OBSCENITY_or F--- You Say!

Obscenities.

What are we to do with them as writers?

Pretend they don't exist?

Scatter them willy-nilly throughout our novel?

F--- has become the duct tape of modern speech.

Without it some rap singers would be neutered.

Look at some of the books out there. I have.

Where is the heart, the soul, the marrow in the bones?

Oddly enough, those things are often found in the profanity of said novel,

in how that profanity is used, and in who uses it when.

Profanity is much like spice in a meal. Too much blunts the taste of the meal ... or the novel.

Yet, take out the "real" in a novel, and you neuter Chekhov into the artificiality of Mansfield.

Better to drink water than near-beer.

Profanity lends a realism to novels.

Not that without it, novels cannot have the sense of the real.

In Dostoevsky, there is such a burning truth in the prose that it changes you even as you read it.

THE HITCH HIKER'S GUIDE TO PROFANITY :

A.) KNOW WHERE TO LOB THE GRENADE:

Never in the structure of the novel. Only in dialogue. And then only when unavoidable.

Even in first person? Yes. It's strange I know. But it is a rule like gravity.

Of course there are exceptions. According to the strict rules of aerodynamics, a bumble bee ought not to be able to fly.

It doesn't know any better, and so it zips along quite merrily on its buzzing, pollinating way.

Trust your instinct on first person narration and profanity.

B.) MOST SLANG HAS A SHORT SHELF LIFE:

It takes three years at the fastest

for your print book to be published. Don't use slang that may well go stale in that time.

Don't be worried about being timely:

use nice Anglo-Saxon words

that have stood the test of a thousand years.

You won't be sorry that you played it safe with swearing.

C.) YOU'RE NOT GEORGE CARLIN:

He wrote for shock ... and for reflection on why we are who we are and why we say what we do.

Don't be the little boy writing gross words on the wall to be smart.

One, you're not very smart if that is why you are doing it.

Two, even if you succeed, you have jarred your reader out of the flow of your story.

D.) THE PILOT ONLY EJECTS

WHEN HE IS ABOUT TO CRASH:

Remember:

the jet pilot only ejects from the cockpit when he is about to crash.

So don't crash your novel unless you're ending it.

Using profanity for shock value blunts very quickly.

Never use a swear word without first seeing if you can't replace it with another word.

Never make the waters choppy if you don't have to.

Then, there is the strange fact that some very common words bring us up short when we see them on the printed page.

Take "fart" for example. It just comes out oddly.

How often have you seen it in a novel you've recently read? Not often I bet.

Then, again ...

E.) QUEEN VICTORIA IS DEAD,

AND I DON'T FEEL SO WELL MYSELF:

Put fornicate, copulate, co-habit, or consummate in the mouth of anyone in your novel but a priest or nun,

and you will make your entire novel as plastic and false as a Barbie sitting next to a Ken.

F.) DON'T PUT A BLU-RAY INTO YOUR DVD PLAYER:

Each person in your novel should have his or her own style or voice.

Not everyone curses.

And not everyone curses in the same way or at the same rate.

My character, Sam McCord, uses profanity very little.

I explain it in the course of my novel.

Elu, his blood brother, uses none

and there is a valid reason

for that given in the course of events.

The street people of the French Quarter are another matter.

Victor Standish, the 14 year street gypsy, has a colorful vocabulary

which he tries to prune

for the sake of his mentor, Samuel McCord.

F.) FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS

AND THE CASH REGISTER RINGS:

Fact of life #1:

Publishing is a business.

A shaky business at the moment.

No publisher wants to chase away customers.

Fact of life #2:

Profanity upsets some people.

So how to write about rough people without using their profanity? Hemingway did this in FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS:

“The man, Agustin, spoke so obscenely, coupling an obscenity to every noun as an adjective, using the same obscenity as a verb,

that Robert Jordan wondered if he could speak a straight sentence” ( Chapter 3).

This tells the reader that, yes, these people are rough and foul-mouthed; so, just take that as a given

and move on with the story.

Since that novel has never gone out of print, most readers must be comfortable with that.

G.) MARK TWAIN WAS RIGHT:

"Under certain circumstances, urgent circumstances,

desperate circumstances,

profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer."

"The idea that no gentleman ever swears is all wrong.

He can swear and still be a gentleman

if he does it

in a nice and benevolent and affectionate way."

"There ought to be a room in every house to swear in.

It's dangerous

 to have to repress an emotion like that."

In other words, when there is no other word which means exactly the same thing and gives the same effect, use the profanity.

H.) A LAST WORD FROM HEMINGWAY:

In a letter to his publisher and mentor, Maxwell Perkins,

Hemingway ended the letter about profanity with ...

"F-ck the whole business.

That's legal, isn't it?"
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BURNT OFFERINGS Is at #23
In Amazon's Top 100 "New Orleans Fantasy"
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