Probably many of you are too young to remember what the question above was a common greeting...but that's neither here nor there. 😉
I've had to stop reading two books this week.
One promised to be a neat, paranormal suspense book, with ghosts and hauntings and danger and all. I was really looking forward to it.
Until I got into the book, and discovered that everybody in it had potty mouths.
Yes. Including the seven-year-old son.
But what wore on me even more was the casual gutter speech from the parents.
Specifically, Mom.
Now, it's a British book. So, I had to tell myself over and over again, "Brits are cruder in their everyday speech than you're used to."
So when she teases her husband by calling him a "cheeky bastard," I could laugh along. He was being one, as a matter of fact.
But when she greeted her kids, first thing in the morning, by saying, "You're up early. Did you shit the bed or something?"
I stopped.
And, while I did read a little further into the book, at that point, I lost interest.
The book had many "tripping points" for those of us used to an opening that moves fast, anyhow; it delved into great and meticulous detail about the layout of this fantastic estate where that the woman was going to be live-in manager. Describing in fine specifics the lengths, and breadths, and numbers of doors, and the whole shot. Even that, I could adapt to...in a book where, clearly, the setting is as much a character as the people. I get that. I've even done it. Although not, it must be said, in such exhaustive geographic detail.
But not a mother thinking it's in any way remotely affectionate to tease her children about being up early by asking if someone's defecated in a bed.
I wonder, to this moment, what she would have responded if they'd said, "Yes."
Part of me, I confess, wanted them to. Just to see her jaw drop.
But they took that in good spirit, as if that was the kind of thing their mother said to them all the time. And the notion of that turned my stomach.
When the language of the kids didn't improve any over the next few pages...I stopped. I just had had enough of their smart-ass mouths.
I no longer cared if the ghost got any of them. In fact, I was rooting for it.
The same has happened with a second book I started, and was quite absorbed in, because a lot out of it is funny. It's another paranormal thriller, with a black-humor bent in it that I appreciate.
I even was heartened when, in the first several pages, the language was actually cleaner than I expected.
Unfortunately, that didn't last.
But the kicker for me? One particular scene, upon which a major incident in the story gets built. A scene in which our "hero"'s wife is being, shall we say, sexually indulged by one of her fellow workers.
Mind you, they're only separated, she and the hero. Not divorced yet. And he doesn't really want to divorce her.
Until that moment, when he doesn't catch them directly in the act...but right afterward.
And he spares us no description of what that looks like. Body parts, reactions, smells, the whole thing.
This is piled on top of an increasingly foul text anyway, in which our hero is dealing with mobsters and semi-mobsters and people who once did business with the mob, and petty crooks, and the whole shot...and none of them, apparently, know any creative words and terms beyond "a**hole," *d***head," and, of course, the ever-popular "f**k" (and all its forms).
A little of that, I put up with.
When we then start to wallow, deeper and deeper, into language--be it conversation or description--that makes me want to take a shower when I'm done reading it?
I'm outta there.
Which brings up my ever-present question.
There are over 600,000 words in the English language.
Why can't people learn to use some more of them?
And why don't publishers demand better?
One time, someone posted on Twitter that he couldn't understand why people had a problem with the word "f**k."
I said, because it's vulgar, obscene, and repetitive.
To which another respondent agreed with the first poster and said, "Oh, but there are situations in which it's the perfect word."
To which I responded, "Only if you're too lazy to find any others."
I stand by that.
I stand by that as pertains to "a**hole," as pertains to *d***head," and a host of other terms that are so peppered throughout most contemporary prose that, were they actual pepper, you couldn't consume the dish they were used on.
Which, when you think about it, is a very good metaphor.
People will say, over and over, "But this is the way people talk."
To which I can only answer, "It's not the way I talk. And it's not the way people with a grain of decency talk. Or write. Or narrate things."
Above all, it's not the way people who actually want to convey real English talk...or write.
And before you scream protests? It can be done.
It has been. Countless times.
You can write about the seamiest, grittiest, most down-and-dirty plot points in the world in your prose without a single one of these lazy words.
And, no, it won't sound like a Sunday school teacher wrote it.
Because there are some really wonderful words in the lexicon that can be used as substitutes for these words. And they're not just substitutes, in that you're doing some knee-jerk "cleaning up" of your writing--they're actually better words.
More descriptive.
More vivid.
One or two, or half a dozen of these other "gems," in speech? If you want to have your characters portrayed as lazy speakers, go ahead.
But peppering them throughout narrative, throughout thoughts, throughout conversation as if they're anything but the nauseating insensitivities they are?
You do that, I'm going to get tired of digging through the excrement to get to the pony. But worse than that, for your author's reputation...is that I'm going to doubt that there even is a pony in there to begin with.
And I will set your book aside.
And I will delete it from my Kindle.
And I promise, I will never recommend it to anybody.
Do you really want that reaction from a reader? Any reader?
You all can do better. I know you can.
Give it a try.
Go ahead.
I dare you.
Thoughts?
Janny
