Swearing in Fiction

First a disclosure: I love swearing. I love to swear, I love to hear others swear—fucking love it.

So it’s no surprise that I like to hear my own characters swear.

But I also get it that others don’t necessarily share my taste in that area, and it can be polarizing. So I try hard to moderate it, to have my characters swear for a reason: if the situation calls for it, to reveal an aspect of their character, to create the story world.

When I posted a version of my first novel on Book Country, a critic on the site whose opinions I valued took exception to the first sentence, which read as follows:

“Thick, green grass beneath her feet, with a canopy of heavy maple leaves shading the bright mid-day sun, with spirited singing from little birds—what a fucking pain in the ass.”

The character is a corrupt middle-aged state senator in a leadership position whose machinations help drive the story. Jay Greenstein, who dubs himself The Grumpy Writing Coach, had graciously reviewed that first chapter, and though he hammered it, he was quite helpful. I was actually following advice from him on his blog (which I recommend highly) when he discussed physical descriptions within scenes and using them to reveal things about the POV character. He thought swearing was pointless in the sentence, and I ended up removing ‘the eff word’ after thinking it over. I kept it later in the chapter, though, in this sentence, over the advice of my sister-in-law Martha (and I owe her a great deal for other feedback, and for being my first reader).

“Here she was, a state senator in liberal Massachusetts, where women got nowhere. Look what they’d done to poor Jane Swift, pressed into service as governor and got nothing but grief for being a mother, until Romney elbowed her aside in the primary. And then Martha Coakley, a damn good attorney general, and all that asshole Scott Brown had to do was pose in a Carhartt jacket next to his pickup, “I’m the guy here, who is this broad?”, and they elect a fucking Republican to the Senate, at a time when it hurt the most, to replace Saint Teddy. Christ!”

The character swears because she is one tough bitch. She wouldn’t have gotten where she is by being anything else, and the fact that she’s somewhat course, and duplicitous in her public persona, is important to the story, given the criminal acts to follow. So “those gosh darn Republicans. Cripes!” just wasn’t going to cut it.

Other characters swear because of who they are, and also because I like who they are. I like the characters in my stories, and I have them do stuff I like, mostly. For me, swearing is having passion in life, and just feels indispensable to me. I suppose I could write without it, just as I could live without it if I had to. I’ve cut back a whole lot on my own swearing because some people in my life are offended by it, and it makes life easier that way, even though I don’t work anymore. I cut back when my now-27 year old son Ben was young at the insistence of my otherwise admirably patient and tolerant wife Dolores, but I did it with mixed feelings. The swearing that did leak out seemed to program Ben to refrain from swearing in his own life—talk about unintended consequences. If I’d know I would fuck his life up in that way, I would have held out and upped my swearing. Oh well.

In my ‘art’, however, it seems even more important to follow my own spirit in this as in all other things. So there shall be swearing in my books, but not too much violence and death. All that may lose me readers, if I ever get to that point anyway, but shit, who the fuck knows anyway?