Tag: cursing

4 Clever Ways to Write Around Curse Words

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Image by Scott Ogle

Image by Scott Ogle

Following last week’s post on limiting your use of curse words in fiction to get the most power out of them, here are a few examples of how to get around them.

In The Cardturner by Louis Sachar (the guy who wrote Holes, which you should read), the narrator, who is a seventeen-year-old boy, doesn’t include any strong language, but at one point explains:

I should tell you that so far, when I’ve recounted my conversations with Cliff, I’ve left out certain descriptive words. It’s not that we’re especially vulgar or crude. It’s just that those kinds of words seem worse in print than when we would just say them in an offhand way. I think I’ve been able to omit those words and still give you a fairly accurate account of what was said between us.

However, if I were to repeat what Cliff said when I asked him if he wanted to play bridge, I’d have to leave out every other word. Let’s just say he wasn’t overjoyed with the idea.

Still, he was my best friend, and when he realized I was serious (adverb deleted), and that it was important to me (adverb deleted), he agreed to play (adverb deleted).

This character gives us several similar asides throughout the book, so this totally works. It’s funny, and when he uses his little parenthetical deletions later on, we know why.

Podkayne of Mars, by Robert. A. Heinlein (the guy who wrote The Moon is a Harsh Mistress; you should read that, too) is another first person narrative – this time a teenage girl keeping a diary. The book is full of her personal editing style (you may remember I used it as an example of a strong voice), so it makes perfect sense when you get to this point:

“He certainly does mean it!” Clark said shrilly. “You illegal obscenity! I delete all over your censored!” And I knew he was really worked up, because Clark is contemptuous of vulgar idioms; he says they denote an inferior mind.

It cracks me up.

But what if your book has a much more serious tone?

The Outsiders, by S.E. Hinton (the same girl who wrote…a bunch of stuff that wasn’t good as The Outsiders), is narrated by a fourteen-year-old wrong-side-of-the-tracks boy who’s wanted in connection with a murder. He’s surrounded by people who swear like sailors, but only includes language (mild language at that) in the tensest moments. The rest of the time he does this:

I fought to get loose, and almost did for a second; then they tightened up on me and the one on my chest slugged me a couple times. So I lay still, swearing at them between gasps.

Or this:

“They’re running!” I heard a voice yell joyfully. “Look at the dirty ——- run!”

This can work in third-person narratives as well.

There’s one part in The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien (who also wrote…wait, you don’t know who Tolkien is? What’s wrong with you???), where tragedy actually transcends words, as Treebeard comes upon a field of his fallen friends, and says:

“There is no curse in Elvish, Entish, or the tongues of Men bad enough for this treachery.”

Granted, we can’t copy this, or risk turning it into a cliché, but it demonstrates a certain genius we should all try to learn from. I’m sure Tolkien was capable of crafting a fantasy-world cuss word that would sound perfectly abhorrent, but his choice here was much more powerful. He has turned a moment, which by last week’s argument would have required a curse word, and raised the level of emotion above the curse.

This is the kind of art we should be striving for. Not necessarily to avoid certain words – but to avoid depending on them. Reach for something deeper. Reach for a kind of hurt so gut-wrenching that an f-bomb seems, not inappropriate, but inadequate. 

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To curse, or not to curse: profanity in fiction

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Image by Ian Soper

As literary influencers, as preservers of words, as Guardians of the Language, are writers forbidden—or on the other hand, required—to use profanity?

I could explain my own religious reasons for not swearing (I opt instead for terms like “baloney sandwiches”), but half of you don’t care about that. Because no matter what I believe, it can’t answer the question:

What if one of my characters doesn’t give a flip?

So I’m not going to tell you to never use profanity in your work. And I’m not going to preach at you. But I will advise you to use profanity sparingly—and include purely artistic reasons why.

But before that, we need to understand what swear words are.

“Just words”?

You might think swear words are simply synonyms for other words; synonyms society only considers different.

Hank Green of the Vlogbrothers begs to differ:

Once a word becomes a curse, it loses its original meaning pretty fast. Like I’m not talking about any particular sphincter when I call someone an [bleep]**. It’s almost as if my brain has a different place for storing curse words than it does for storing normal words. Holy [bleep]; it does. Language and linguistics happen in a recently-developed and very complex part of the brain in the left hemisphere. Swearing, on the other hand, happens in the emotional bit, in the limbic system. Swear words are stored and accessed in a completely different way. So next time you think ‘there’s nothing different about swearwords’ – there is. They’re physiologically different for us…You can think of swear words as being stored in our brains as units of emotional expression. Almost like a laugh or a scream or crying. It blurs the line between linguistics and emotion.

Units of emotional expression. Remember that.

 

Here are the reasons you might swear in fiction:

(and, consequently, the reasons to avoid it)

1. That’s the way people really talk

The thing about fictional dialogue is, it’s just an illusion of the real thing. Even when we replace Gs with apostrophes, use double negatives, and add in “um”s and “uh”s, we’re just creating the illusion of accent and bad grammar and stammering. If we actually wrote the way people talk, readers would have a hard time deciphering it. If you’ve ever had to transcribe real human speech, you know what I’m talking about.

So even though you might swear with every other word in real life, it isn’t practical to write dialogue that way. It’s harsher in print, and the repetition clouds the meaning. It’s hard to sift through all the f-bombs to get to the point.

So for clarity’s sake, what you want is to create the illusion of swearing.*

2. There’s no other way to express XYZ

Maybe your character is extremely surprised, distressed, or broken-hearted. If you’re writing about a father watching his daughter slowly decay from cancer, somehow “stupid cancer” just doesn’t cut it when she dies. This is just the kind of situation in which one of those units of emotional expression seems necessary.

It’s also the reason you should minimize—or even eliminate—swear words from the rest of the book.

If your character drops f-bombs in every chapter, when you finally get to the climax, the word is meaningless. You have sucked all the oomph out of it. When you use swear words that often, they cease to be units of emotional expression and instead become filler words—in much the same way some people use the word “literally.”

 

In short, profanity is powerful. But only when used sparingly. If you use it all the time, you’re wasting it.

*Next week, I’ll give some real examples of authors who found clever ways to create the illusion of swearing.

 

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** For the record, Hank actually bleeped himself. I recommend watching the entire video (only 4 minutes).

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