Every now and then I write something that gets linked to a whole bunch and a whole bunch of people hit the site for the first time. Most of them read, nod, and move on about their day. Some of them…
Well, they object to the profanity.
Some even go so far as to email me about it.
I understand this, to a certain extent. I know a lot of people who object to profanity – my mother is definitely not a fan – but I’m a much bigger fan of using it for emphasis. More importantly, I’m a fan of using it here on the blog because all those shits, fucks, goddamns, and mother-fuckers do two very important things.
SWEARING FILTERS THE AUDIENCE
Less than 1% of the blog posts people respond to tend to be actually profanity, and even then it largely depends on your stance on words like goddamn and screwed. It’s not a lot by reasonable standards, but they stand out because certain words are less polite than others.
That’s as it should be. That’s why I use them. Think of those words as a shark’s fin, cutting through the surf, warning you that danger is on its way. Because, if you object to those words, you’re going to object to everything I’ve got published in longer forms.
I once worked out that something like 5% of the word count in the Flotsam series is devoted to swearing. Contextually, its an important thing: the characters in those books are fraying at the edges, breaking down as their whole world falls apart around them. Swearing is going to be as natural as breathing, in those circumstances, and so they swear.
Horn and Bleed aren’t quite that bad, but they’re definitely right up there on the profanity stakes and, one again, we’re talking about a character for whom profanity is a means of holding it together.
More importantly than the words in all those books, there is the content. I don’t write particularly polite books. If you object to the swearing, you’re definitely going to object to the subject matter in those books. The same applies to the majority of my short stories. I mentioned, yesterday, that the beginning of a story teaches you how to read it. They foreground not just the world and the characters, but the narrative style and the tone that will be used.
If you start a story with a single character, walking the street, pondering his troubles, it will suggest a very different kind of resolution to problem than two characters exchanging banter, or an acton sequence. Starting in media res and letting the audience catch up foregrounds a kind of narrative complexity, suggesting that the reader will need to pick up on the subtle clues and interpret things for themselves.
Your blog and your social media aren’t the beginning of a story, but they form a kind of meta-text that surrounds your work. The tone you set there will inform the way in which you’re perceived and read, and it’ll attach itself to the things people bring to your work.
Swearing is a part of that, for me. It foregrounds that I’m not going to be polite about things as a storyteller, and the narrative isn’t going to stay on the side of the street where heroes are square-jawed and willing to help old bunny rabbits across the road. If you object to swearing, you’re sure-as-shit going to lose your mind if you go out and read, say, Horn.
SWEARING CONTEXTUALISES THE ADVICE
More importantly, swearing contextualises me as a blogger. It lets you know where I’m coming from as someone talking about writing, a shorthand that lets you what my interests are and how I prefer to run my career. A lot of the time I’m talking to myself and making the results public, forcing myself to focus in on something that’s been frustrating me and hoping it’ll resonate with the readers around me.
I am always wary of the fact that I don’t know shit about writing and publishing. Over the years, in workshops and writing classes, I’ve recommended all sorts of books about writing and publishing that people have gone off and taken as gospel, even though my advice is generally read this, take this bit, and see what you get out of it. Disregard the shit that doesn’t make sense.
There is a tendency among some people, usually the newer writers, to regard everything they write as gospel and follow advice blindly. Some of them will use it as a tool to self-flagellate, or talk themselves out of writing, and that’s always the danger of putting certain advice out there.
I don’t want to be regarded as an expert on these things. I know some shit, sure – enough to get me through nearly fifteen years where teaching writers has been a significant component of my dayjob – but at the end of the day I’m always aware of just how much I don’t know. I write this blog to throw out ideas, and talk about the things I wish I’d known a decade ago.
I know fucking nothing, and the swearing is your notice to take all advice with a grain of salt.
