Bad Words

If you have small children, you might want to send them to play in another part of the house. If you are sensitive and easily-distraught by bad words in what you read, you might want to mark this column as "read" and go on to something less offensive like LOLCATZ or whatnot.

First, let's get all the giggling and snickering out of the way right upfront:

Shit. Fuck. Piss. Cunt. Cocksucker. Motherfucker. Tits. Asshole. Prick. Cockbite. Dick. Pussy. Cumjunkie. Jackoff. And about a couple thousand more which I could spend all day writing down.

Are you blushing a little? Feeling a little uncomfortable at reading those words? Let me clue you in on a little writing secret...words have power, especially those considered profane by the general public. They can be used for dialogue ("Fuck you, asshole!" - The Terminator), humor ("What the fuck ass fuck bumfuck of a shithole town is this? I make a business call. I give him my card. And the hick-ass fucker shoots my foot off! Cock-fucking-shit!" - Mystery, Alaska), or emphasis ("One of the big downtown papers was looking for a new Lifestyles reporter - someone to do all the human interest garbage stories that filled up the Sunday supplements and the crap on the back pages of the weekdays. Liza was determined that she would be the one to write that crap, and she would do it with pride and defiance. To do that, though, she'd have to submit a piece that was really something special. In fact, it had to be more than special. It had to be absolutely fucking brilliant." - The Milkman).

When is it okay to use profanity in your writing? Well, a lot of it depends on who you're writing for. If your target audience is the Greater Austin Ladies' Quilting and Bridge Club, you're probably not going to want to throw out a casual fuck. Same thing for if you're writing for children. I'm not sure where to draw the line in Young Adult, because it's such a mysterious, poorly-defined genre, but since I don't write it I'm not going to address it. I write for adults, and as such, I feel there should be no limitations on profane language. But don't take that as carte blanche to fill your manuscript with "bad" words. The English language is a rich, fertile soil from which can sprout many great sentences and phrases. Fuck and shit are the equivalent of the tasteless, over-fertilized corn that one can buy in most grocery stores. I'm not ashamed to use profanity, but I prefer it like seasoning atop a dish. For example: I find the word cunt personally distasteful, and don't normally let it leave my lips. But I have had a character (one who I really enjoyed creating) spout it off at a significant moment in a story. Just because I write someone saying it doesn't mean that I'm the one saying it. Remember that, and when it comes to writing the bad words into your book, if it feels right and sounds right, don't be afraid to use them - especially in dialogue. The word fuck is uttered (in various incarnations) more than probably anything else where I work. We're just all used to saying it and hearing it and we don't really notice it anymore. An outside listening objectively would certainly comment on how much we all cuss. But it's just how we - a bunch of blue collar yokels - communicate. Because different folks speak different ways, it's certainly all right to have certain characters spew forth the profanity, so long as it doesn't detract from the rest of what they have to say. Take two examples of the same situation here:

1. "What the fuck?" cried John as the red car crossed in front of him, nearly clipping his bumper. "Did you see that motherfucker? He fucking cut me off. What a fucking asshole. I'm going to fucking kill him!"

We all know people who talk like this. Hell, many of us are people who talk like this - especially behind the wheel. But reading it is a bit difficult because fuck is repeated so many times in short order. Now look at a revised version:

2. "What the--" cried John as the red car crossed in front of him, nearly clipping his bumper. "Did you see that? He cut me off. What a fucking asshole. I'm going to kill him!"

It's almost an identical setup, but with one difference. I condensed all the profanity down into a single fucking asshole. It means more when written like that, because we're not used to the fuck fuck fuck of the previous setup. We're reading along, seeing John getting mad, and then "fucking asshole". It's more emphatic.

So when you have to decide whether or not to include profanity in your work, try to strike for a balance between what sounds good and what reads good. Shit, I ought to patent that. Fuckin' A.