Tag: fiction writing

4 Clever Ways to Write Around Curse Words

  By ,

 

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. 

—

To curse, or not to curse: profanity in fiction

  By

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.

 

—

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

–

The government is researching storytelling

  By

Just a tidbit today. I’m afraid the paying job has used up my quota of brain power for the week. But I ran across this fascinating fact a couple of weeks ago and wanted to share it:

A U.S. government agency called DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), which develops new technology for the military, put out a request for research on narrative – that’s right. Storytelling. And I quote:

DARPA is soliciting innovative research proposals in the areas of (1) quantitative analysis of narratives, (2) understanding the effects narratives have on human psychology and its affiliated neurobiology, and (3) modeling, simulating, and sensing-especially in stand-off modalities-these narrative influences. Proposers to this effort will be expected to revolutionize the study of narratives and narrative influence by advancing narrative analysis and neuroscience so as to create new narrative influence sensors, doubling status quo capacity to forecast narrative influence. [check out the source here]

Okay, aside from consternation over yet another thing our tax dollars are paying for, this gives me three different feelings:

  • Fear. This is a power I don’t want the government to have.
  • Comfort. If I had to pick one country to have this power it would be mine (sorry my non-American friends, I admit I’m biased).
  • Self-satisfaction. I TOLD you storytelling could be a powerful weapon! See? The government agrees with me!!!

What do you think? Tell me in the comments!

—

 

How to Start Writing a Novel in Three Easy Steps

  By
Blank page

Don't fear the blank page - photo by D. Sharon Pruitt

–

We talk a lot on here about various stages of the writing process, but a quick glance at the Internet reveals several people who want to write books but have no idea how to get started. Well, my friends, here’s how.

1. Getting the Idea

You’ve got to start with an idea. This can be any number of things. It can be a character (“cheesemaker who loves books and has an ugly dog named Ahab”). It can be a partial plot (“bored millionaire attempts to take over the world”). It can be a setting (“a space station 500 years in the past”). Or a single scene (“faun with umbrella under lamppost in snowy wood”).

What’s your favorite kind of book to read? What do you daydream about? Typically, if a storyline or setting is interesting enough for you to daydream about it multiple times, it’s a good thing to start writing about.

While you’re waiting for that idea, try writing some short fiction (prompts here weekly, folks). That’ll get you some practice, and you may even stumble on an idea with enough legs to become a novel.

2. Plotting

If you don’t know where the story is going, you’re likely to get bored with it fast. But don’t worry about planning every detail at first—most of it is likely to change as you do the actual writing. A quick list of major events in the story, in chronological order, is a good start.

3. Facing the Blank Page

Now comes the part so many writers seem to fear. Actually writing. Let me help you with this:

Your first draft is going to be terrible.

It’s supposed to be terrible.

The point of the first draft is to get down everything you know about the story, as fast as possible. It’s to get you started. So quit worrying about finding the perfect words or structuring the perfect sentence. Quit worrying about being eloquent or poetic. Just get some ink on paper. Because before you perfect the story, you have to discover it, and to discover it, you have to dive in and write it.

Reassure yourself that no one else will ever read this draft. Give yourself the freedom to write badly, honestly, and with vulnerability. I guarantee you the final draft will look nothing like the first draft. But I also guarantee that you can’t write the final, glorious draft until you write the first, terrible draft.

And while it’s okay to edit a tiny bit as you write, restrain yourself—don’t spend hours rearranging a paragraph you’ll just end up cutting later (there’s a 99% chance* you will cut it later).

A Final Warning

Writing a novel is will be the hardest thing you’ll ever do. You will deal with constant discouragement, from the beginning stages to getting published and beyond—if you get published—and I’ll tell you right now, your chances aren’t good. Nobody’s are. But you know what?

It’s still worth it. 100%.

—

What’s keeping you from starting a book?

—

*Yes, I pulled this number out of thin air. It’s true, nonetheless.

–

How to edit your novel: 5 more practical tips that really work

  By ,

 Continued from last week’s Part One: The Forest

 –

photo by David Mellis

Now we move in for a close up, a focus more on the words and sentence structures than on the story itself. But let’s say you’ve got the grammar stuff down. How else do you clean up your prose?

Part Two: The Trees

Clarity and Flow

1. Compare sentence and paragraph lengths.* Take a sample chunk of your manuscript—say, one to two pages—and, highlight each sentence in alternating colors. The first sentence blue, the second red, the third blue again and so on. Then, take a step back and look at it. There should be a variety of long and short sentences: if all your sentences are about the same length, that’s a sign of bad flow, and you’ll need to do some tweaking.

Bonus tip: Different parts of the story may require different types of flow. Intensify action scenes, like fights or chases, by using more short sentences.

Then, take a sample chapter and do the same thing, but highlighting paragraphs this time. There should be a variety of paragraph lengths.

2. Compare sentence starts.* Using the same samples outlined in #1, highlight the first word of every sentence and then compare them. This helps you ensure a variety of sentence structures. Be on the lookout for pronouns and names. I’ve often had four or five sentences in a row beginning with “She did such-and-such.” Yuck. It makes the prose choppy and repetitive. Rearrange a few of these sentences to improve flow.

3. Search and replace words you use too much. Create a word cloud of your manuscript on wordle.net. ** The biggest words are the ones you use the most (Wordle automatically filters out naturally common words like the and and). Your main character’s names will unavoidably be huge, but look out for others. My most recent test revealed “like” to be pretty big—a sign I may have too many similes. There’s no magic number for how many is too many, but try taking the two or three biggest words in your word cloud, and then searching your manuscript for them (the “Find” feature in MS Word). If you see a pattern emerging, work on editing out at least half.

4. Read aloud. This is what critique partners and writing groups or for: an excuse to read chunks of your writing out loud. Bonus if you can get one of them (who is good at reading aloud) to read it for you while you stand by with a red pen. This way you can make sure an objective reader will:

  • Emphasize the right words. If not, try restructuring the sentence, altering punctuation, or italicizing the words that need to be emphasized.
  • Pause in the right places. If not, you need to add punctuation—commas, semicolons, periods, etc.
  • Doesn’t stumble too much. Passages that are tricky on the tongue can be tricky on the brain, too.
  • Doesn’t repeat the same words too close together. The same adjective, for instance, should not appear twice on the same page.
  • Doesn’t rhyme. Unintentional rhymes sound awful and interrupt flow.

5. Commit to cutting words. You may be horrified at the idea of slicing phrases out of your so carefully crafted masterpiece. Don’t be. Force yourself to cut, say, 100 words per chapter. This doesn’t necessarily mean cutting whole paragraphs, or even whole sentences. Get crafty. See if you can find a word here or there that you can cut without sacrificing meaning. Here’s what will happen as a result:

  • You’ll start to recognize patterns of superfluity and be able to avoid it in the future.
  • You’ll start to recognize when to cut bigger passages that are dragging the story.
  • Your writing will tighten up: it will be clearer, more powerful, and easier to read; which means readers will keep reading.

If all that doesn’t convince you, I’ll appeal to Strunk & White to back me up: rule #17: Omit needless words. Here are examples of words you can cut.

–

What editing tips have you picked up? Tell me in the comments!

—

* I owe these two tips to my first writing teacher, Miss Judy. Thanks, Miss Judy, wherever you are!

** I owe this tip to Jubilare—pay her a visit; she’s got a new blog!