As long as I'm writing here, I'll get right down to business. That business is swearing. The novel I'm writing involves realistic young adult characters, and therefore has swearing in it. Naturally, I did this without thinking about it, given that my own vocabulary consists of a countless amount of swear words (particularly when I find myself in a difficult work situation, i.e. having to carry a 30 pound CRT monitor across campus, going on a particularly long trek to replace a computer only to find that the door's locked and I have no key, etc). Upon rereading the drafts of my work, and, more importantly, having other people workshop my work, I began wondering if I should include swearing at all. This post and this post on kidlit made me realize that I'm not alone, but didn't make me feel any better about the prospects of getting my work published.
While I was reading through the posts, however, I noticed a link to Gayle Forman's blog post, which was definitely my saving grace in this area. If you haven't read it, you should. It's brilliant, particularly if you're a young adult author struggling with this issue. Knowing that a published and popular author such as herself has characters swear made me feel that my prospects of getting published were not dashed away with every four-letter word (just dashed away by potentially bad writing). Her post made me feel better, and now the characters that should swear in my book are swearing. Because, after all, as Gayle Forman says:
"As a writer, it just feels wrong to sub a crap for a shit when shit is the word that sounds right. Or a darn for a damn. I mean, really, darn? What 18-year-old says darn? I am not writing about the Amish."
Damn straight.
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