th, 2015 at 11:11 and is filed under Blog.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.