AGD. 18.
I just came here to party.
This is my strictly creative writing world. Stories, poems, articles, whatever - they all fit in here.
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Perfecting Profanities
18+ NSFW etc etc. Contains swearing because, well, that's the point of the piece. Spoiler tagged for the younger and the pure of heart.
My name is Alexa and I’m proficient in three languages: English, Music, and Swearing.
Profanity: She’s a hard mistress to tame as many brave writers have discovered over the course of their careers. How do you use it? Should you use it? What it all comes down to is the tastefulness of your choice of words. Swearing can be fun. It’s attention grabbing and can actually allow for a lot of creativity. Never completely discount it from your writing, but use discretion. Here are some things you should try and remember when using any expletives in your work.
- Excessive profanity is a turn off. Your mother probably told you chicks don’t dig it. It’s true, they don’t. And neither do your readers. Don’t make me wash out your mouth with soap.
- Badly placed profanity is also a no-no. If it doesn’t fit the situation and you just have an urge to stick a bad word in there, I have an even better idea for you – don’t. It seems awkward. You notice and we notice it as well. Open your window; stick your head out and just give’er. But keep that shit to yourself if it’s unnecessary. (Do you see what I just did there? ;D)
- So then you might ask ‘Well, Almighty Alexa, where do I put it?’ There are tons of options. You can absolutely open a piece with a profane word. (Ex: “Fuck.” Thought [insert generic character name here] as he [insert something generic here]) Why not? I’d keep reading. I would want to know what [insert generic character name here] was bitching about. There can be a thousand reasons that make that word just fit as the opener. Or you could build and build up to it. Sometimes even the best of characters snap and need to ream someone out and ream them out good. Sometimes it really just is unavoidable. They say the first step to recovery is good ole’ fashioned profanity to get it out of your system. Seriously. People say that. I know I do.
- If you have a character that just seems to have a personality that sometimes requires a bit of bad language (Ex: Ichigo from Bleach), just go with it. Censoring yourself through censoring them also seems a bit stilted and awkward.
- If you don’t like swearing, avoid creating characters and situations where it would be appropriate. Setting the audience up for some big talking and then letting them down with cop outs like “Dang you” and “Shoot” is just mean. Contrary to popular belief, though they are replacements they are not synonymous because the same mood is not conveyed. The audience does not get the same picture in their head as they otherwise would’ve.
- If used right, swearing can be very creative for a couple of reasons. Creating a special new swear for your character might make you more comfortable if you personally aren’t into bad words and can ultimately be more impacting in the long run. Nit Tibbles. That sounds dirty, doesn’t it? And I just came up with it in my head this very second. You could use that instead of “Damnit,” I bet. Replacements can also work, within full context though. No dangits, no shoots, no fudge. James has been known to use “What the suck?” on occasion, which is a perfect replacement. I may accept “What the fridge?” as that is both amusing and memorable.
- Furthermore, if you’re not into creating a new swear or replacements and you’re a-okay with a little something over G rated language, phrasing can play a huge part in making expletives more interesting and acceptable. “Eat a bowl of dicks” is way more fun than “You’re a dick” and there will be no arguments about that. I know it’s more interesting. I’m a professional. “Fuck you in the trachea with a rusty blade” is also an acceptable choice.
Swearing is really for two things: expression and impact. It can be done in a humorous way, but the fact is, is that it brings a little bit of shock value to your piece, in a way. You want people to take notice and you want it to stay in the reader’s mind long after they’ve closed the web browser. Don’t overuse, don’t underuse, don’t forget that it’s okay to use. Just keep it interesting, ladies and gents. Or I’ll fucking kill you.
Symmetry
Mature language disclaimer: There is mature language used.
Tyler taps his startlingly clean nails on the table.
Tap.
Tap.
Tap.
I examine my own, nicotine stained and scratched.
The noise is hypnotic, and I concentrate on it. I match my breathing.
I am Jack’s loss of control.
I stare down at my hand; the chemical burn still throbs dully, sometimes.
“Stop that.” Tyler narrows his eyes at me.
“Stop what?”
“Thinking. Wondering. What if-ing. Stop all of it. To explore the alternatives is to admit there is fear in your choice. It is weakness and it is exploitable.”
“Tyler, you mean to tell me that you’ve never wanted to take one step back? Never wished you’d done something else?” I shake my head. “You’re a fucking liar.”
“No. I’m a fucking dumbass. I’m a fucking screw up. But I am not a fucking liar.” We stand in silence. Tyler is right. He probably isn’t a fucking liar. He’s a concealer in order to reveal, but he is not a liar. I pour glycerin into another container. “You, however, are.” He adds.
The silence continues.
“So?”
“So? So confront me on that. Don’t shy away from the truth.” Eyes narrow further. Tyler stops what he is doing. I don’t know if I should tread more carefully but I do know I don’t want to add another chemical burn to make myself more symmetrical.
I read somewhere once that the most attractive feature of a person is their symmetry. At work for awhile I took to cropping photos in half and then copying the half left over to make a full face so I could decide whether or not it made them more attractive. I started doing it to colleagues and finally to myself. According to Science, I was this close to being attractive. I stare down into the container.
“Okay, Tyler, how am I a fucking liar?” another unknown substance added. I am afraid. I have been through hell and back and I am still afraid of this one man and his opinion. Tyler smirks and doesn’t look up from what he is doing.
“Because you won’t admit it.” Tyler Durden has the most roundabout way of getting to a point.
“Admit what?”
“Exactly! Anything! Goddamnit, you won’t admit anything. You don’t know and if you did, you still wouldn’t admit anything. You’re scared of humanity and you’re scared to be human. You’re scared of your broken routine and you wonder if you missed out on normalcy. It’s so backwards, so… broken. All this, is to fear your mistakes when they are what make us great. You’re a liar. I told you to wake up. What are you waiting for?”
Silence. More silence. I wonder if I’m concentrating symmetrically.
“So…”
“So fuck what if! ‘What if’ is to look for order where there should be none. And in the end it doesn’t make a difference. Not one. Because we have the capacity to make mistakes and we always will. That is fact, inevitable. To believe otherwise is to believe in orderliness. To give random events order is to forget what makes them great. It is letting God win.”
Tyler is right, like he usually is. I took all that I’d learned from that night – the realization – and filed it away, wanting it to come back in due time. I am adjusting. I am not ready. I don’t know anything – but I know I shouldn’t be afraid.
pls 2 b telling me wat u think
I'm in a story writing contest at OB and the first challenge for me is "the rewrite" where you rewrite a scene from an existing work, either changing it or replacing it with your own. I chose Fight Club. What do you think? Tell meeee.
Tyler taps his nicotine stained nails on the table.
Tap.
Tap.
Tap.
The noise is hypnotic, and I concentrate on it. I match my breathing.
I am Jack’s loss of control.
I stare down at my own hand; the chemical burn still throbs dully, sometimes.
“Stop that.” Tyler narrows his eyes at me.
“Stop what?”
“Thinking. Wondering. What if-ing. Stop all of it. To explore the alternatives is to admit there is fear in your choice. It is weakness and it is exploitable.”
“Tyler, you mean to tell me that you’ve never wanted to take one step back? Never wished you’d done something else?” I shake my head. “You’re a fucking liar.”
“No. I’m a fucking dumbass. I’m a fucking screw up. But I am not a fucking liar.” We stand in silence. Tyler is right. He probably isn’t a fucking liar. He’s a concealer in order to reveal, but he not a liar. I pour glycerin into another container.
“You, however, are.” He adds. The silence continues.
“So?”
“So? So confront me on that. Don’t shy away from the truth.” Eyes narrow further. Tyler stops what he is doing. I don’t know if I should tread more carefully but I do know I don’t want to add another chemical burn to make myself more symmetrical. I read somewhere once that the most attractive feature of a person is their symmetry. At work for awhile I took to cropping photos in half and then copying the half left over to make a full face so I could decide whether or not it made them more attractive. I started doing it to colleagues and finally to myself. I was this close. I rolled my eyes.
“Okay, Tyler, how am I a fucking liar?” another unknown substance into the container. I am afraid. I have been through hell and back and I am still afraid of this one man and his opinion. Tyler smirks and doesn’t look up from what he is doing.
“Because you won’t admit it.” Tyler Durden has the most roundabout way of getting to a point.
“Admit what?”
“Exactly! Anything! Goddamnit, you won’t admit anything. You don’t know and if you did, you wouldn’t admit anything. You’re scared of humanity and you’re scared to be human. You’re scared of your broken routine and you wonder if you missed out on normalcy. All this, is to fear your mistakes when they are what make us great. You’re a liar. I told you to wake up. What are you waiting for?”
Silence. More silence. I wonder if I’m concentrating symmetrically.
“So…”
“So fight me.” Tyler says.
Twilight: The Root Of All Evil
The Root of All Evil.
So, as a little disclaimer, I’ve read Twilight. To be exact, I’ve read the entire Twilight saga, from the alright but totally addicting for whatever reason opener, the namesake itself, Twilight, to the dramatic and incredibly disappointing finale, Breaking Dawn. So I think I’m completely within my rights as a one-time fan to completely blast apart this questionable best seller.
Twilight, in theory, is probably pretty nice. Chicks love romance and chicks love magic stuff, so if you put the two together, you can’t blame SMeyer for turning what should have stayed fanfiction hidden in the recesses of the internet into a novel. No, you can’t blame her. Because in theory, it was pretty sweet. It was in the entire execution where it became a disaster. And you know who should take blame? The company that agreed to publish her. I have a hard time understanding the fact that she got published in the first place. As a book, it’s a literary joke.
Twilight utilizes very few words. I don’t think I’ve ever read anything with a more limited vocabulary outside of, perhaps, children’s books. That’s a little embarrassing, as a fellow writer. I myself, and any writers I know, always strive to expand our vocabularies, improving with each piece so that there can be more. A plight with most critics of Stephenie Meyer’s work is her limited vocabulary combined with an undeniable rape of a thesaurus. I couldn’t agree more. A thesaurus is not inherently a bad thing, but what Meyer does with it sure is.
Her vocabulary only further undermines her already shaky character development. I say shaky because Meyer goes against her own created parameters far too many times, hoping that readers will forgive her because “OMG EDWARD IS SEWW HAWT!” Which isn’t too far from the truth, sadly. The characters themselves leave much to be desired. First of all, every single character has one trait in common: angst. There is a problem when every single character shares one trait, considering the whole point of having multiple characters is so you can give them all their unique personalities. Someone apparently forgot to tell Meyer this little yet very important detail.
Let’s break down why all the characters in Twilight suck.
Bella – Mary Sue. For those of you who don’t know what a Mary Sue is, it’s basically a self insert female character. Isabella Swann is bland and everyone loves her. Her only flaw is that she has none. Which is the worst kind of character an author could conceive. She is dependent, boy obsessed, perpetually in danger. Not much of a pioneer female character, Bella takes female characters back to the dark ages.
Edward – Shiny. Vampire. Really? Yeah, unfortunately. And that’s about all there is to say about him because his personality is almost non-existent. He is cold, has stalker-like tendencies, and is a domestic abuse case waiting to happen. He sneaks into Bella’s room to watch her sleep, he can’t live without her, there is more than one occurrence of Bella being bruised by Edward… the list here is pretty much endless.
Jacob – really really angsty.
I really don’t think it’s necessary to actually discuss all of them because they don’t get more interesting.
Rosalie is not misunderstood - she’s legitimately a bitch. Alice is alright but she’s underused so we never really get to see much. Charlie is a typical dad in denial, Renee is an inconsistent child in a grown up’s body, Carlisle, as much as I want to like him, upon the reading of several other critiques, has become questionable… why does he only save teenagers? Sort of weird. And illegal. Jasper and Emmett just really don’t matter, Esmee sort of falls into that category as well.
Twilight is shallow, it sends all the wrong messages, teaches all the wrong morals. By the end of the series, Bella is practically a drop out, a teenage bride, a teenage mother, willing to give up everything for a boy. Bella turns her back on her friends, her family and her own safety. And when you thought it couldn’t get any worse, without any real struggle like her vampire brethren, Bella experiences no trouble fitting in to her vampire life and is now completely perfect and beautiful… which is weird because she already was a perfect Mary Sue to begin with.
You can tell me you've read all these arguments before... I don't care. After reading essays for and against this wildly popular fandom, I've decided to throw my own hat into the ring, so to speak.
Twilight creates unrealistic and unhealthy expectations for little girls in love with the idea of love and is possibly a very scary look into the future of literature.
I can’t tell you why I enjoyed Twilight, or the subsequent novels to follow, because honestly, upon review, I can’t remember why I had any good reasons too.
Chapter 6
Awkward is perhaps the biggest understatement I have ever used in my life in conjunction with the events immediately following that night for a myriad of reasons. Some funny, most … not so much. I woke up on your couch, my face plastered to the leather via an excess of drool. I peeled myself off and sat up, wiping my face on the inside of my shirt and running my hands through my hair. I braced myself for the oncoming wave of nausea and pain and… none came. Surprised (though not ungrateful), I proceeded to stand up and stretched. As I did so, I glanced at the clock.
“Shit!” It was late. Much much later than I had anticipated. I pulled my cell phone out of my pocket and clicked a button on the side to illuminate the screen, but it stayed blank. I then remembered that as the gentleman I am, I had turned off my phone last night to avoid any phone calls from my girlfriend. I sighed and held down the power button, waiting for it to turn back on. A few seconds later it did and my phone began vibrating. I was absolutely inundated with both missed calls and texts from my girlfriend. I scrolled through all the new text messages.
“Hey, where did you go?”
“Where are you??”
“Alex, call me!”
“I’m worried… please call me…”
“Alex!”
And the last one, sent at 6:43 AM
“Alex I swear to God if you aren’t dead in a ditch somewhere or you haven’t called me by noon tomorrow, I’m going to make sure you end up that way.”
I could picture her sitting in her bed, eyes puffy and red rimmed from crying and worrying about me (I later learned that this was not the case, for she had actually been fucking my friend Colton somewhere in between all those text messages, but I feel that will become more pertinent information later on). I felt bad, make no mistake about it, but my finger still hovered above the ‘Call’ button, unsure. 11:58 AM. I was supposed to be at school more than 2 and a half hours ago for my Sunday morning lab. 11:59 AM. ‘Call’.
Ring one.
Ring two.
“You fucking douche bag.”
“Uh yeah… hi…”
“Where the fuck were you? Where the fuck are you now? Why the fuck didn’t you call me?”
“Sorry… I was… I passed out for a bit and some guy from the party came outside on his way home and actually woke me up and took me to his place so I could sleep it off. I was really really out of it.” There it was again, in those big bold letters I was so familiar with. Lie. It felt very safe. “Sorry.” I said it again. Which I was. Her voice softened.
“I was really worried.” (bitch)
“I know.” I cleared my throat, not really sure what else to say.
“Let me come pick you up.” She said.
“No, no. I should go for a walk, clear my head. Plus it’s the least I deserve for worrying you so much last night.” I could hear her smile.
“Well, that’s true.”
“I’ll talk to you later.”
“Alright. Bye, Alex. Love you.” I clicked the phone shut. Enough lying for now, I supposed.
“Some guy from the party, hmm?”
I turned around to see you walking towards me from the kitchen, two mugs of coffee in hand. You sipped from one as you held the other out towards me.
“Well…” I took it, sheepishly.
“Ah, say no more. I presume that was the girlfriend. All’s fair.” You grinned.
“Mmm.” I shrugged in a very non-indicative way.
“I see sobriety does nothing for your ways in the art of being specific.” You noted.
“Anything above vague when it comes to my personal feelings seems to be inexpressible.” I said. I then realized I was no longer making eye contact with you but I was simply staring. It was almost painful to tear my eyes away from your face. You were uncomplicated in so many ways. My life badly needed something uncomplicated. “I should go.” I put my cup of coffee down, barely touched.
“Wait!” you said it almost fervently. “Let me give you my number.” You grabbed my hand still holding my cell phone and gently pulled it out of my grasp. You quickly put it back into my hand after tapping your contact information into it. This item suddenly took on a lot more importance. You smiled.
“You may go, now.” I nodded.
“Well, thanks.” You waved your hand in the air nonchalantly.
“Think nothing of it.” Yeah. Right. If only.
“I’ll call you sometime.”
“That was the point.” You said, feigning exasperation. I smirked and tore my eyes off you again, making my way to the door. I jammed my feet into my shoes and opened the door.
“Bye.” I didn’t turn around as I said it.
Minutes later I was on the street, walking home. My phone began vibrating so I pulled it out to check the caller ID. It was my Father. The last person I needed to hear from, because the only time he ever called me was when I was in trouble. I flipped the phone open anyway. Better now, then later.
“Hey.”
“Alex, why did I get a call from your lab partner about 2 minutes ago asking where you were this morning?”
“Well Dad, I should think that the answer to that question is fairly obvious.” My answer was greeted by a surprising silence. A very short-lived silence.
“Alex.”
“Yeah, Dad?”
“Get your ass home, now.”
“You know, I was thinking. I know that I’ll be getting a lecture when I get home and that doesn’t seem too appealing to me right now. I’m just in too good of a mood. So how about you just stew about this for awhile and then you can be even angrier by the time I get home?” More silence.
“Listen here you little shit, if you aren’t home in – “
“Okay, see you later.” I snapped the phone shut before another venomous word could escape. I swear my phone would’ve started melting if I’d have let him continue. I shoved the phone back into my pocket, after turning it on silent mode. And then I did something surprising. I started laughing. I replayed the conversation with my Father, with my girlfriend, and then I replayed the whole night from start to finish. And I laughed as I walked, until I felt like my chest was going to burst. I hadn’t been so eager to relive a night since I lost my virginity (a tale not so exciting as you’d think. Awkward was again an understatement for this occurrence as well.) I felt like I was standing still. When I couldn’t take this slow feeling anymore, I started running. My heart beat wildly in my ears to the point where all outside sound became blocked. I ran until it hurt, and even then I was still smiling.
It’s funny in that sad ironic way that my hope for you to be the one who could untangle me from everything ended up being the one to inadvertently push me further in.
