Violence is Red, Swear Words Are Blue…

… I’m thinking about fiction, and you will be, too.

(WARNING: due to the nature of this discussion, this blog entry will contain swear words and references to works that depict graphic violence. No graphic violence in the blog itself, though.)

The first novel manuscript I ever wrote was called Just James. I started it when I was eleven and finished it at thirteen. It was about 36, 500 words long, and it was about a magic boy and his three dogs, and it was also really, really stupid.

I remember having a lot of worries about Just James — helpfully, whether my twenty-seven-year-old self would consider it stupid was not one of them — but one that recurred for me again and again as I worked through new manuscripts was: what is appropriate to include in my stories?

There are a lot of ways to ask that question, but the one that troubled me was, specifically, “What swear words can I include?”

When I was eleven, this was a lot easier. Since I myself was horrified by the word “fuck,” I wasn’t likely to include it in my writing. “Shit” and “crap,” I decided, were all right for when my characters were really, really scared or upset, but “damn” was classier, because it wasn’t about poop.

This hierarchy was in no small way influenced by the bad language my parents and other adults in my life used when a situation drove them to the end of their ropes. Although they seldom swore, when they did, one of those three words was the usual steam-let-off valve. Even so, I worried that maybe I would offend other kids who were more sensitive than me; I knew, for example, that my more religious acquaintances frowned on the frivolous use of “god” and “damn.” But sometimes, a swear word was called for. I remember pencilling in “shit” with a vague guilty feeling, hoping that whoever was offended wouldn’t put down the story, and also that their parents would let them read my book, which I felt sure was going to be an immediate bestseller, as so many first efforts by teenaged writers are.

Today, I have a much broader tolerance of — and, dare I say, appreciation for? — swear words. It’s more likely that context will bother me than a specific word. For example, around my friends, I pepper my speech with variations on “fuck” for emphasis and/or comic effect, and I laugh to hear them say it back. However, were one of them to use it with me in anger, I’d be very upset. Likewise, when my friends and I jokingly call each other “bitch,” it’s funny; when I hear someone use it as a gender-specific pejorative, it infuriates me.

The other thing that makes writing swear words different for my adult self is that I’m still writing stories for young readers, but I’m no longer a young reader myself. There’s a sense in which I feel like I have a responsibility — or at least, in which I feel like others expect me to have a responsibility — not to include harmful material; more practically speaking, and admittedly, what I consider more often, it’d be tough to sell publishers, agents, and parents on a book for middle-grade readers entitled, Fuck the Fucking Fuckers, Bitch.

I’ve also started to wonder about more aspects of my stories than swear words. Some of my stories have fistfights, deaths, and property damage, although usually in the opposite order. What level of violence is appropriate? What about sexuality?

I’m still not sure, but I have learned that one of the nice things about books as a medium is that the “strength” of a controversial scene is determined not just by what actually happens but by the way in which the writer describes it.

Film and TV have a similar but clumsier spectrum; it can be OK, for example, to hear characters talk about an off-screen act of violence, or to view a scene where it’s implied that that violence happened off-screen, but having it on-screen boosts the work up a ratings level. Having it on-screen and filmed from certain, more explicit angles that show the details of the act might send it to yet a higher ratings level. If the act is real and not fictional, that’s considered even more explicit and disturbing, and so the film may achieve an even higher rating.

Contrariwise, books have the luxury of describing extreme acts of violence with a level of subtlety that film and TV can’t match. Consider, for example, the fictional serial killer — and protagonist of both books and TV — Dexter Morgan.

On the Dexter TV show, there’s a high level of violence. We often see killers stabbing, strangling, or shooting people. We also often see bodies and body parts of people who have been victims of violence — sometimes arranged in elaborate tableaux. It’s a pretty gruesome show.

And yet, TV-Dexter doesn’t touch the level of violence of book-Dexter. First, there’s the method of his killing. TV-Dexter strips his victims and ties them to a plastic-wrap-covered table with more plastic wrap. After confronting them with evidence of their crimes, he stabs them efficiently in the heart, usually in a mid-range shot that shows both the act of violence itself and the blood that flows as a result.

Book-Dexter, on the other hand, is coy about his methods of killing. We know it does eventually end the same way, with a stab in an important organ, but book-Dexter describes himself as “playing” with his victims… with a knife. We also know that whatever he does, it can take hours, and many of his victims embrace that final, deadly cut.

Compared to TV-Dexter, book-Dexter is a far bloodier monster. TV-Dexter is compelled to kill; book-Dexter is compelled to torture and kill. And yet, I find the violence in the TV show more disturbing than that in the book series.*

Why? Because Jeff Lindsay never describes the violence in the book in a sickening way. It’s never blood; it’s just innocent words and imagination. The reader’s imagination, that is. You can take the hints as far — or not — as you’d like. It makes the scene less disgusting but more emotionally evocative. It won’t make you throw up, but it can manipulate you into giving yourself chills.

Conversely, the TV series has to show us what happens, or at least hint that it might. The audience automatically has to think in tangible and visceral terms of visuals. It’s harder (but not impossible) to create a subtle image that suggests drastic violence, and it’s easier for an audience to get frustrated with teases of that nature, because it’s more obvious that a deliberate choice has been made to hide explicit material from them.

So, I guess the bottom line for me is: as long as I’m writing — swear words, violence, or sex —  it’s not about what I say, it’s about how I say it. Of course figuring out that “how” is no piece of cake either. But that would be a topic for another blog entry.

* With the exception of serial mutilator Dr. Danco, the antagonist of Dearly Devoted Dexter, who, despite not being a killer, is way more disturbing than anything the TV show has ever offered up, even John Lithgow nakedly murdering naked women in a bathtub, naked.