Profanity / Obscenity
Dec. 8th, 2004 07:19 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
odd_buttonsThe following is an excerpt from Part III of the book Making Shapely Fiction, by Jerome Stern. The first two parts are very much worth reading as well. The book is available in paperback.
Profanity / Obscenity
Characters can be a rowdy bunch -- cursing, blaspheming, talking rude and crude. If you're writing about such people, you need to render that speech convincingly. For certain groups expletives and strong language have little emotional weight -- they're used to add emphasis, rhythm, and flavor to speech, but they don't necessarily signal intense emotions. Some people can't utter a sentence, and sometimes can't get through a single word ("absofuckinglutely"), without an expletive. There's even a kind of affection expressed through obscenity, a bonding created by the violation of the ordinary laws of polite conversation. It's a form of intimacy, private as opposed to public speech.
Even so, a little obscenity in a story goes a long way. Offensive language seems much heavier on paper than it does in the air. Repetition quickly gets rank. To avoid that, use the same principles as for dialect. You're suggesting a style of talking, not making a recording. You're creating characters through their language. If they're poetically obscene, the poetry has to be apparent. If their profanity is affectionate, that has to be felt.
Used too frequently, blasphemy and profanity will over-shadow the character. But even worse is to be squeamish and euphemistic. "Jumping' Jehoshaphat, that blankety-blank son of a parsnip stole my Gol-dern car" sounds false and corny. If you aren't comfortable writing about foul-mouthed characters, you shouldn't.
See Dialect, Sex.
Profanity / Obscenity
Characters can be a rowdy bunch -- cursing, blaspheming, talking rude and crude. If you're writing about such people, you need to render that speech convincingly. For certain groups expletives and strong language have little emotional weight -- they're used to add emphasis, rhythm, and flavor to speech, but they don't necessarily signal intense emotions. Some people can't utter a sentence, and sometimes can't get through a single word ("absofuckinglutely"), without an expletive. There's even a kind of affection expressed through obscenity, a bonding created by the violation of the ordinary laws of polite conversation. It's a form of intimacy, private as opposed to public speech.
Even so, a little obscenity in a story goes a long way. Offensive language seems much heavier on paper than it does in the air. Repetition quickly gets rank. To avoid that, use the same principles as for dialect. You're suggesting a style of talking, not making a recording. You're creating characters through their language. If they're poetically obscene, the poetry has to be apparent. If their profanity is affectionate, that has to be felt.
Used too frequently, blasphemy and profanity will over-shadow the character. But even worse is to be squeamish and euphemistic. "Jumping' Jehoshaphat, that blankety-blank son of a parsnip stole my Gol-dern car" sounds false and corny. If you aren't comfortable writing about foul-mouthed characters, you shouldn't.
See Dialect, Sex.