FREE KINDLE FOR PC

FREE KINDLE FOR PC
So you can read my books

Sunday, January 20, 2013

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?"
***

BURNT OFFERINGS Is at #23
In Amazon's Top 100 "New Orleans Fantasy"
While Anne Rice's VIOLIN is at #34!

12 comments:

  1. Oh I struggle with this. I have no problem with swearing/cussing in novels, but I write YA and dropping the F Bomb is something I have to fight.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Donna:
    You can have your character begin to use the word and then be interrupted by others or by circumstances.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Depends on the setting and character. I don't like a lot of cursing, but some events warrant it.

    Realism counts. Use with discretion.

    ReplyDelete
  4. D.G.:
    I'm with you: discretion with the spice of profanity avoids prose indigestion! :-)

    ReplyDelete
  5. I don't mind reading it if it fits the situation and character. Some stories need the realism. I'm just cautious with it in my own writing as I want to have a wide appeal.

    ReplyDelete
  6. "Without it some rap singers would be neutered." Excellent, Roland! As an English teacher, I struggle with including cuss words in my writing. I tell my students that F-bombs indicate an impoverished vocabulary -- but what if some of my characters have not been blessed with an overabundance of education?

    ReplyDelete
  7. In my first manuscript I substituted 'fudge' for profanity but it made the whole story farcical.

    I agree with the post and inadvertently held true to what is advised. If only you had posted this 12 revisions ago.

    ReplyDelete
  8. Good advice. I think it's really character driven. Some people (like me) just swear a lot. Overdoing it is just going to sound phony, however.

    ReplyDelete
  9. I have this in my WIP. The main character won't curse, so no problems there, but her antagonists include a bunch of Russian mafiosi, and I'm afraid it would just be unrealistic to have them not cussing quite a lot. That's just the reality for them. So I'll lose a few readers probably. I'm not sweating it.

    ReplyDelete
  10. Alex:
    As I've written earlier: I try to make my novels "Family Friendly." I have used the F Bomb only once in my memory:

    It occurs in END OF DAYS:

    Alice is floating (Yes, she can float above water) over the flooded streets of the French Quarter directly after Katrina.

    It is night. The lights are out. A pack of gangsters, strung out with withdrawal, are hunting for the helpless to rob. They turn the corner, half-mad with withdrawal and rage, and see a hungry Alice.

    She giggles insanely, turns completely to mist, and slithers like a snake of hissing fog towards them.

    They cry out in horror the F Bomb, stretching it long and high like the scream of little girls. It seemed appropriate and gruesomely funny. The water up to their waists made them running away awkward and terrifyingly slow. It was a bit of comic relief after and before grim scenes.

    Milo:
    In my Other Life (or one of them), I was also an English teacher. Profanity bothers me for the reason that I put in the mouths of both Sam and Elu to Victor:

    Profanity limits your vocabulary. What restricts your vocabulary shrinks the width and depth of your mind. An anemic vocabulary hobbles the effectiveness of your mind.

    And your mind is all that you have to fight the darkness of this world.

    Dean Koontz in ODD HOURS tells the story through the eyes of his hero, Odd Thomas. He uses a unique way to deal with the profanity of the rough enemies of Odd. Odd translates the obscenities literally in his mind with humorous effect.

    JP:
    I wish I had. You might try reading ODD HOURS to see how Mr. Koontz handled the problem.

    Thanks for visiting.

    Steven:
    It also depends on who your target audience is. Remember the Yosemite Sam cussing of the smarter thief in the first HOME ALONE?

    Ted:
    You might have them curse in Russian as I did with Marlene Dietrich (in German) with her appearances here and in GHOST OF A CHANCE.

    You could have your heroine understand the meaning and loosely translate for the reader or leave it for the context to make it plain the Russian mobsters are cursing. Less lost readers that way. :-) Thanks for visiting, Roland

    ReplyDelete
  11. I shared this one. Good one,too. There seems to be a debate about the use of profanity in novels. My newest project is about pill heads, pole dancers,and a drug dealer. They're not peeps to be polite.

    Hugs and chocolate,
    Shelly

    ReplyDelete
  12. Shelly:
    Thanks for sharing this post. That means a lot to me. Sounds intriguing your latest novel! :-)

    ReplyDelete