Showing posts with label What About Profanity When Writing Dialogue. Show all posts
Showing posts with label What About Profanity When Writing Dialogue. Show all posts

Tuesday, September 5, 2023

What About Profanity When Writing Dialogue?


by PeggySue Wells @PeggySueWells

By the time she was ten years old, my daughter had surpassed all the art instruction I could give. At a local art show, she considered the pieces on display and pointed to a group of portraits. “I could learn from that artist.”

And so she began group lessons at the artist’s studio. When I picked her up after the first class, my daughter eagerly described the new techniques she learned and finished with, “And there is a little old lady who swears like crazy.”

The following week, the instructor and I talked about my daughter’s progress. “She mentioned that one classmate is particularly colorful,” I said.

The instructor nodded. “When your daughter joined the class, that student really cleaned up her language.”

To use or not to use. What does a writer do with the question of profanity? Writing about our artistic little old lady with the surprising vocabulary, what words get included in the dialog?