9 Profanity Techniques That Propel Your Novel to Greatness

if you handle profanity well in your novel it can actually help your book but a lot of writers struggle with how to use it when to use it when to use substitutes so we're going to look at how nine Mega bestselling authors used profanity in their book in a way that helped out their characters and their story and the first one we're going to start with is one cursing technique that Stephen King swears by so in Stephen King's book on writing he said that his mother was always very opposed to swearing she said it was

the language of the ignorant and he says that he mostly agrees with her but he also says that the key to good dialogue is honesty and what that Honesty means is sometimes characters do swear but I'd like to point out a very interesting technique that King uses with swearing called inversion which is where basically you have your heroic character curse semi-frequently but then your evilest character doesn't use any foul language whatsoever and for an example of this look at Annie in Stephen King's book misery she is the type of person who will take her favorite

writer impr Rison them and then break his feet if you watch the movie or cut off his feet if you read the book and yet even though she's this horrific villain she says that she hates profanity and instead she uses these most innocent substitutions like cocka Duty brat and fiddly Fu so this innocent language contrasts so sharply with her horrifying personality there's also a little bit of psychology here like maybe she's trying to convince herself that she is a good person by not swearing so to use this technique in your book find the absolute worst

character and have them not swear at all and then find your best character and have them swear like a sailor now this next technique is super powerful it is number two interstellar's one F bomb scarcity is golden especially when it comes to profanity because sometimes if you avoid dropping any sort of foul language for a long period of time and then you use a curse word that curse word lands with like a force of a thousand tons so in interstellar when Cooper is walking with Dr man he learns of this horrible betrayal of the entire

human race that might honestly destroy the human race that Dr man has only signaled the endurance to come there because he wanted himself to be saved and Cooper responds he coward now what does this teach us I think it shows us that cursing can be really good for emphasis if you have the most pivotal point in your novel sometimes that's the right point to use a curse word because it tells the reader like hey look like this is something that's worthy of cursing I do think there is a danger if swearing is sort of omnipresent

throughout your enti book that it loses its power in a way and the reader becomes really desensitized to it so I would try to find the most pivotal points in your plot and then just sprinkle in some profanity there to wake the reader up now the third technique that we're going to look at is probably the most fun out of everything we're talking about in this video it's number three Maze Runner substitutions James Dashner is the author of Maze Runner and he made a very curious choice because he was writing for a ya Market he

chose not to employ traditional curse words but in instead he decided to substitute a whole bunch of slang words that he made up for instance the boys frequently curse using the word shuck this is a Shu face I'll give you three guesses what that is a substitute for he also has this other one where the boys say clunk I clunk my pants three times which is a substitute for well poop would be the G-rated version so what does this strategy get you well one it gets you realism without the vulgarity two it's actually really good

for World building if you are creating a universe in a Sci-Fi land or fantasy land or something like that it helps readers to feel like oh like there's even their own language here and three I also think it's really fun to be original and to coin some words because it sets your book apart it makes it feel different than all the other books now you can also use the strategy if you're writing to a particular conservative audience or religious audience or simply young audience and honestly it's really fun to come up with substitutions for swear

words as well just write down a list of common ones and then what your substitution is and in my dialogue course have a whole video on swearing but I also have 28 other videos walking you through the steps of how to become a better dialogue writer I go over stuff like the 12 ways to make each character sound different in your book I go over the four pillars of dialogue writing which are evade fight conceal and contrast I also go over a lot of common mistakes that writers make when writing dialogue and give you lots

of examples to show you all right here's what the most amazing dialogue can actually do so if you've been a regular viewer of this Channel and you're like I want to take my writing to the next level then I would recommend either buying that course or subscribing to book Fox Academy which gives you access to all of my courses now it's time for Point number four which is honestly one of the grittier points in this whole video this is JD Salinger million dooll raw honesty I know you guys know salingers catcher and the Ry and

Holden Coffield in that book does not hold back on the language he is very unfiltered in the way he swears in that book but it does give you a sense that this character is trying to be honest they are not like holding back in any way maybe through cursing he's trying not to be a phony little sidebar information here this was actually the very first novel in the US that contained the words Fu although no character said it it was just on a wall like graffiti there now you feel a little smarter My overall sense

of the way that swearing Works in this book is that it is the opposite of gratuitous gratuitous profanity doesn't add anything to a book it doesn't build character it does nothing other than really shock the reader but in the case of Catcher in The Ry I really think if you stripped all the profanity out of the book it would not be the same book it wouldn't ring as true and we wouldn't get as good of a sense of Holden's character as we do and Tony Robbins has actually talked about this he constantly curses in his

seminars and he does it for a very specific reason he says that the brain responds to curse words in a way that it responds to almost no other type of language and I think Salinger was tapping into that when he chose to use so much profanity in his book so what I want you to do is take a good hard look at your novel right now and maybe catalog how often do you swear what swear words do you use and then ask yourself how would the book feel differently if I cut these out because if

you can cut them out you probably should right if there's no reason to keep them in then yeah yeah cut them but if you feel like they give a texture to the book if they are doing World building if they are building your character then there's a reason for them to be in there and you should absolutely keep them in this next point is kind of a a covert operation and it is number five marquez's sneaky workaround what do you do in your book if you feel like it's not right to have the actual curse

word spoken maybe there's been too much cursing already in your book and you're like ah I don't want to add more to that maybe there's been no cursing but you're like I don't feel this is the type of book that cursing would improve because of my audience or for some other reason if that is you then follow Gabriel Garcia marquez's strategy in Love in the Time of Kera when there was nothing left to on the plates the captain wiped his lips with a corner of the tablecloth and broke into indecent slang what's he doing he's

just summarizing the curse rather than saying it in actual dialogue and I see this technique used pretty often in books aimed at conservative or religious or young audiences it gets you the realism like you're saying like this is the type of character who would say something like this but without the offensive profanity and you don't have to do this everywhere in the book you could curse in some parts of the book and then other parts just summarize it this next one is my my favorite point out of all nine of these techniques it is number

six flann's holy potty mouths now flaner o Conor was a Catholic writer I think there is a case made that she is easily in say the top five best short story writers of the 20th century and there's not a ton of cursing in her short stories but something I did see semi-frequently is that she would have characters use religious curses like Jesus Christ and she does this in multiple stories but especially in things like Parker's back but she's Catholic and I feel like there's a resistance to her using these Rel just curses and so what

she does is she gives them a double meaning on one level her character is just cursing like they think they are uttering a religious curse but on the other hand the curse happens at a very pivotal like almost religious transformation moment a conversion moment and so it sounds like they're calling upon God so flanner manages to be both true to the actual character this is something they would say and also true to her personal religious convictions now how does this apply to you well I would say look in your book for places where curses can

have double meanings and it might just be something silly like a character walks into a room and finds his wife with a coworker and they're doing what you would expect on a bed and drops an fbom obviously that's both cursing and it's also a literal description of what's Happening Now the next one is a little bit of an exception to everything we've talked about so far it is number seven curse words as humor you know you know that sometimes curse words are just hilarious in fact you might be think thinking right now of a place

in a movie or a book or something where curse words we use in a funny way rather than in say an angry way let's look at a book by Jenny fagun called the pen Opticon I think the reason that is funny is the little girl keeps on asking this woman oh did you say this curse word did you say this curse word and then she comes up with quite crazy examples of curse words that end up being more funny than offensive in any way so listen I don't care how depressing your book is how dark

it is there's always always room for humor so look for a place where you can use curse words in a hilarious way I guarantee that you won't regret it and your reader won't regret it either this next example is probably our grittiest one out of this entire video it's number eight Irving Welch's class Consciousness you probably know Irving Welsh because he wrote train spotting which is about heroin addicts in Scotland now the sheer number of F boms and seword in this book is honestly it's staggering there's more than 700 F bombs and more than 300

c-word in this book with those kind of numbers he better have a very good reason for doing what he's doing but I think he actually does so I think cursing and specifically the way that his characters are cursing is a way for him to give his characters a social class to let the reader know this is the social class they belong to they're working class they're from Edinburgh and also their excessive language matches their excessive actions the wild things they will do in order order to get their hands on heroin is I mean like diving

into a public toilet type of bad stuff I think if you removed the curse words from a book like this it would be a betrayal of the texture of these characters real lives now you might be saying to yourself like I don't want to do that in my book like that's not really my style that's cool here's a technique that I want you to consider have one character who curses a lot and one character who doesn't curse at all I think that contrast will give us a sense of their personalities and help the reader to

feel like they know these people now it's time for our very last Point number nine the character reversal I swear that I have seen examples of this in both books and movies but for the life of me when researching this video I couldn't find those examples so you're going to have to do me a solid and in the comments drop any examples you have of this and you can do this one of two ways one you have a character who swears all the time but in a crazy moment of Crisis they don't swear at all

or you could have a character who never swears and is the type of person who would never swear but then in a moment of Crisis what comes out of their mouth is filthy so even though I don't have a book example I actually have a personal example for this one my mother was a saint like never swore at all never heard anything coming out of her mouth that was even remotely like a curse word she considered like the word butt to refer to your hind quarters was a filthy word you should never use but once

when she was disciplining me she told me to get my ass back to my my bedroom and I was just floored I was I was shocked I'm like so you know when you have a character who that's not in their personality to curse or swear at all and then you have them do it it's so powerful for the reader to experience and I would recommend using that technique and just a reminder if you haven't done so already subscribe to book Fox Academy or buy a copy of that dialogue course it will help you immensely