Month: June 2025

Comic book cusswordsAs a writer, I have a love-hate relationship with my first published novel. I’m proud I wrote a solid PI tale set in my hometown of Cleveland. But I published badly, alienated an agent because of it, and also…

There is too much damn swearing in that book. It’s out there now, still with Clayborn Press, but if I were to go to, say, Down & Out Books to republish it, I’d do a complete rewrite. 

“Wait. Because of swearing?”

Yes and no. There’d still be swearing in it, but especially after taking on editing duties, I’ve found a lot of manuscripts have little swearing in them. And Marcus Sakey, an author with whom I was acquainted for a time, told me about his “F Bomb Check.” He took out every other F bomb, or every third one. I started doing that with my crime fiction. In scifi?

The Children of Amargosa was initially presented as a YA novel. By Storming Amargosa, that had gone into the rearview mirror. The moment it changed, however, came when I wrote Suicide’s rant to JT Austin about disobeying orders and joining the mission to find a fallen starship (a very Harry Potter thing to do in a story more like Lord of the Rings. With aliens. And dirty polygamists.*) JT, still reeling from his wife’s death, pleads a promise he made to take back her family’s farm. Suicide explodes, “F*** your promise, little boy! We all lost someone in this war!” It’s actually the only F bomb in Second Wave, but writing it was the moment I stopped pretending this was a YA series and JT forced himself to become an adult.

Meanwhile, Nick Kepler, my original PI character, needs a bleep button in his pocket. So, how much swearing is too much?

Most newer writers–That would be me in the early 2000s–use profanity to sound tough or earthy. But like Ralphie’s dad in A Christmas Story, you have to learn to work in foul language like some artists work in oils or water colors. It didn’t help us crime writers religiously watched The Wire, which had a writing staff composed partially of the cops the characters were based on, along with some of the criminals they tangled with. Cops and gang bangers tend to swear a lot, though having witnessed two less-than-pleasant encounters with police in the past year, I’ve noticed they tend to yell more than swear. At least in the suburbs. 

So how do you handle swearing?

  1. Know thy audience. Yes, you’re free to say what you want how you want. You are not free from the consequences. No one is obligated to like your book or buy it. If your audience is primarily Sunday School teachers, you may want to avoid swearing altogether. But even hardened veterans who have been to Afghanistan or Syria tend to back down from the language. One veteran I know who writes scifi had a book where a female soldier was brutally raped by her captors. Leaving aside the question of how to handle such a scenario, the book had very little swearing or graphic depictions of violence (except in the sequel, where a corrupt admiral came to a sticky end. Don’t think he will ever mend.**) 
  2. If you’re going to swear, do it on page 1, or at least in the first three pages. You don’t have to drop an F bomb. A mild profanity like “shit” will do. (Editing tool PerfectIt repeatedly tries to edit that out but doesn’t seem to care about F bombs for some reason.)
  3. Swear in the first draft. Clean up in revision. The rough draft is where your tough guy protagonist finishes fighting bad guys and stops off at the vet to pick up his pet unicorn because you were feeling goofy that day. Revision is where you might want to change that unicorn to a cat or a dog. The same with the language. Write whatever you want in the rough draft, even swearing so thick it would scare off Quentin Tarantino. Edit it out in revision. First draft is for you. Subsequent drafts are about the eventual audience.
  4. The F Bomb Check – Start with yanking every third one. Or every other one. You’ll find most of the time the prose and dialog are stronger for it.
  5. Don’t overthink it. If you put rules on it, you’ll just end up with stilted, flat prose. If you take the audience, the publisher, or even your own preferences into account, you can easily modify what you’ve written in revision. Revisions should not be scary. They should be making your story better.

 

*It’s a lot more complicated than that. Even polygamists who bathed often didn’t like these guys.

**Apologies to the late John Entwistle

Wadded paperAs a reader, I try to keep my TBR stack wide in its variety. At the moment, I’m reading the last Mark Twain book on my list, Short Stories and Tall Tales. On audio, I’m listening to Uncle Tom’s Cabin. As an editor, I keep thinking, “I wouldn’t publish any of these. They break all the rules.”

Except…Those weren’t the rules in 1857 or during the Gilded Age when Twain wrote. Stowe wasn’t a conscious stylist. She simply wrote what she knew of and put it out there for the reader to judge. This book makes me angry, which is what Stowe was going for. Twain, on the other hand, brought a newspaper man’s sensibility to storytelling, coupled with an ear for dialog and dialect and a talent for letting us know what the speaker sounded like. But Twain broke the rules of his day.

He wrote short, declarative sentences, in dialect, and in a conversational style that make him easy to imitate even though most people have never heard him speak. Doesn’t hurt he died recently enough that even older Millennials might have met someone whose parents actually heard him speak. But…

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn would not fly today, not in its current form. I don’t mean the embedded racism of society when Twain writes about. Newer versions have  omitted a certain slur in favor of the word “slave” without any damage to the meaning. If anything, it drives the point home. What I do mean is you have to read that one out loud to know what Huck and Jim are actually saying.  And therein lies the reason you did it back then and not now. Twain intended for his works to be read aloud or have them read aloud. In audio narration, you’d spend most of your time cringing at the characters attitudes (and realize Jim is waaaaay smarter than his vocabulary suggests), but the right reader would make you forget the dialect after about five minutes. Now? People sit and read in small sips, often on electronic devices. That use of apostrophes and well-placed malaprops that work so well out loud and on Audible suddenly become a barrier. It didn’t help Huck narrated the two later Tom Sawyer novels (which weren’t exactly classics.)

But Twain’s journalistic tendencies reshaped English literature. The heavy, ponderous, hard-to-read prose of the past (Looking at you, Henry James! You still owe me an apology.) gave way to crisp, visceral writing by a guy used to thinking in terms of column inches and above or below the fold on the front page. That brings us to Hemingway. And Raymond Chandler. Hemingway’s sentences were bullets. Very short. Get to the point. Sometimes fragments. On purpose. Chandler pioneered, then made cliche, the use of simile as a literary shorthand. Author Les Roberts, himself a decent crime writer whom I’ve had the pleasure of editing, sometimes parodies this in his own writing. One description of the month of April in Cleveland went on for a paragraph and ended with “was as urgent and persistent as the throbbing of an infected hangnail.” I almost stopped reading. Then laughed my ass off.

But Hemingway came up in the 1920s while Chandler began writing around 1930 (and shame on me if I missed any earlier short stories.) The world, roaring or in depression, moved quickly then and hasn’t slowed down since. The prose reflects that. Take the most famous American novel of all time, The Great Gatsby. I’ve read it. It packs a wallop. It’s less than 180 pages. Wow. Hemingway’s contemporary, F. Scott Fitzgerald, wrote that one. And his prose is even leaner than Hemingway’s.

And yet… I’d yank out most instances of “that.” I’m also aggressive about ripping out “very” and “just,” which have been overused to the point of near-uselessness. Gatsby has too much passive voice, too much description. Get to the point. Except Fitzgerald did get to the point. But he died before my mother was born, never mind me, and left behind one of the greatest American novels ever. Rules simply changed since.

Why? People still sat down and read books back then. They had radio, but no television. Most news came from newspapers. (I miss newspapers.) 

Since the 1990s, though, editors started getting more aggressive. Passive voice was the enemy. (And yet that last sentence would likely pass muster.) They would cut the word “that,” along with “very” and especially “suddenly” without mercy. I myself get angry when I have to put “suddenly” back into a manuscript. I love my clients, but that word is so useless I’d rather keep an F bomb in a Sunday school primer than “suddenly.” And the dreaded run-on? Forget it. Run-ons must die.

Some of this is good. Some of this is a fad. We don’t write in dialect much anymore (Walter Mosley a stubborn exception), or we do with the lightest touch. Some of this is good. It makes the writing clearer for an audience with declining attention spans. And therein lies the issue.

Today, books and articles are competing with video games and TikTok and the Twitter clones. There are a lot more types of content out there, and the content itself has exploded exponentially. I myself read books usually 15  pages at a sitting. I have to. Like everyone else, I’m pulled in a dozen directions. Will they change again?

I’ve had the opportunity to spend some time with ChatGPT. Love it. Hate it. It will affect how we read and edit, too. (Also, it knows who Robert Fripp is. If this is Skynet, the apocalypse will have a killer soundtrack.)

 

Ah, yes! The English language. So versatile. So adaptable.

Just read this snippet of Beowulf aloud and drink in the beauty.

Hwæt. We Gardena in geardagum,
þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon,
hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon.
Oft Scyld Scefing sceaþena þreatum,
monegum mægþum, meodosetla ofteah,
egsode eorlas. Syððan ærest wearð
feasceaft funden, he þæs frofre gebad,

Stone Carving Free Stock Photo - Public Domain PicturesThis is the part where you go, “Huh?”

That is, in fact, English. Only it’s usually called “Anglo-Saxon.” If you hear it read out loud, you’ll hear something resembling Dutch. To those of you in the Netherlands or who speak Dutch, I said resembles it. Dutch didn’t even exist when this was written. Well, when it was spoken. The poem is actually a Danish epic, but you’ll find nary a word of Old Norse in it, never mind French, Latin, Celtic, or any of the dozens of languages English has ambushed in a back alley to steal words over the centuries. 

So how is this English? 

This is actually what linguists mean when they say Old English. Basically, as the Roman days in Britain waned, three Germanic tribes drifted in. The Saxons from Saxony (Duh.), the Angles from Angeln in modern-day Schleswig in Germany, and the Jutes, from Denmark’s Jutland peninsula. The Saxons settled in the south. The Angles took the Midlands and, after uniting their kingdoms, gave the country its name: Angleland, land of the Angles. Never mind England’s culture before the Vikings moved in permanently was largely Saxon. The Jutes went to Kent, which explains why that particular county still has its own unique culture and is yet quintessentially English. The Church of England is based there, and that’s where St. Patrick got his marching orders to go handle the snake problem in Ireland.* All these tribes spoke an early form of German, as did the Vikings to the north (who were not yet Vikings, but they were working on it.) They had to talk to each other and to their new neighbors, the Celts, and to the lingering Romans. Sprinkle in a few Latin constructions so the Romans and Celts could understand, and a new off-shoot of German emerged. 

(And you could still split infinitives and end sentences in prepositions. Remember, the empire that made those rules just collapsed, so why keep up that nonsense? Take that, Mrs. Chaucer. You ruined tenth grade for me!)

Things continued swimmingly for a few centuries. The Angles coalesced around York, their main kingdom being Mercia. The Saxons’ center of power became Wessex (as in West Saxons.) The Jutes become Kent Men and spent their time in the lab trying to invent the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin. That would take a while, so they worked on the Anglican Church as a side project. I digress. The language remained more or less isolated. They also didn’t write a lot of things down. Hence, the Dark Ages. Not because civilization fell. Civilizations tend to give way to…Well…Civilizations. If there isn’t one in place already, people tend to build their own. Hence, Anglo-Saxon England, Old Norse Scandinavia. France. The Dark Ages are dark because such people don’t really have time to write things down. They’re busy building. 

So, the next wave are the Vikings, whose idea of a vacation was pillaging and ravishing England, Scotland, and Northern France. Contrary to popular belief, they weren’t really looking for spam. Eventually, though, looting makes a lousy business model. So the Vikings barged into the Angle kingdoms and set up what was called the Danelaw. Around this time, a Saxon king named Alfred the Great–amazing leader, but lousy baker–united the Saxons, Kent, and the remaining Angle kingdoms into one nation, adopting the name for the region for his new country: England. He subjugated the invading Norse, and their language began changing Anglo-Saxon. It was still English, but the Norse, contrary to popular belief, got rid of a lot of the sillier rules of the language. Gendered nouns and verbs began disappearing. Unlike most other European languages, those dealing with the Norse decided “the” was all the definite article they needed. English started to look like, well, English.

And then we have the Welsh. The Welsh do not have a happy history with the Anglo-Saxon and Norse kings of old, but they had an impact on the evolving language. Celtic words began creeping into the language, as a bunch of Saxon nobles carved off a slice of Wales known as the Marches for themselves. Well, live among a people, you start sounding like them.

So by 1066, the language is already morphing into something resembling…um…English. Or, at least, modern English. 

And then came Billy the Bastard. Er, um, William the Conqueror. No, really, one of his epithets was “the Bastard.” LIke the kings from the Danelaw before him, Willy was a Viking. A French Viking. In fact, the Normans didn’t speak Old Norse. They spoke their own special brew of French. And William decreed all England would speak French. And then Willy’s granddaughter Mathilda married an actual Frenchman, Geoffrey Plantagenet. And her son Henry II assumed the throne in England. And so proper French joined Norman French. But those pesky English insisted on speaking Anglo-Saxon. By the time Henry IV took the throne, he decided the Wars of the Roses would be fought in English. And this version of English, Middle English, was almost readable.

Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote,
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licóur
Of which vertú engendred is the flour;
Whan Zephirus eek with his swete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halfe cours y-ronne,
And smale foweles maken melodye,
That slepen al the nyght with open ye,
So priketh hem Natúre in hir corages,
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages,
And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes,
To ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes;
And specially, from every shires ende
Of Engelond, to Caunterbury they wende,
The hooly blisful martir for to seke,
That hem hath holpen whan that they were seeke.

If you read that out loud, you can understand what Chaucer is writing. But this is also where the various pronunciations of “oo” came into being. Between Chaucer and Shakespeare (who actually wrote in Modern English, just the Elizabethan version. Sorry, Rev, but your favorite Bible is not in Old English.), something happened called “vowel drift.” The vowels sounded different in Chaucer’s time, why the rhymes don’t work in the modern ear. Populations migrated. People flocked to England to find work. The language changed.

And then we have Mr. Gutenberg. Gutenberg did a great service to the world: He made books available and newspapers possible. Unfortunately, even though German has some non-Latin letters, he opted to use the strict 26-letter Roman alphabet we all know and love. His rationale was the Pope was Pope over all (Henry VIII enters the chat, followed by his son Edward VI and daughter Elizabeth. They’d like to dispute that.) and so Latin ruled. When Tyndale imported his first printing press, it did not have the thong, the now-obsolete letter denoting the “th” sound in English. There also was a holdover rune from Anglo-Saxon that covered some of the “-ough” words. But Gutenberg didn’t do runes. Umlats, yes. Probably a Spinal Tap fan (Google umlat and Spinal Tap.) But no runes. Them’s pagan letters. And so you have to put tough, thorough thought into how “ough” is pronounced. And here I’d been blaming the French and the Welsh all these years. Turns out it’s a technical glitch, and we get to suffer from it.

And now you know why English has swollen not into a large language but a linguist gang of seven or eight languages that waits in back alleys to mug other unsuspecting languages for words and idioms.

*Yes. I know. That’s a myth. The snakes. Pat worked for the Archbishop of Canterbury, originally one of the guys who could easily become Pope. Work with me, people!