Editing
On Swearing
In Your Novels
Occasionally, swear words add strength to one's dialogue, and in cases where the character would be likely to say them, I do not hesitate to use them. However, there is such a thing as over-use. For example, when my son was in grammar school, we lived upstairs from a woman who appeared to have a vocabulary of only four or five words. Listening to her talk, It was obvious that when she had reached the age when she learned the word 'fucking,' she came to the conclusion that she had learned all she needed to know of the English language. Consequently, every other word out of her mouth was 'fucking.' And everything she talked about did it. All the time. She was a rather dull conversationalist.
My son was six years old at the time, and was quite impressed with her vocabulary. I told him that really, she was a person to be pitied, as she had never learned how to speak English. What was worse, she lacked creativity. We spent hours culling through books, looking for more colorful insults. Occasionally, when he was with his friends, he would cut loose with a string of these insults, but was disappointed to learn they did not know when they had been insulted. They rudely begged for more of those epithets. This goes to show that creativity will be much more popular than blatant swearing, though perhaps not as well understood.
If I were to use her as a character in a story, I would be rather hard put to gauge how much of her foul language to use. Would I really want to illustrate her full repertoire, or lack thereof? How often would I have to use that word in order to illustrate her character for my readers?
These are questions of taste and conscience, and each writer has his own. The writer also needs to judge just how much the publication his is writing for would be willing to print this sort of language.
There are no hard rules for this. It depends on what the writer wants to show of the character and his role in the story, and how much the editors of the publication for which the story is groomed are willing to print.