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I'm working on a psychological thriller. I know that most books in this genre use at least some profanity. But I, myself, don't swear. I never have. Sometimes I let one slip, but other than that I don't swear, and I don't want to include swearing in my novel.

So is there a way to get around this? Are there different words that I can use instead of the regular swear words? I want to create the emotional intensity that would normally be accompanied by swear words, but without having to explicitly use those swear words.

F1Krazy
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Kailah
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3 Answers3

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Seems like you are the ideal consultant for this! How do you deal with emotional intensity without swearing? Just do the same for your characters.

People do not have to curse, they can sob, scream, grimace, gesture, sigh, or be articulate and say extreme things.

You can use euphemisms, as well. You can use implication: "We slept together last night" implies intercourse, you don't have to say "we fucked last night."

Or, finally, realize that every author writes evil characters doing things they would never personally do. I've written about a woman that intentionally killed dozens of people, because she thought it was justified in a greater good. She used any kind of subterfuge to get close to them, including seducing them and having sex with them.

I never have and never will do that, but I think I wrote her character convincingly.

Your story will not be good if every character is just a reflection of you. Realistic characters swear.

That said, if your story is set in fantasy world, you can invent your own swear words, that are not swears in the real modern world. That might be a route to explore.

Amadeus
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First, using swear words is a characteristic of that person. You can well write a novel, even a psychological thriller, about a person who doesn't commonly swear. Not everyone does, and those people go through difficult times, too.

Second, emotional intensity cannot only be expressed through the use of swear words. Indeed, some people swear without being emotional at all! With or without the use of swear words, you will have to create that "heaviness" and intensity in another way: by building up tension in your readers through a suspenseful narrative, by rasing the stakes, by showing how the characters in your story are getting more and more agitated.

Describe what that agitation does to your characters: How does their inner state change? How does their thinking change? How does their behavior change? Observe yourself and the people around you in stessful situations. Look at how other writers do it and learn from them.

In the books I read, there aren't usually any swear words and I don't use them either.

Ben
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Prior to the 1960s there was very little (no?) swearing in fiction. You could try reading some detective stories from that period. I'd suggest Dashiell Hammett, Dorothy Sayers, and G. K. Chesterton. Comic books tended to use punctuation, e.g. a villain might say "!@#$%" when the hero (who, of course, never swore) hit him.

Simon Crase
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