Profanity in Fiction
—Profanity in Fiction—
Can be done very well. Though the opposite is just as true. Forgive the presumption, but I think in all of us there remains just a smidge of high school angst. The kind that makes you do things impulsively, or because ‘everyone else is doing it’. Or maybe because you want to sometimes just be dark and brooding for the sake of being dark and brooding.
For me it’s primarily the latter, parts of which manifested in early drafts of NIGHTLIGHTER. I’d use ‘fuck’ like you would a comma, relying on the F-wagon and other such profanities for my characters’ exclamatory outbursts. In narration, I used it mostly as a way to sound cool, and write edgy, transgressive prose. Lazy choices, transparent, and not all that effective. My characters devolved to stereotypical caricatures of characters who had been written time and time again.
This, however, is not to say that all profanity is shallow and ineffective. For many characters it’s a requisite trait, an essential part of their DNA—what makes them them. Doctors, for example, are expected to be meticulous and carefully attentive in their work. A doctor raised in a religiously pious household might be expected to adhere to a set of moral guidelines—apart from that of normal society. (Unless, of course, your doctor has spent her life abandoning and rebelling against such a childhood.) Your doctor dropping a, What the fuck? while with a patient in for a routine checkup likely won’t fit her character.* The consequence? The eroding of your readers’ immersion into your story. So the diction, just like any other character modality, must serve the character, and the character must serve the story. The story is paramount; narrative unravels when this is forgotten. Or ignored.
I was enlightened to my more juvenile tendencies during one of the early NIGHTLIGHTER revisions with Editor John. I thought I was being clever; I thought my use of profanity was serving the character and the story. I thought I was being dark and brooding. How wrong I was. Dialogue came off as shallow and forced, characters lost distinction, and much of the prose was elementary. An easy fix? Invent your own. Curse words, expletives, neologisms that, yes, serve the character and the story. In sci-fi/fantasy, this is an easier and more appropriate remedy; in real-world-based fiction you need to be more selective,** you need to ask yourself questions like, Is my character replying, ‘What the fuck?’ to a stimulus appropriate? Not in a moral sense, but literary. Does it serve… I repeat myself, but here again for emphasis,
Does it serve the story?
Writing is freedom. Especially in fiction. We get to create worlds and stories and characters from nothing. We’re not restricted by social niceties—much of what we’d often like to say in public but cannot, we can say in prose. We’ve, technically, no rules to follow. But, if we want our reader to shelve disbelief and invest in our story, we need to be mindful of how we craft our characters. If we don’t, we run the risk of writing dull, trite, uninteresting stories.
That’s all for now, bitches.
-Taylor
*This might actually be an interesting and especially dramatic moment, given this cursory characterization. Our doctor’s wtf could indicate something’s terribly awry; it’s an out-of-character moment; we don’t expect it from our doctor. Thus, it hits harder.
**Writing profanity in a different language can also be an effective choice.
TJH -- 02.03.2025