Rob Hart: Swearing In Stories (Or, Is There Such A Thing As Too Many Fucks?)

One day last summer I picked up my daughter from camp. We have a rule: she can’t use swear words at school, or around other people. But if we’re alone, she can. I figure this’ll make them less taboo and give her an outlet.

That day in camp, she made a foam princess crown—pink and covered in gems and sparkles. As we were driving home, she asked, “Wouldn’t it be funny if I put on this crown and said a bad word?”

For context, my daughter is 9. She was 8 then, but regardless, she looks and sounds like a tiny little woodland elf.

Being a good dad, I said, “Of course it would be funny.”

And I watched in the rear-view mirror as he slowly put the crown on, smiled, and emphatically said: “Fuck!”

I lost my shit laughing, glad to be at a red light and not actively driving, because I might have crashed the car.

Flash forward to last January, where I teach in the MFA program at Seton Hill University. I was leading a workshop, and one of the students was reading his story to us. It was a banger. Very cool mechs-fighting-monsters business, and a solid start to a book.

I make the students read their stories out loud before we jump into the critique. They tend to hate this, but it’s important to hear the ebb and flow, and it exercises that performance muscle they’ll need to develop.

He used the word ‘fuck’ 12 times in the space of ten pages. I clocked the frequency, but so did he—shuffling a little at each subsequent f-bomb. When the story was over, I said we needed to talk about language, and he nodded before I even finished making the point.

“You’re giving too many fucks,” I told him.

I said he could keep one—one in particular—and asked him if he knew which one I meant. He flipped through the pages, a little unsure. And I told him it was the one that got the hardest laugh from the other students. It was in a dialogue exchange, and it was fun and fast and punchy and it landed.

The rest had to go.

I mean, they didn’t have to go. It was his story. But the thing about profanity is, you have to wield it like a fine-edged blade. Sharp and precise. When every other word is ‘fuck,’ it’s going to lose power and feel gratuitous.

If you hold them in reserve, you can make them land like tactical nukes.

That’s why my daughter’s ‘fuck’ hit so hard. It was unexpected, the context was perfect, and it was delivered with a forbidden glee.

That’s something I was mindful of while writing Assassins Anonymous. I do love a good swear. The Paradox Hotel has 51 uses of the word fuck, including the main character asking, “What in the Cincinnati fuck is this?” I’m proud of that one, because it’s ridiculous and means nothing, but I think the assonance of it is fantastic.

With Assassins, I made a conscious effort to de-fuck the manuscript. There were 30 when I sat down to edit, and I whittled it down to six, in part because I don’t want to rely too much on profanity.

But also, I wondered if it would do anything to placate those readers who will leave one- and two-star reviews over language (violence and sex are okay, but four-letter words are the true signifiers of moral degradation, apparently).

And you know what?

I think those six fucks land much, much harder.

That might make them stand out and offend the pearl-clutchers even more. But I’ll take that as a win, too. There’s no pleasing some people.

All that said, I’m not telling you not to swear. I’m certainly not telling Chuck Wendig not to swear, in his own goddamn house no less, because that man uses curse words like Salt Bae seasons steaks. In fact, he wrote a fantastic post in favor of swearing that’s worth reading to get the other side of this.

But it doesn’t hurt to try something new. Cause, you know, fuck it, why not?

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