After two years of waiting, I finally got a short story published in Menagerie, my high school's literary magazine. That piece, "After the Flood," was about a teenage boy wandering around in a flooded, postapocalyptic Chicago. When the magazine was published and I got a chance to read the piece again, I was pleasantly surprised to find that it held up (usually I hate my stories; I look at them the same way Richard Nixon looked at those incriminating 'Smoking Gun' tapes). I found that the piece had good voice, a decent plot, and a message that was subliminally meaningful without being obtusely in your face. However, whenever people approached me to comment on the story, all they could talk about was the story's excessive use of swearing (the title of this post happens to be the first two words of the story).
My view on it was this: if you were trapped in a flooded, postapocalyptic Chicago, you wouldn't try to censor yourself in your expression of how you felt about that. I didn't use the swearing in order to intentionally provoke uncomfortable feelings among my readers, but rather to build a realistic voice for the story's narrator. Swear words are a part of our colloquial dialect, and they shouldn't be ignored. Granted, they shouldn't be used gratuitously (and I don't think they were in my story), but they also shouldn't be outlawed altogether.
In addition, talented writers can also make beauty from swear words. This isn't a horn-tooting implication of my own greatness, mind you, but rather a recognition of the potential of swear words to sound lyrical. Here I'm thinking mainly of graphic novels-particularly Warren Ellis' Transmetropolitan, Garth Ennis' Preacher, and Brian Azzarello's 100 Bullets-but I'm sure there are books out there wherein authors have achieved the same level of awesomeness with swear words.
So don't hate on the swears, please. Just treat them as part of the piece.
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