Possibly, your canvas doesn’t need that colour – Jugular Crimson, let’s call it – but if it does, or might, there’s no real substitute.Īnd because swearing is taboo-breaking, it also introduces an edge of force, of toughness that otherwise only violence, or the threat of violence, quite can. In effect, obscenity gives the writer a very specific colour that nothing else quite does. More broadly, swearing is exciting because it’s taboo-breaking: the amygdala in the brain actually responds differently to swearwords than it does to any other type of language. A boozy, relaxed contemporary love story won’t probably have copious swearing, but it too is unlikely to want to avoid it completely.
For the same kind of reason, contemporary grit-lit, all sink estates and drug dealers, will sound wrong if characters don’t swear fairly copiously. That doesn’t mean your characters should swear as much as real soldiers in actual combat: your job, always, is to create the semblance of reality your adherence to actual reality is much less important. War fiction (even, quite possibly, historical war fiction) is probably not going to come over as very realistic, unless there’s some bad language. If some obscenity is right for those things, then it’s right to use it. All that matters are your story and your characters. Bad language doesn’t have to be lazy writing: it’s often essential. In short, the presence of at least some swearing in the story is as important to the atmosphere and mood as the presence of the Welsh hills themselves. For me and my story, not to use the word ‘fuck’ would be to betray both character and story. Its heroine (and first person narrator), Fi, is gritty and direct in her speech. Which suggests that the first lesson of this short post is a simple one: it’s okay to use the word ‘fuck’ for effect, depending on genre.Īnd to be clear: mine is a crime novel. This novel of mine, for example, contains 125,000 words, of which no fewer than 78 are ‘fuck’ or its variants. I’m not super-potty mouthed myself, but I’m perfectly comfortable with using obscenity and profanity in general fiction. And are there any rules which govern the scale or amount of your swearing?. How much do novelists (in a fairly, though not extremely, gritty genre) generally swear?. So the questions we’re going to face are: Is that fucking OK with you? It is? Cool. Right here, on this post, we’re gonna swear like a GI with Tourettes.) ( And, uh, trigger warning, guys: this post is going to use some naughty fucking language, so if that’s a problem for you, you may want to hasten away to the unthreatening pastures of Cozy Mystery or Amish Romance. 
In this post, we discuss swearing and bad language when it comes to writing fiction. A short guide to obscenity, profanity, cussing, and creative swearing in the novel.
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