Swearing in Your Manuscript: How the F**k Can You Write That?

The guy who cuts my hair made a confession. He was at his shop one day recently and mentally scrolling through customers he hadn’t seen recently and realized one of them was a female client he particularly liked.

“I called her because I had to hear her voice,” he said. “You’d never know it talking to her in public, but has the best F-bombs.”

“Oh? How so?” I asked.

“It’s not that they’re creative,” he said. “It’s just the way she says that word. I can’t put my finger on it. But God I love hearing her say that word.”

Photo credit: Etienne Giradet

“Just so I understand: You called her not about coming in but just to hear her say it?”

“Just to hear her say it,” he said. “And I told her how much I like it. She knows. I told her once I was surprised at how often she said it. She said, ‘Honey, I fucking say that word all the time. It’s my favorite word.’ And it’s my favorite word, too. ”

Mine, too. And, I told him, all of its derivations.

“Usually,” he said, “it’s followed by ‘you.’ “

Your Characters and 4-Letter Words

He was joking, but he wasn’t lying. I’ve heard him.

The drive back to work from my midday haircut was filled with thoughts of a unisex salon filled with women of all ages dropping F-bombs alongside all the gray hair they were having touched up. How oddly comforting that would be, I thought.

And then I thought of my own mom and the one time I heard her load up the F-word. She was in the throes of divorcing my father – or maybe already had, and was coping with bitter, ugly aftermath – and the word shot out, punctuating her tears, frustration and helplessness.

That, too, was good to hear. She’s just like the rest of us.

Still, these days the old Lutheran guilt tends to kick in when I go through a scene sketched by four-letter words. I’ve asked myself what dear old mom will think when she reads this.

She said, ‘Honey, I fucking say that word all the time. It’s my favorite word.’ And it’s my favorite word, too.

This is the wrong approach. If you’re thinking about mom when you’re writing and rewriting and honing your story to a fine point, you’re thinking about the wrong things. Be true to the story, true to your characters and please the reader. If your character is a cusser, let him or her cuss. Please yourself as you please the reader. It’s the only way.

Cussing and swearing is a topic that comes up from time to time at author conferences and during Q&As between authors and readers. It's hardly the primary subject, but people -- some who are offended, others who are just curious -- ask. Here's a riff by Lee Child about littering a manuscript with F-bombs. As he says, he sprinkles in some "industrial" cursing. He just ensures that it's not everywhere.

Full disclosure: I grew up playing sports and hanging out with people who cussed – a lot. Most of my professional life was spent around athletes, ex-athletes turned administrators and highly competitive business people. These people not only used profanity -- some of them quite creatively -- they often overused it. So did I. So do I.

For this new career, I write about crime. And bad things and bad people and cops and detectives. These people, not all of them speak so nicely all the time. In case you haven’t noticed, this is the way of the world.

If your cop/detective/criminal didn't go to finishing school, and most don't, chances are they're going to throwing around some four-letter words and f-bombs in all their derivative glory. That's not to say these characters are all going to come out sounding like they were a prodigy, say, of Chuck Wendig, one of the world's excellent cussers. But they're not going to sound like someone in The English Patient, either.

No Cussing at Wal-Mart?

A couple years ago, an unmemorable speaker at a writing conference told a group of wannabe authors that Wal-Mart would not carry your book if you used words that the company deemed too profane. In other words, you could get your book to the Wal-Mart masses if you used "hell" or "damn" but that something like "goddamn" would get you excluded, as would just about any other curse word in all its forms. Well, hell.

Why do I bring this up now? Because I finally have a manuscript worth peddling. Should I strip out the profanity for the sake of one day having some decision-maker at Wal-Mart or (pick your bookseller) declare the book not worthy of its shelves because of some blue words?

As the speaker said, "You may look down on Wal-Mart for having that policy, but the bottom line is, are you OK with your book not being able to be seen by millions of potential readers and buyers just because you wanted to use some curse words?"

Turns out, I find no evidence that Wal-Mart actually has this policy related to books. (Nobody from the company returned my email about this question.)

Regardless, thinking about Wal-Mart during the creative process seems like misspent energy, unless Wal-Mart distribution is the lynchpin in a book-selling plan.

The John Sandford Swearing Table

Every so often, I dig up one of the favorite blog posts ever about writing novels. This post by the webmaster son of John Sandford addresses an issue that rears up every so often: How profane should crime-fiction characters be, given the inherent risk of driving away readers? How much profanity is too much profanity for publishers and bookstores? And should a writer sacrifice a personal voice -- the one that wants to tell a story in exactly the way they dreamed it -- for a business decision?

It turns out Sandford’s readers complained that the primary character in his “Prey” series, state cop Lucas Davenport, was accused of swearing more as Sandford grew the popular Davenport-driven series. How does one fend off such a notion? Why, with facts.

So Sandford's son, who runs his website, went to each manuscript and ran word calculators on them. (In case you didn't know, there is software that analyzes manuscripts for word usage. This can be a valuable tool, because nobody wants to re-use the same word too often in the same book.)

What his son found was that cussing in Sandford’s "Prey" books goes up and down -- just like almost everything else in life.

In the end, any persona angst about this might amount to a whole lot of nothing. I might decide to self-publish, and of all the things to consider about that, one of them isn't about cussing. I won't be banning any of my profanity, much like the TV beer ad below that, sadly, never made it to television.