Curses! When To Use Them!

 By Thomas Kies

Swearing, cursing…include it in your dialogue?  Don’t include it?  Does it make what your characters are saying any less authentic?  Will you p*** off readers if you DO include it?

Full disclosure, I have a deep well of vocabulary to draw from when it comes to blue language.  Generally, I reserve it for when I’m driving alone, and another driver does something stupid or dangerous or both.  As long as the windows are up, it’s mostly harmless.  If I forget that my window is down, well, I’ve gotten some interesting responses to my observations.

Swearing, technically referred to as "using intensifiers," can be a potent tool in a writer's arsenal. A well-placed curse can convey a character's emotion more effectively than an entire paragraph of description. However, it's a delicate balance. Get it wrong, and it can sound gratuitous, silly, or just plain stupid. Get it right and it’s a gut punch.

I think the rule of thumb should be to be true to your genre.  If you’re writing war fiction, if you don’t use slang and bad language, it’s not going to sound realistic. You may not swear as much as real soldiers in combat (they swear all the time), but you have to create some semblance of reality.  If you don’t use blue language, you’ll sound like dialogue from a movie from the 1940s.

I specialize in crime fiction.  Working for newspapers and magazines most of my life, I’ve known good guys and I’ve known bad guys and they all swear copiously.  Writing dialogue as realistic as that would be tiresome, but not including it would sound fake. I can’t have a drug dealer shout, “Gosh darn it all to heck!”  Nor can I have a police captain growl, “Golly, get those cuffs on that astronaut.”

Oh, and politicians?  Get them away from the public and they also have a colorful vocabulary.  Surprisingly so. 

Cursing in a love scene?  You’re using a whole different set of words, and we can talk about that at another time.  Use the wrong words and you just sound like a bad porn movie. 

Why can swear words be a beautiful thing?

- They have the ability to shock.

- You can equate them to linguistic violence.

- They can mark extreme emotions, moods, or turning points.

- They can be used for comic effect. 

Now, you don’t always have to use street language, depending on the context.  Shakespeare had the ability to swear without really swearing.  He wrote the mother of all literary cuss-outs (cuss is simply a variant of curse) in King Lear, but interestingly there is no profanity or obscenity as we know it, merely terrifically imaginative vulgarisms, delivered with passion. Here it is, the Earl of Kent preparing to thrash the crap out of Goneril’s loathsome lackey, Oswald:

"Knave; a rascal; an eater of broken meats; a base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited, hundred-pound, filthy, worsted-stocking knave; a lily-liver’d, action-taking, whoreson, glass-gazing, superserviceable, finical rogue; one-trunk-inheriting slave; one that wouldst be a bawd in way of good service, and art nothing but the composition of a knave, beggar, coward, pander, and the son and heir of a mongrel bitch, one whom I will beat into clamorous whining if thou deniest the least syllable of thy addition.

I don’t think I’ll use any of that the next time I’m in a bar or shooting pool, but it’s worth thinking about.

Now, can you lose readers due to foul language? Of course, but why on earth would they be reading crime fiction if they have a weak constitution?  Have a great f****** week and keep writing.

In defence of molecules

My goodness, Wednesday has crept up on me! Days blur together in this new "date-less" regime, so I was happily perusing the internet this morning, checking email, social media, news headlines, and various other intriguing links that popped up along the way, when I suddenly realized it was Wednesday. Blog post day! What possibly gems of insight do I have to share today?

Like Aline, I have been plodding along on my first draft at a snail'a pace, in fits and starts as I feel my way forward. Like her, there have been exhilarating moments when the story just poured out and it was exciting to see what would happen next, and other moments when I would ask myself the usual writer questions. Why in earth am I writing this dreck? Where is it going?

The pandemic has sapped a lot of creative energy. First of all, the formless anxiety we feel from the constant news of suffering, dying, and outrageous reactions, along with the disruptions to our routines and social supports, makes concentration very difficult. Secondly – and I felt this very acutely at the beginning – our stories, even though about murder and mayhem, seemed silly and trivial in the face of global real-life tragedy. And as if the pandemic weren't a big enough crisis, the death of George Floyd has triggered anti-Black protests across much of the world and brought the struggles and despair of Blacks and other people of colour into sharp public consciousness. All of which has made my own story seem even more trivial and irrelevant.

Yet fiction is about people, and crime fiction in particular shines a spotlight on people in pain. People who are desperate, frightened, enraged, or horrified. It doesn't usually paint on a big picture, global canvas, but rather it drills down into the unique and individual lives of those make up that canvas. Put together, molecule by molecule, fiction can tell the story of that global canvas.

So I will write on, delving deep into the story of my unique band of characters and hoping that I contribute in some small way to the bigger picture. And also hoping that when my next Wednesday comes along, I will have something more coherent to say.

2019 Looking Glass

Time to recap 2018 and gaze into the looking glass for 2019.

This last year gave me plenty of reasons to celebrate. I published two books, one of them my novel, Steampunk Banditos, and the anthology I'd edited, Blood & Gasoline. Plus I had one short story published, "Flawless" in A Fistful of Dinosaurs, and signed a contract for one to be published next year. I also received rejections on a couple of short stories but that's par for the course. Hopefully I'll find a home for them next year. I was honored to be a Guest of Honor at MileHi Con 50. I taught at Lighthouse and in the Regis University Mile High MFA program. Added to that is more cause for applause but I'll keep that hushed as it's not yet a done deal and I don't want to jinx myself.

My favorite read of the year has been out a while, The Promise, by Robert Crais.

Like many of you, social media has caused me to grind my teeth in frustration and disgust at many things. What's particularly grating is the increased intrusion into our lives by the tech companies. Recently Google rolled out an enhanced Gmail that supposedly improves my email "experience," but that's a lie. For one, my Gmail account is slower and more cumbersome than ever. And two, forget any pretense of privacy. Gmail automatically offers automated responses, which means they're reading my correspondence to teach their AI robots. Plus our searches are shared cross-platform. I Google something on my phone and then on my computer, without asking, Facebook pops up with relevant suggestions. Of course the companies deny they're spying, but we all know they're aggregating as much as possible about us into secret profiles, which they then monetize. Big Brother in 1984 was nothing compared to Alphabet, Inc. For 2019 I'm expecting more stories where smart speakers become part of homicide investigations. And that high-tech remains as vulnerable as ever to criminal predations.

On the writing side, I can't offer much in the way of prognostication, other than we "ink-stained wretches" have to tread on ever-more fragile eggshells. I borrowed that line from Kurt Vonnegut and I wonder how long before his reputation is pilloried for the un-pc things that he wrote back when. I've been told that steampunk has shrunk to a narrow-gauge railway, and that the time for the big breakout novel of that genre has come and gone. Demand for stories about the post-Apocalypse has stalled except when it hasn't. Vampires and other supernatural creatures, especially in YA, remain popular provided you put a timely spin on your stories. Science-fiction enjoys a resurgence. And crime fiction remains as popular as ever given that we humans are, as my favorite Bible verse (Job 5:7) puts it, "...born into trouble just as surely as sparks fly upward."

Been There, Going Where?

Frankie, here. Finally, getting a chance to sit down at the keyboard. This week has been busy, and that brings me to my topic for today's post.

Yesterday, I was a guest lecturer for a series on genre fiction being offered at a local college. The attendees were all adults who were there because they were interested in the topic. I had two hours, and I decided to focus on the evolution of crime fiction and how that overlapped with the evolution of the criminal justice system. I started with our friend Edgar -- Poe, that is -- the "father of the mystery short story". I talked about his contributions to crime fiction as a genre -- from the brilliant, but eccentric, detective and his narrator to "hide in plain sight".  I told them about "The Mystery of Marie Roget," his fictional detective's investigation of the real-life murder of Mary Rogers, "the beautiful cigar girl" using accounts found in the "penny press".

I followed the evolution of crime fiction from Poe to Doyle to the "Golden Age" writers. I used Chandler's The Simple Art of Murder to move from country houses to "mean streets." I paused to discuss the real-life Ruth Snyder-Judd Gray murder case and what James M. Cain did with that case in Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice and how that influenced film noir. I moved on to the birth of police procedurals, and then to the impact of the Civil Rights movement and women's rights movement on crime fiction in the 1960s and after. I ended with the rise of the thriller. Along the way, I talked about crime fiction and theories of crime, the FBI, and modern forensics.

I packed a lot into those two hours. After my whirlwind tour through the evolution of crime fiction, I turned to writers and the changing industry. We've talked about the challenges here on Type-M and they come up during panel discussions at any writers conference. The challenges include finding an agent, finding a publisher, keeping a publisher. With new technology, we have to decide whether to continue with our efforts to traditionally publish or consider self/independent publishing or maybe become a hybrid. We worry about creating our "writer's platform" and then how much time to devote to maintaining it and making sure that all of our parts (website, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) are all working together to ensure we reach a maximum audience. We worry about the time social media takes away from our writing. We think about how diversity and multiculturalism -- now being discussed -- affects us and the characters we create.

My audience was make up of people who read mysteries. They recognized the writers and titles I mentioned. And -- in case you're interested -- when I asked about use of social media, only 3 or 4 people out of an audience of around 50 said they use Twitter. On the other hand, I know some readers have found me on Twitter when a reviewer tweeted a link or a blogger mentioned my guest post. Something to ponder.

But, right now, I've got to run.