The Use of Profanity in Modern Fiction

     I have known for a while that my taste in literature is conservative. In fact, I'm sure in some fields it would be considered very conservative and many readers might wonder how I find any books to read at all. But the point I want to consider is how a writer handles topics when the world around them is filled with these kinds of 'real-word' scenarios.

     The first misconception that readers and young writers seem to have is that when writing a book if you want to convey that something bad has happened, you must make the moment filled with profanity. Rather than finding a creative way to express what is going on, there's a standard response, to plug in some profanity, and move on to the next bit.

     That does not have to be a standard response. How do people handle stress? What do they do? People will do things other than swear, and you can use those to find keys to their characters and put scenes together. Does a nervous twitch express itself in other ways? Does someone's snappy attitude become something inappropriate for the situation, yet perfect for you as a storyteller? You can find a hundred ways to display what's going on in the characters' heads.

    I can give an example of what I think is an inappropriate and excessive use of profanity. I began to read a book by an author which was unfamiliar to me, and the book was filled with characters swearing at each other. Left and right, old and young, all of them were swearing at each other. Now the characters were all living in the same neighborhood. I have to say, I can try to think back months, and I can't remember a single day where I've heard nearly that much profanity in a single day.

     The thing that must be understood here is that every author is giving the reader a lens to look at the world through. There might be neighborhoods very different from my own where people swear all the time, but it put me off when I read it. I thought it distracted from the story.

     A lot of new authors, and some established authors, say that profanity is a tool to add excitement or tension to a scene. What they don't think is that anything could add tension to a situation. But there are many things that are not appropriate which could work in just the same way. A stampede of llama's could break the door down and eat the hero's cell phone. A man could come up to the hero and offer to buy all of his furniture for $50,000. These would certainly add tension, but they don't contribute to the story that you were writing before these scenes came along.

     One example of excessive profanity came from a thriller I read. The scene was set in a desert. An archeologist was doing some work, visited by someone who was there to move the plot along. When asked if he wanted something to drink, the visitor said something like "#@$! yeah." Knowing what the novel was, and that it was a thriller, my primary thought was that the author had wasted his use of this profane word. The man would likely be running for his life later in the book and if the author was going to use any profanity at all, he had just wasted ink. If the character was going to go and swear, saying "It's hot" is not the time, because there are a thousand creative ways for the author to tell the reader about the heat of the sun.

     I believe, too, that there is a market out there for books without this kind of language. I've heard that the Christian fiction market started out as simply a group who were looking to write books without content they didn't want to read. Eventually, whether because they themselves were Christian or because they drew so many Christians, this developed into the Christian Fiction genre of today. One of the ways to handle this is to encourage new authors who are clean, and who don't put profanity and other inappropriate things into their books. There is a market for a conservative audience, and most books out there are catered to people who either put up with profanity and other inappropriate things or who find other things to read.

Outlining a Novel

     I've faced this task at least once before - outlining a novel. One of those novels I completed, others were side projects which I fiddled with. The first novel I started (and finished) I wrote without any preliminary outline.
     In the world of fiction-writing, there's a spectrum of how much or little a writer will plot their story. The terms writers use are 'Plotters' and 'Pantsers'. 'Pantsing' coming from the phrase 'by the seat of one's pants'. The writers in this second group will improvise, to a greater or lesser extent, the writing of their novel. Some Pantsers may have a general idea of where their book is going, others may have a theme in mind. There are pantsers who will sit down at a blank page and start typing away at their keyboard. Stephen King, by his own admission, is one of these.
     At the other end of the spectrum are the Plotters. No matter how much like 'schemers' this might sound, that is not the idea I'm trying to draw for you. Plotters like to have some kind of outline written out before they start writing out their novel. This could be a summary of a page or three pages. It could be a list of scenes that the Plotter wants in the book. It could be a listing of chapters with a summary of the story, scene-by-scene like James Patterson prefers.
     There are hundreds of ways to outline a novel. The way I used for my latest project is the Snowflake method by Randy Ingermason, an author who worked as a physicist before he became a writer and developed his own method of outlining his books. He was interested in fractals, shapes which became increasingly complex by step. So he took this idea and applied it to writing.
     Writing a one-sentence summary of the book, he expanded that to a paragraph, and then each sentence of that paragraph to another paragraph, creating a piece of writing which naturally, spontaneously grows from the whole. There's work in there developing the characters because that prompts the growth of other things as well, including more scenes and other characters.                                                                                                                                                         
     Every writer has to find their own system that works for them. For my own writing, pantsing has worked well. Sometimes ideas will come from unexpected places. I will often pick up small details from life or from books I've recently read or that I'm reading at the time. This might be drawn from another book. It will be small details, but they will lend life to the characters and story.
     As a writer, wherever you fall on the spectrum, I'd urge you to consider outlining not as a description of a type of writer, but as a tool in your belt. Outlining is a way to give yourself a roadmap to where your novel may be going. Some writers, like surveyors, just have to find the road as they go. Others prefer a 3D rendering with all the details. Whatever your preference, don't dismiss outlining without a little experimentation and research.
      

Finished With My Second Novel

So today's post is an update about my writing project. I'm writing to let you all know that I have finished the first draft of my second novel. This is a project that I started a while ago and which I picked back up this summer. I finished the first draft yesterday, and I am happy with it. I'm going to let it sit for a while before I go back to read it so that I can critique and start my second draft of the book.
Finishing the last part of the book was strange because I looked at what I had written and wondered whether I had finished the book. I don't mean that I said to myself "This is an incomplete ending", but I felt like I looked over the pages and wondered how I got to the end of the book so quickly.
Now I'm brainstorming for a third novel and planning ahead for that. While I did not do much planning for my first two books, I want to do some more involved planning for my third, because I think it will help me to write this one more quickly (and concisely) than the second.
This will be my first attempt at planning a novel before writing it, so it will be a different experience for me. I've read plenty of material about the subject and I'm familiar with many of the methods that writers use.
I'm excited to move onto a new thing and to be in a new stage of writing, at least for a little while, until my preparations are done for this next book. As I said, hopefully the prep work will mean that my writing will flow more easily and quickly than it does now.

Reading Literature

     One of the things I have tried to do in the past is to get into reading literature, the works of authors from the 19^th and 20^th centuries. Literature is a word that could refer to works from any era, but the works that I’ve read are mostly from the last two centuries. I must admit that sometimes, in the process of reading these works, I get bogged down with the style and language of the period. This includes authors writing in various styles and genres.

     For instance, at one point this year I set out to read Pride and Prejudice. I am familiar with the story, as my mom has watched a couple renditions of it several times in the past. I enjoy the banter between Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth and roll my eyes as Mrs. Bennett at her outbursts.

     When I think of Mrs. Bennett, I can still hear her voice in my head wailing “Oh Mr. Bennett!” In the story Mrs. Bennett’s pestering and blustering are set against Mr. Bennett’s patience and it eventually comes to a tipping point. At a critical point Mr. Bennett finally puts his foot down and, rather than weathering the unnecessary storm and taking the underhanded comments from his wife he stands up to her and tells her to quiet down.

     However, the way in which Jane Austen (and many other authors of her period, I’m sure) approached their writing was very different than it is today. I remember reading through the book and watching pages of dialogue where, rather than seeing one-line banter going back and forth, one character will stand and speak for pages at a time. Paragraphs and paragraphs of prose as these characters stand and talk about what’s on their minds. If a modern author did that, their manuscript might be thrown out. I say might because once in a long while sometimes going against the grain is just what a book needs to do. I don’t bring up this point to criticize Jane Austen as an author, but to say I found it very difficult to track one line of thought for two straight pages.

     If you’re an aspiring writer, don’t take this as a model for how to form a good bit of catching dialogue. Once you have the audience reeled in you could take a chance and have a scene with some extended speech – if your scene calls for it.

     But as I read the book, I realize that it is a different style of writing for a different people of a different era. From what I read recently, Jane Austen’s book was not typical for it’s time period and critiqued culture, running as a social commentary of the time. From what I understand an outright critique of society in the way that she did it was nearly unheard of.

      The books I have been reading lately are The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien. It is a fantastic series and I highly recommend it. I don’t read much fantasy, but I do know that whenever a writer takes up this genre they have a lot to take on, for they have to not only introduce the reader to the people and the things that they will encounter, but they also have to introduce the locations and the fantasy creatures, such as dragons, elves and dwarves that one might run into in that fictional world.

       The predecessor to The Lord of the Rings (LOTR), The Hobbit, is one of my favorite novels, one which I have read time and again. It has a very different style than LOTR. I have heard that The Hobbit was more extensively edited before it was released and that LOTR was not edited in the same way. Tolkien spent years building his mythological world of Middle Earth before the trilogy was written. The countries, races, famous weapons, creatures, and much history were already in place before he began to write the book.

        I was talking to my brother the other day and he spoke about reading Tolkien’s The Silmarillion. I have not read the text myself but apparently it reads something like a history textbook. Characters are suddenly introduced with no context. It s written as a report of events, a summary rather than a drawn-out story that we are used to hearing.

       However the author chooses to approach their text, it is interesting to see how the styles of writing have changed over the centuries. Though within a period there will certainly be authors who differ from one another, as time progresses societies change in tastes and authors change in how their approach to writing.

What is a 'Pantser'

One of the things that writers often talk about on forums is the spectrum ranging between pansting and plotting. Outside of this context, I don't know if most people will have heard this word before. “Pantsing” is a reference to the phrase “flying by the seat of your pants” or improvising. Writers who write without planning out their book (or without planning much of their book) beforehand are often called 'Pantsers' in the writing community while at the other end of the spectrum we have the 'Plotters', those who detail what the plot of their book is before they write it.

But if we consider the 'Pantser' if the writer doesn’t know the story, then how can they write it? Surely a story can’t be written if it isn’t known, right?

In my own experience as a Panster, I’ve found that the writing process often feels like a journey of discovery. At the beginning of writing a scene, I may have an idea of a premise or what needs to happen. Beyond that, I leave the slate blank and I start typing, letting my imagination work as I write. 

In this way I’m working out the story as I’m taking it down. You might imagine that I’m taking dictation.

As I said before, I may often have a general idea in mind. This was true for my first book. I knew what I wanted for a few key scenes in the book. It took me about a hundred and fifty pages to get to that scene but once I was there I knew what I wanted to happen. Sometimes I had no idea what was supposed to happen next. That’s fine – in a first draft that’s where a writer spends most of their time unless they’ve outlined the whole book before they’ve started writing.

The process itself is fairly straightforward. As I move forward in the book, I’ll have to decide how to start each new scene. If there is no gap of time between one scene and the next, and there’s no Point of View (POV) shift either, then I could go right ahead and start writing the next scene. But if there’s a gap in time I’ll have to sit back and decide when the story will pick up again and where. Through whose eyes will we see this next part of the story?

The second book I’m writing has been pretty straight-forward since I’m following one small group of characters, for the most part, and each scene directly follows the next. Imagine, however, you are writing an Epic Fantasy which sprawls over a map between two or three kingdoms with some kind of great quest or war going on. In this case it will take a good amount of awareness to juggle what is going on at any one time in different parts of your invented world. Whether your story will be told in parts, with halves (or thirds, quarters, etc) of the book devoted to a character or region, or if you spend a chapter at a time with one character, you’ll have to find a way to manage keeping track of where everything and everyone is at any one time.

This is all to say that, for the Pantsers out there, a bit of organization can go a long way. I’ve been watching some videos about charting out chapters of a novel to see who is in it, who isn’t in it, where the turning point it, and other vital information.

Why?

So that when someone asks you, rather than flipping to page 164 to figure out whether there is enough conflict, you can glance at a chart and see that you’ve had three chapters in a row where things have got better for your protagonist. Entering all the information into a chart can be tedious, but the payoff could be very handy, especially if you were to move into a long period of revision with your novel.

Despite the idea the name brings about, it doesn't necessarily have to be done with no plans made at all. As I said before, the "Pantsing/Plotting" argument is on a spectrum, so some people who plot out their books will make much more detailed outlines than others who will only do a rough sketch of what they want their book to be like. Some pantsers will say "I want to write a Mystery" and sit down to start their first draft. Others might take a little time to flesh out a few characters, the basic plot and maybe the setting before the go forward with the first draft.

In the end, Pantsing is just another way that writers get the job done. Some Pantsers may plot a little, some may not plot at all and let the story develop as they write it. Each chapter they finish will inform the next chapter that they write. And so chapter follows chapter to form a book and book will follow book as writers as different types keep at their work.

Three Hundred Pages

     Over the past several months I've been working on my second novel, an action book. It has been an interesting process in several ways, one of which is that this has ended up being a longer project than I anticipated, and longer than my first novel.

     My first book was a shorter project, which I'm not surprised at, since I had not experience writing anything of that length. I was still exploring how to write a novel, so I was still trying to understand how it works in a very real way. One can read about it and watch Youtube videos, but doing it is a bit of a different experience. however, when it was all said and done, my first book ended up being about 260 pages, beginning to end. Now this isn't too long of a book, considering different genres and the lengths of books out there today. My first book will probably fall under General Fiction, so it could be relatively short and still be all right.

     I know it's early to talk about it, my second book, on the other hand, is in a different genre. Now a lot of writers will stay true to their type and only write in one genre. I think that, for myself, I discover ideas for stories, and then find the genre of the story after I begin to write it. Because my second story is an action book, there is a different style of writing throughout the novel than my first book. This means that, hopefully, the plot moves faster. Readers, then, will expect some longer novels in the Action genre than under the General Fiction genre.

     Now when the editors come into play they may ask the author to write more scenes, so my book may be longer. They may ask him to cut or edit scenes that slow down the plot and which don't move the story forward. (I can certainly think of a few of these in my own book.) The thing is, I'm still working on the first draft, so we may just have to see how the story works out, and how long the book turns out to be.

     For the last two weeks I've been keeping track of my daily word count just towards my novel, and I've been managing a steady 1,200 words or more, just about every day. A few bad days, some very good days with 1,300 or 1,600, but almost every day I get in more than 1,000 words each day.

     But different books have different word counts, even within the same genre. Depending on how complex the author decides to make the plot, the number of characters involved, the time-span, how far the characters may travel and how quickly, and how much detail the author goes into - all of these elements may add up for a novel of great length, or it may be something much smaller.
J.R.R. Tolkien considered his 'Lord of the Rings' to be one work. Those who worked with him saw that it wasn't publishable in the form of the tome that it was and broke it up into three volumes, a trilogy as we know it today.

     As I write and as I read I've found that I don't have a particular tie to any one genre. Some people, for instance, love science fiction books and would rather read and write those all day. For others it's romance or high fantasy. I've never made that distinction. I've read some sci-fi, some high fantasy, some action, a thriller or two, and some Christian fiction, so I've been all over the board for genres, I think. As I said before, my way of writing is to discover what the story is first, and then to label it for marketing.

Writing Genres

As an author, what genre do you choose? It sounds like a pretty simple question, but one that is loaded with possibility. For the most part, I think that if anyone assumes anything about authors they assume that an author will write most of their work in one genre and stick with the one. Why write in more than one if you can help it? Well, because it's fun! And because the next story you want to tell doesn't fit in the genre of the last story you told.

Sometimes an author sits down for their next project and has decided already, or asks themselves, what genre will I write in next? Fantasy lends itself to great amounts of creative output and imaginative creation. Action books challenge the author to keep the book moving forward at a heart-throbbing pace without much call for deep character development. If you want to talk relationships, Romance may be the genre for you, setting up relationships, breaking them apart and finding a way to lead them back together again.

Whatever happens in the book, one of the things you have to understand about me is that I’m a punster, I write by the seat of my pants. That means I have to have a good idea of what my story is before I sit down to write, even a basic concept – a young woman’s car breaks down and she gets stuck in the middle of nowhere. Perfect! Now where do we go from here? The key is to let the story lead you forward, no matter the genre. 

One of the differences about writing in a genre that young or inexperienced writers may have is whether to write in a different style for the genre that they’re in. Should an author change their style to suit the genre they’re writing in? My answer is not straightforward. Don’t change your personal style of writing. However, if you’re writing a piece set in Victorian England, this will naturally reflect something different than a piece set in post-apocalyptic Boston, MA. People have different vocabularies, dress differently, use different dishes and carpets and furniture – the essence of the piece which you describe will lend a different air to it which will set is apart from the next piece.

So if you’re deciding you want to write, and you don’t know what genre to pick, that’s fine. Find the story that you want to write and go from there. Once you know what kind of story you want to write, the genre will be clear. The story will lead you in the right direction.