How much swearing is too much?

I've begun to notice a pattern in my writing - regardless of the story, my characters swear. A lot. Particlarly when startled or angry. About three times a page, someone uses the 'f' or 's' word. I'm just wondering about this - it's not at the point where it seems forced. Normal people would probably swear at those points. But as a reader, is too much swearing offputting? If it's a dark/violent/gory storyline aimed at 19-25 y/olds, that is?
Any advice on this?

PS. Have been very careful to not actually swear!

I'm going to give a very detailed and lengthy explanation . . .

Depends.

The key is the character and how they are being developed. In my last manuscript, the main character cursed very little (even when confronted with gorehounds ripping out of people), but the impact character cursed like a sailor. I won't go into it all, but the main character was so clean cut that his flatulence smelled like lilacs and unicorn hugs. On the other hand, the impact character had gone through so much in her life that she could really give a . . . ;)

So my advice would be to consider the context of your writing as well as the background and character development. Some characters will swear, some won't. They're people just like you and I with internal issues and complex backgrounds so each one will react and speak a little differently.

Use a swear word too much and it becomes irritating. Any dang word can get dang annoying if you use it over and over, dang it.

Personally, I find it harder to like the characters. I get annoyed with their habit. And how can I respect someone who curses when it rains on his head or when she's got a run in her nylon? This happened with stories I critiqued in writing classes and circles; I just had no respect for them. I don't know if that's the case in your story, but consider the circumstances. Is it all non-stop rage and terror?

Plus, it loses it impact. I once read over a scene for my buddy, and he had an f-bomb four times in that scene. (Yes, scene, not page.) By the third one, I said to him, "I get it! I get it! This is a bad situation! You don't need to beat it over my head! You can stop now! Really!" Look at the last few sentences. Did the exclamation point have the same impact by the end?

I'll admit that many readers have a higher tolerance for profanity than I do. But you could lose readers this way. Just my two cents.

I treat cursing like anything else in a story. Taking accents or stutters as an example. They can be used to very, very good effect in some cases. However, if they are used the wrong way, they can really annoy your reader. You don't write dialogue the way people actually speak. You write it in a way that it mimicks the way people speak, but in a more fluent and readable away.

If someone lets loose with a string of curses, you don't need to write the whole string. Just tell the reader that they did so and let the reader imagine what curses they used. If anything, that has greater impact for the reader.

I have a character who curses - and curses often, actually. It's part of his personality and he's totally unrepentant about it. However, I don't write every curse he says when I write him. I write them when they would make the greatest impact on the reader. Otherwise, I say he cursed or he mumbled something under his breath.

I think that, even if we as people swear a lot on an everyday basis, it should be limited in our writing to only extreme circumstances.

Also, think of it like this--when I'm around certain groups of my friends, I swear. A lot. Sometimes I'll have four or five f-bombs in a single sentence.

But if there's the chance for children to overhear it, I tone my language down. I step into my office, and I seriously tone my language down. It doesn't matter how much I swear with my sisters or my best friends from college or when I'm driving in my car and stuck in traffic (that'll be mostly profanity, there).

Think of your characters always being "on the job", keeping up a professional facade, even when they're not, in-story. I'm writing about a bunch of sailors, so they have a habit of colorful language from time to time. But it's more likely to happen when they're faced with something so out of the ordinary, they don't necessarily have their training to fall back on. And even then, you can just allude to swearing ("son of a..."; you can fill in the blank yourself).

Or you can find alternatives. I have a friend from college who legitimately uses "dang it" and "darn it", and instead of saying "Jesus Christ", she says "Jeezum crow". Granted, I've also seen her string together a bunch of f-bombs for no other reason than because she could, but hey.

If you are Irvine Welsh, 3 times per page is going to be a rare low count.

Generally spoken everything appears magnified in a novel.
Use the f' word three times in a row and all people will start to notice is how much people curse in your novel, not to mention that it will start losing impact pretty fast and at best start to sound involuntary funny or at worst become sorely annoying whenever somebody starts to curse again - justified or not; and then you come to the point where readers will stop “listening” to your characters, because, hey, we already know what they are going to say: “F’ it.”
And once I lose interest in what a character has to say, I may soon after lose interest in the story at whole.

Yes, some people do use a lot of swearing in their language and probably can't get over a day without using "f' it" at least once but if "realism" becomes your argument to included it then you’d have to have the rest of your characters use every ah and ahm real people do, too.

Having recently read "The Catcher in the Rye" (an experience I wouldn't care to repeat any time soon :P), I can tell you that the cussing in that got annoying really, really fast. I mean, the dude wasn't even cussing about anything important most of the time, but sometimes every other word out of his mouth was a cuss word. That's just the way he talked, I guess. (Of course he was an annoying ****head quite apart from his cussing. I probably could've put up with more swearing than that if I hadn't wanted to smack him every 5 seconds anyway, heh.)

On the other hand, one of my nano's featured a character using the "s" word 5 times in a row...followed by the "f" word 5 times in a row. Admittedly, something really bad *had* happened, but he didn't really need to swear *that* many times except for wordcount. :P

In another nano, I tried to write a character who rarely if ever swears. For some reason, her swearing alternative of choice was "oh sweet bacon!" :P This was a bit unique for me, considering I cuss like a sailor. So I just had all the other characters cuss a lot and everyone was happy. :P

My rule of thumb: if someone cusses too much for your personal preference, tone it down, otherwise leave it in. Don't make a character cuss unless they really would, otherwise it'll sound fake. Basically, regardless of your personal preference, you can find an audience who likes the same level of swearing you do. You can't make everyone happy, so all you can do is be true to yourself & your characters.

Personally, I don't swear. I might on extremely rare occasions, but it's not a natural thing to me.

When I read books these days I realize that there is going to be some swearing.

People do swear in real life. I'm around swearing a lot at work, I'm one of the few people at work that do not swear. It's irritating in real life to have to hear people use swear words as often as most people use adjectives and adverbs. It's at work, and I'm not a boss, so I pretty much have no say in the matter, so it's a part of life.

When I read a book, I'm not going to be put off with a few swear words. I realize that a cop who's had a rough life is going to use more than a housewife who spends her days going to PTA meetings and little league games. But if I find by page three that I'm being assaulted by profanity when I read a book, I'll stop reading. Unless there's a very compelling reason for me to continue. And it would have to be a very compelling reason. I get enough of it at work, I don't need any more when I want to relax.

I realize that some readers may like to have it in the books they read, and if you are going to target that audience, that's fine. But if you want your book to appeal to the general audience, you have to realize that there are a lot of people who do not like to read that stuff.

I recently read a mystery where there were a few swear words, but in the whole book they only showed up several times and the word appearing then wasn't very bothersome. The FMC had just been through a whole lot and she said what she thought. It fit her character and I had no problem with it. It wasn't just an uttered expletive, it was a sentence like, "I could see this was going to **** real fast.". I liked the book as a whole, and intend to read more of this writer.

I've read another book where I was confronted with a bunch of profanity on the first few pages. I glanced through the rest of the book and saw that language on almost every page of the book. I have not finished the book and haven't picked up any of the writer's later writings. The other books may not have the same level of language, but I still remember the other book that I read.

In my own writing, I have used very few expletives. In one I had a frustrated character say "[removed]!", and that was as bad as I got. In the whole book. 120,000 words and one expletive.

In most of my writings even that would not appear.

How much is too much?

How many people do you want to offend so they will not buy your books?

The more profanity in you book, the fewer readers you will have.

My two cents.

Growing up in Wyoming, and dealing with oilfield/mine workers...anything short of three swear words per sentence and people think you're Mormon...

As has been stated, it depends on a lot of things. What you say and how you say says a ton about you, where you came from, and how you think. Someone who swears a lot, all the time, regardless of anything, is very self oriented. They understand their world, and that's it. I've got friends like that, and they're irritating. They might also be looking for a reaction. I worked with a guy kinda like that. He didn't swear, least nothing serious. Think I heard him say damned once while talking about his kid stealing one of his guns and selling it to a guy who shot some people....He would say the craziest racist/sexist crap you ever heard though, but I don't think he believed half of it. It was to see how you reacted. Some people do this with swearing. Actually, I do this with swearing. Drop a hard swear word in casual conversation with someone and watch for a flinch, or see if they follow suit. As long as you don't care what people think, don't care if they like you or not, you can learn quite a bit about people real quick.

Well, in the last story I wrote, clocking in at 152k words, I apparently used the F-word 36 times, the S-word 20 times, and the B-word twice. Considering that my MC was an adult and a soldier, and the level of graphic violence at times, I think that he was being amazingly restrained, considering he generally didn't start getting potty-mouthed until the proverbial feces hit the fan.

Personally, I get really annoyed by self-censorship, and actually find swearing to be relaxing, as paradoxical as that might sound. It just feels more real to me when a work of fiction uses swearing, to a point. (The Boondock Saints was a little over the top, but even then I just found it hilarious.)

I have one main character who swears quite a lot, with little provocation. When he's REALLY angry, he doesn't say anything.

I also have a character whose worst 'swear word' is probably "darn" and tends to fall back on "goodness" quite a lot. At some point I might have her say "For the love of cake"...

Those are two extremes and I have characters who are at various points in between. In fact, two of my other characters are more likely to come up with creative insults for people they dislike, or witty retorts, or simply ignoring the person. They rarely if ever swear in the sense we're talking about and when they do, they make it count.

But swear words are words and just like any other word, I feel it's my duty to know when to use them and when not.

Always use a curseword where it would be weird to omit it. Yeah, I agree that using the word "****ing" (hope you get which word I mean) gets old pretty quickly if you overuse it, so you should have as much variety in your swearing as you can. But when people are angry, or really surprised, or Swedish, they swear. Of course, it depends on the genre and target group; I don't consider it a problem that no Dr. Seuss character curses, but at the same time if I'm reading a book about a gang member It in Los Angeles then I'd like the dialogue to sound authentic. So my personal opinion about swearing is that you should avoid it if it becomes tedious, but otherwise it's not a problem. You're an adult. You can drink, you can you-know-what, and yes, you can use the f-word as much as you like. Sure, some people don't want to read books with bad words in them, but there comes a point where any reader who doesn't like foul language has to accept that a man seeing his wife cheat on him with best friend, or a woman who stubs her toe really badly, or a teenage boy who says anything at all, probably will use harsher words than "gosh darn it!"
(Apologies to all teenage boys and Swedes. I'm Swedish myself ;) )

I get annoyed when it's wrong in context. For example, "[removed]" was exclusively used in the movie "Crash" and I hated it--because everyone in the movie swore the *exact* same way with only one swear word even if their native language was *not* English. (I would expect them to swear in their native language if they are that shocked.) I gagged by the end and said I could write better dialogue in my sleep.

When swearing is in your omniscient narration because you think it is cool and you're writing in the style of a Victorian Novel, I would say mitigate it. If your lawyer is swearing in court and trying to rap to it, I'll squint at you. If it's a doctor talking to a patient about their disease and they are telling them to swear "go to [removed]" I'll wince.

And if you are going to have your characters swear be selective of who swears and how they swear. Make it dependent on the character+situation they are in.

So yeah, depends.

Just a reminder, folks, Writing 101 is an all-ages forum, so we can't actually use profanity here. That includes masked profanity, where you replace some letters with other letters and characters, because we can still tell what you're not saying. :)

I will allow the use of "the f-word" in the discussion, since it's pretty hard to have this discussion without referring to them in some way, but please don't use the actual words, even if you leave out some letters. :)

Strangely enough, I swear a lot when I'm angry but I don't like it when there is too much swearing in a book. I put one down when there's cussing on every other page even if it's only swearing for something only mildly upsetting. It's just too much. I find it annoying because it's just really repetitive. Too much swearing will definitely put off most of the younger readers, if your going for a young audience.
I accept it when an author uses it at the right moment, like when your character's life is going down in flames or something more than just mildly upsetting happens. Also when the character is the type who'd generally swear a lot like a gangster or soldier...or you know a sailor.
I agree with it being okay to use for impact. When my classmates are arguing, one pulls out a swear word and all my other classmates just gape.

Swearing a lot is ok, but only as long as it's effective. A carefully placed F (or any other swear word) can do much more than an endless string of f..k f..k f..k f..k f..k f..k f..k f..k f..k f..k f..k f..k f..k f..k ever could, because it's just a word like any other and the impact and meaning are lost if it's repeated way too many times.

This is why you should worry about the quantity, not because you fear your readers might be prudes.

Thing in books usually seem "stronger" and like there's more of them than in real life. Someone in real life needs to fail an exam at least 5-6 times for people to go: "he's always failing!", while in the book it's enough to put him fail the exam twice (or three times) in order for it to seem noticeable. Similarly, a girl dating four guys in a year isn't much (imo?), but the same girl dating only two guys in the course of the book will achieve the same effect. Same goes for the swear words. You need to put less of them than in real life to make it sound like a real life heavy swearing. Do more and it will just become useless.

So I'm eating my words, right now... I switched to a different character, and this one swears at least three times a paragraph. Apparently he missed the memo about being professional. It's not surprising, given his background and current situation (Marine in a POW camp).

I mean, he knows how to turn it off in speech, but when I'm narrating from his POV, that's just how he thinks. Granted, I'd probably try to tone it down in editing stages, but at the moment, when I'm just writing and getting his thoughts down, I'm letting him have at with all the foul language he wants.

It's certainly amusing to compare the two characters, though. Bobby comes across as such a goody-two-shoes compared to Paul...

I'm kind of amused at all the talk about how you'll lose readers if you swear too much. I personally almost never curse--if I do swear, I'm probably in a LOT of pain or really, really angry--and that rubs off on my characters. So in a piece I wrote for one creative writing class, a character whose friend was having a nervous breakdown thought and said a lot of "dang" and "darn" and such, which all felt perfectly natural to me. Most of my classmates (and I think even my professor) disagreed, saying "Just swear. Seriously? Just swear," as if choosing NOT to do so was babyish and immature. More than one person claimed that the LACK of profanity distracted them.

So there's one end of the spectrum. On the other end of the spectrum, my grandfather used to say that if you have to swear to make your point, it's probably not a point worth making.

And in the middle? I'm writing a story that I'm posting on a family-friendly forum, where any word stronger than "dang" is censored... but one of the plot lines revolves around a group of soldiers fighting against an enemy that has a habit of brainwashing young children and sending them to fight on the front lines. Can you imagine those characters NOT swearing? Yet because of the way that story is being "published," so to speak, it cannot include a single word of profanity, and that often leaves me banging my head against the wall. In that case, my saving grace is that there happens to be a camera in their midst, and their every action has the potential to be part of a weekly television show back on the home front, so they have to watch their language for the sake of the censors. For example, as the Major tells his men that a large fuel supply has been sabotaged: "The whole navy's shot to--Holt, is that camera on?" "Yes sir." "The whole navy's useless without fuel..."

So, how much is too much? I have no definitive answer. Just a couple interesting perspectives to consider.

I am going NUTS with this one right now, I'll be honest. I ended up IMing a friend last night with a string of profanities, because my current characters refuse to swear. They're a bunch of super straight-edge teenagers who won't even say "crap" or "darn". One of their friends has been kidnapped and brainwashed, and another one just got kidnapped, and they're all thinking "Oh, no!!" Seriously, guys? That's it? "Oh, no!!"?

AUGH.