Swearing in Books

On Sunday as we sat in church waiting for the service to begin, I asked my husband how he was getting on with reading Wool by Hugh Howey, a book I have been raving about recently and had enthusiastically recommended to him.

"I'm struggling with it," he admitted, "Because I can't get past all the swearing."

Swearing? I didn't remember any swearing, and told him so. He opened his Kindle and showed me and indeed one character swears constantly. I was shocked that I hadn't noticed. Only a couple of months ago I refused to finish reading one of our book club assigned books because of all the bad language in the first couple of chapters. (If you want to know why I object to swearing, read this post.)

My first thought was that the fact that I hadn't noticed the swearing in Wool was testament to how well written it was. I must have been completely engrossed if my brain glossed over it. Maybe, like an addict in denial, my mind had refused to acknowledge it as a problem because it would mean that I had to give up my drug of choice (the book). Maybe again it was because (almost) all the swearing is done by one particular character, and it was so right for that character that my brain had taken against the character himself, not the book.

My second thought was utter mortification, because I recommended that book to the church book club! Even as I sat in my pew, the sensitive and delicate church ladies like myself (ahem) were reading it and probably having funny turns as Bernard threw out an F-bomb every other sentence, Doubtless they were wondering why that talkative blonde lady had put such filth in their paths, and thinking they might choose to avoid me in future in case I had other surprises in store for them.

Now, I'm a writer myself (which is why I have this blog) and my first four novels were written for delicate and sensitive souls because that's the audience my publishers cater to. In fact my first novel is so twee and saccharine and cheesy that I find myself wanting to vomit as I type it out all over again, copying it from the book itself because my new publisher wants to re-release it and I've lost the manuscript. Even in moments of dire peril my characters never utter anything more offensive to the ears than "Oh deary me!" My books are very much U certificate. Disney (old Disney, before they tried to get edgy and bought Star Wars) could film them. In fact, I'd rather like that. How about it, Disney?

Wool is definitely a 12A. (PG-13, if you're American.) I often wonder why books don't get classifications. After all, I rent DVDs using the classification as a guide to whether it's suitable for my tastes, so it comes as a bit of a shock when one buys a book called Fifty Shades of Grey and discovers that it's not actually about painting in monochrome.

Of course, one of the problems of being a writer who doesn't like swearing is that characters might occasionally swear. Not everyone is as, um, refined as me, and for some people it's perfectly normal, especially when they find themselves in stressful situations, and any book is a little dull if they don't. Here's one passage from my currently work-in-progress where I get around that problem. In it, Maralee has just discovered that the guy she has been dating is engaged to someone else. She goes to his office to confront him:

“You know what you are, Daniel? You’re a…” She groped for a word suitably scathing and abusive but couldn’t find one of the appropriate magnitude so she settled instead for stringing together every swear word, insult and offensive metaphor she could think of.

“Yes, yes I am. Are you free on Thursday night?”

“Absolutely.”

“If I come to your place and bring wine, will you say that to me again?”

(Needless to say, Daniel may go to Maralee's place on Thursday night, but the narrative doesn't. This book has a PG classification.)

So, going back to Hugh Howey, the guy is so approachable and down-to-earth (and get this--he encourages fan fiction!) that I'm betting I could ask him, ever-so-nicely, to do a quick find-and-replace on all the swear words in his books and put out alternative "cleaned up" ebook versions of Wool, Shift and Dust just for readers who are a bit anal have high moral standards.

It might be fun if Bernard's epithet of choice was "Holy Zarquon singing fish". And maybe then they'd let me come back to the church book club.