Bad Language

Exercise Your InkTank

What the fuck’s the problem with using a few fucking curse words in your fucking writing? The truth of the fucking matter is that people curse all of the fucking time in real life. Why the fuck shouldn’t they do it in motherfucking storytelling?

Profanity isn’t new to literature, of course. Even Shakespeare cursed, but Shakespeare was also censored, both in his own time and beyond. The most famous alteration of his works, Thomas and Harriet Bowdler's Family Shakespeare (1818), omitted “those words and expressions that cannot with propriety be read aloud in a family,” so as not to “raise a blush to the cheeks of modesty” and as recently as 1996, one of his plays (Twelfth Night) was banned in an American school on the basis of its obscene content.

The debate about the appropriateness of certain language in literature is often cast as just such a collision between conflicting standards of morality and propriety. It’s the censor prudes against the corruptor potty mouths. And, to be fair, this collision is a real one. It plays out in our publishing houses and our theatres again and again, but it’s most apparent in the perpetual squabbling over what you can and can’t say on television. These days, you can say the words bitch and shit but you still can’t say God damn, and holy fuck is out of the question. It all seems so silly and arbitrary and besides the point and maybe it is. The debate over profanity in literature is perhaps more accurately cast as a technical matter, at least for the practitioners of the art; it’s about earning the trust of the reader and keeping it. Some find gratuitous cursing in literature objectionable, but where is the line between gratuitous language and earned language? Where would you draw it? Why?

1. I never use profanity in my writing. It’s cheap.
2. I only use profanity when the moment absolutely calls for it—no more than once or twice in a selection.
3. I only use profanity in dialogue, never in narration.
4. I use profanity, but I try to use it sparingly.
5. If my narrator/character is the type of person who curses, I see no problem with bringing that language into the writing.
6. I use exactly as much profanity as I want to use. If a reader has a problem, he or she can stop reading.

Dirty Birds
According to George Carlin in 1972, the original seven words, you can never say on television were, shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, and tits. Write a passage in which you earn the use of one or more of these seven forbidden words. If you are morally or aesthetically opposed to the use of profanity in writing, write a passage in which you replace one or more of the seven forbidden words with a viable substitute.