That !&#%@# Profanity!
I got an interesting 1-star review on one of my River City titles recently.
Not interested in reading a book filled with profanity. And yeah I don’t care if you think it’s how “real” cops talk.
How did I react? I laughed out loud. Here’s why.
First off, the River City series is a police procedural series. And it comes from an author whose tagline is “gritty crime crime fiction from both sides of the badge.” Would you expect such a title to be devoid of profanity?
Hell, no.
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I just shake my head. At least it was a 4-star review, though, eh?
But the part about the 1-star review of my River City novel that made me laugh out loud was the chiding of the second sentence. It reminded me of a news piece I saw a few years back. Seems that a youth soccer team, just one of those funsies recreational teams, was struggling. A parent of one of the players offered to help out the coach, who seemed to have his hands full. The coach snapped back that he had it handled and didn’t need to hear this parent’s thoughts on the topic. Just let the expert handle it, the coach snidely remarked. The parent quietly apologized and returned to the stands. Turned out that the parent coached the MLS team in that city.
Oops.
Why’s the review funny to me? Well, I don’t “think” that’s how real cops talk. I know. I was a cop for over twenty years. I was in the field professionally for almost twenty-five. Trust me, in their native environment, most cops make frequent use of colorful language. Incessant, at times. In my novels, I have reduced its occasion significantly, especially those casual uses that slip into daily speech habits. So the fact that I already slapped a filter on it makes this review even more amusing to me.
But the true purpose of this being a blog post instead of a tweet, ironically, is to touch on how my own use of profanity in my work has slowly lessened over the course of my writing career.
At first, I sought verisimmilitude. My cops spoke like the cops I knew. Like I did. I was wisely cautioned by several other authors to trim it back to essential – or at least necessary – uses. This is the strategy I’ve employed since getting and heeding that advice. All that has changed is my own definition of “necessary.”
I’ve found that “necessary” profanity in my work has trended downward. Even a title I wrote seven years ago that I recently reviewed to get fresh for a sequel had instances that I would cull if it were a draft I was writing today.
Will my crime fiction ever be devoid enough of profanity to please this particular reviewer? I’m certain not, and that’s okay. I write what I write and s/he reads what s/he reads. There’s plenty of room in the crime fiction world for us both to be happy. And the one star review doesn’t move the needle much on a four-star title, so no harm, no foul.
But it still makes me laugh.
“I don’t care if you think that’s how ‘real’ cops talk.”
Right on. But I do know how real fucking cops fucking talk.
[An additional slice of irony – the timing of the review leads to me to strongly suspect the reviewer picked it up for free while it was on promotion.]
Source: All The Madness In My Soul
