: Re: Swearing in a book, within a context. Too offensive? I am currently writing a science fiction novel. The characters are almost uniformly pirates and/or miners in the asteroid belt. Having worked

@Bryan361

David Williamson wrote a play called 'The Club'. It used swearing. However, a theatre group that came to the school where I was teaching said they could do it without the swearing if we wanted. We wanted. It was just as effective, when acted, without the swearing, as anything we could imagine from the version that used swearing.

Robert Swindells, in his novel 'Stone Cold' about homelessness, mimics the language of deprived people without using a word that is considered a swear word. He uses other words, I think one is 'frigging', to effectively imitate without offending.

Personally, I found Roddy Doyle's 'The Commitments' really hard to read out loud because of all the obscenities. Yes, people might speak like that, but art doesn't have to mimic reality. Instead it selects, mediates, edits and enhances reality for the enjoyment, edification, etc. of the audience.

'The White Tiger' (a Booker Prize Winner and so, by definition, by several people considered very well written) uses swearing, of a reasonably extreme type, very rarely and very effectively. The narrator swears and laughs, or one of the characters swears and laughs, and the reader laughs.

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