Do you feel intense cringe when the novel MC swears?

[QuercusMalus]

Swearing is like seasoning. Use sparingly, and not in all dishes.

 

[ArchlordZero]

Yo, I have to make the dialogues fuckin realistic. Here at my place, you often hear bad words at 6 AM. So you can kiss my ass, biatch!

(Please don't be offended, I'm just trying hard to be funny)

 

[riotwtttch]

I like it if the rhythm is right, but "right" is something I can't quite define. The thing about people/characters who swear all the time is that their curse words are often in place of emphasis or punctuation rather than being words per se.

As for older people swearing constantly? I hear it a lot in real life. I'm not going to say that those real life people are speaking in ways that make for good dialogue, but I can certainly believe that a person that age would.

 

[T.K._Paradox]

I'm a method author, and I based one of my characters on myself.

And yes, I'm 34 and I swear a lot, especially around people I'm comfortable with.

"Based one of the characters on myself."

"Swear a lot."

I always knew you were a female Pope.

 

[RepresentingDesire]

Well I don’t think that it's cringe.

 

[DaScoot]

I find it weird that the assumption is that swearing is something 'young people' do and that you age out of it. When I was an awkward kid I could barely force myself to say a bad word. Now unless there's kids around or something I don't even notice swears as being any different than any other word.

My informal characters absolutely swear, including the ones that are hundreds of years old.

 

[Corty]

Swearing has its place in stories. Anyone who likes to pretend it's beneath them and reading it is cringe or a sign of sub-par literature is a snobbish liar.

People swear in their everyday life. Many times without thinking. It can be used to make a character more human if their reactions match that of the average people.

It can also be used to build a character. Yes. It can. You don't think so? Then your imagination is limited to a box you should start opening up and expanding.

Like everything, you can overuse it, you can make it cringe, and you can do without it. It is all depends on the author to keep it a balance and to make it part of a character if he/she is someone known to have a foul mouth.

 

[Deleted member 54065]

"Based one of the characters on myself."

"Swear a lot."

I always knew you were a female Pope.

I'm no Catholic. I'm a Protestant.

 

[Roseofblades]

"Swearing" is just another way to express one's self at any age. I grew up in a super religious household, so I wouldn't have even dreamed of uttering so much as a "Damn." Now that I am no longer part of any of that bullshit, I "swear like a sailor." I stopped caring about it offending other people around the same time I stopped working customer service jobs. I'm 36... so if that means I'm a young person... YAY! Otherwise, age plays no factor.

I wouldn't necessarily spam the word fuck like that repeatedly, though. That's just redundant and rather annoying. The only time it has any place in a story to be said that frequently is during sex. Even then, I still don't bombard my readers with it like that.

Edit: I just did a word search for Fuck in my story Empress of Hell. Apparently I've used it 203 times in ~630 pages.

 

[Corty]

I stopped caring about it offending other people around the same time I stopped working customer service jobs.

As a fellow who works with people (including customers), I salute you for your service.

 

[LuoirM]

Dude probably thinks women belongs in the kitchen

 

[BigBadBoi]

Depends on how much they swear. Tasteful use of curse words adds a lot to the story and dialogue. if you're gonna use it like a 10 year old that just learned that you can curse as much as you want without getting bitchslapped by your parents then that's when it starts being a problem.

 

[PlatDragon]

I have more of an issue with the following:

Then I do with his swearing, especially if its internal some people swear in their heads all the time <Me>, but not in real life. You might even think they are lily white pure. Some people don't swear, that's just people.

I reread what I wrote above and I should add an explanation to why it threw me off more than the cussing.

A Diploma <After High School> is usually some hands-on training with few classes and is commonly given out in specific specialized skill sets for certain industries. So besides the High School curriculum you have HVAC, Electrician, Auto Mechanic, Airplane Mechanic, Arborist, Hair stylist, Nail Technician, and so on. They are not full on College courses with a more spread out curriculum. Anatomy could be one, but that usually mean you took some online courses and got a certification (Diploma) that you took that course or courses for that certification.
A Degree is a structured program that includes a mix of core and degree-specific classes plus elective to broaden your education.
A Minor is a specialization in another area alongside or besides the major degree. So a Major in Physics and a Minor in Probability & Statistics is a good fit.

So for me it should have been "By the age of twenty-five, he had obtained a Bachelor's in Physics with a Minor in Statistics and Probability and had taken some certification courses in Anatomy. Armed with the knowledge of these three fields as his foundation, he spent all his time performing research on martial arts and combat sports."

Now I would still have given it a "huh" look as, the study of Kinesiology is a college level program that you can go all the way up to Doctorate with. Which includes the study of Human motion, muscles and cardiovascular system. A person with said degree depending on level is either anywhere from a Youth league sports therapist, School Gym teacher, Local Gym Trainer and all the way up to Athletic director, Sports consultant, Wellness director, Chiropractors, Occupational therapist, Physical therapist, Registered nurses, and Sports Medicine Physicians including researchers in Sports Medicine.

Which Covers what this guy was doing with his Physics, Math and Anatomy. However sometimes people end up in weird career paths and he might have been one of them.

Honestly when I read novels that explains the background of mc before they get isekai'd or whatever, I usually think ehhh and will probably drop it after 6 chapters. Like seriously, don't explain to the readers whatever the hell the mc is or was. Just show me how the mc is supposed to be like based on his background and give us bits of info about his past every now and then when it is relevant. This is because when authors written that their mc have 8 PhDs or whatever, my imagination already have an understanding of their personality and behaviour. People like those are true intellectuals, they don't act immaturely or in a lacking way. The moment they step a bit out of line, my imagination of them being experts fall off and just ruins the experience.
Authors need to know that the smartest characters you can write will only be as smart as yourself. So by writing characters that are supposed to be smarter than you, you actually have no idea on how to write them realistically. Of course, you can always research what those type of people are like but last time I did that I dug myself into a rabbit hole for a week lmao.

 

[LilRora]

To me this depends on a lot of things. A general rule of thumb for me, use swear words to emphasize, not to express, except unusual and extreme cases. That automatically means I'd use them much less.

And as for cringe, this will depend on what the rest of the story is like, but generally I don't mind a lot of swear words in dialogue, but I don't like them at all in narration. Both can be overused though, just that dialogue has a higher bar that can be raised even higher for appropriate characters.

 

[Jemini]

Me, I say swearing is just one more tool you can use for characterization. My MC in both my series will swear but it's rather infrequent. On the other hand, both my series have characters with really bad attitudes, and part of the way that's portrayed is by the frequency of their swearing.

My MC in the respective series use swearing a lot like how it's being advocated for by a few people on this site. Only to punctuate points where it really matters. The foul mouth characters will just go off swearing to express some (oftentimes rather mild) frustration that they have, and it winds up coming up frequently.

 

[RepresentingWrath]

No.

 

[TheEldritchGod]

My MC curses all the time. His maid also periodically slaps him and tells him not to swear so much.

 

[MatchaChocolate69]

No, it's not cringe. It's a way to characterize the characters.
Old people in my country swear all the time, especially when they play cards.

 

[BlackKnightX]

Your example is quite appropriate. The character is in a pinch and feels frustrated. Nothing unusual. I love curses in fiction, but not when it gets thrown around left and right. Usually, it's either to show anger or for comedy. Showing anger is just like in your example. For comedy is, for instance, say the MC gets tricked by a character, and he's just realized what's happened. He might go, "Fuck," or, "Son of a—."

 

[Representing_Tromba]

If it's overdone, yeah. If not, no.