Writing Cleanly: Realistic dialogue

Hi everyone, and thank you for joining me in Too Many Books to Count! I’m so glad you stopped by. :) All month long, we’ve been talking about writing clean fiction, and the things that are sometimes difficult for clean writers to get right. There’s a stigma against clean writing, one that says if you’re writing cleanly, you’re not writing well—and that just doesn’t have to be the case. Sure, we have to be a little more picky with the way we word things, with the amount of details we give when it comes to certain topics, but that doesn’t mean we have to compromise in terms of story. (which, by the by, is RAD Writing’s motto)

This week, for the end of our series, I chose a topic very unlike the rest of the topics in this series. I chose this topic because it’s something that I see in writing in general, but something that clean writers get a bad rap for, more than others. It’s something that I pride myself in being quite good at—and so it’s something I like to share about, whenever I have the chance.

Writing Cleanly: Realistic dialogue

It’s difficult, I know. While exposition often flows off our fingertips like fine silk, dialogue comes out clunky, overly wordy (or underly), and just plain wrong. It happens to the best of us, whether we’re clean writers or not—but there’s one aspect in particular, for which clean writers get a really bad rap. And that's where I'll place my focus, today.

When real people talk, they curse.

And clean writing avoids cursing, at all costs.

And you should! If you’re writing clean fiction, then you should avoid cursing. Please. Clean readers don’t want to read cursing, no matter how you’ve written it. They don’t want those words in exposition, and they certainly don’t want those words in dialogue. But there are a great many non-clean readers who expect to see cursing, because it’s in their day-to-day.

Personally, I don’t see what the problem is. As long as you’re writing good dialogue, realistic dialogue in general, then the curse words aren’t necessary at all. The vast majority of the time, in any sentence that includes a curse word, that curse word could be removed without altering the sentence in the slightest. So, why does it matter if we don’t write them? It’s beside the point though, because the argument has already been made and lost. Readers, even clean one sometimes, want characters to be fully realistic. Which means that some of them really ought to curse.

That being the case, I have two fairly simple options for you, for including curse words in your writing (without actually including any):

“He/she cursed.”

Easy, right? And it actually works rather well, most of the time. In many stories, especially sci-fi/fantasy, it bothers me when “normal” curse words show up in dialogue at all—because what are the odds that curse words are exactly the same on this world as they are right now, and on Earth? Maybe these people think hands are offensive, so they use hands as a curse. It just works better, in these cases, to use phrasing like “he/she cursed”—because then the reader can infer from the line before, what the curse was involving.

A new set of deity

This one is my personal favorite, and it works extremely well when you’re writing fantasy—but can work in alternate Earths as well. Make up a new set of gods, and use their names when people are cursing! Brilliant, eh? AC Schafer did it extremely well in The Wraith and the Wielder, if you ask me. Tsaw rahk, her characters say, when they’re cursing. And the meaning of it isn’t lost. We all know they’re cursing. We all know it’s a curse. But none of us are turned off by it, because that’s not a curse in reality. If you said that to someone, they’d probably just ask you to repeat yourself, because they didn’t understand what you said.

These, my friends, are my two favorite ways to include cursing in story, without ever actually including a curse word. And sure, there are times and places when a “minor” curse or two can be appropriate in your writing, but most clean readers don’t want to see any at all—which makes these methods far more appropriate when you’re writing in this arena.

Have something specific you’d like an opinion on, when it comes to cursing in clean fiction? Send me a message and let me know! I’d love to help!

In the meantime, have a lovely week—I’ll be back in March, with a whole new series!

[love]

{Rani Divine}