There is no profanity in my books. Readers notice, and now and then someone asks me about it, usually with a little surprise in their voice, because my stories are not gentle. They are supernatural thrillers. There is real fear in them. So how do you carry a character through terror and fury and grief without ever reaching for a curse word? That is the puzzle I want to share with you today, because the answer taught me more about writing than almost anything else.
The honest answer is that it is harder. And that turned out to be the best thing about it.
Where It Started
Part of it is just who I am. I am a Christian, and I tend to write the way I talk, which means the salty words never really make it onto the page. That is not me pretending the world is a clean place. It is more that those words have never been the tools I reach for, in life or in fiction.
And here is what surprised me. Clean does not mean tame. Some readers have told me they finished one of my books in the dark and then got up to check that the door was locked. The dread is real. It turns out you can scare a person silly without a single rough word, and figuring out how became one of the most interesting puzzles of my writing life.
Take the easy words away, and you discover how much is waiting underneath them.
What I Had to Learn Instead
Here is the part fellow writers will recognize. A curse word is a quick road. When a character is furious, terrified, or breaking, it is the simplest thing in the world to drop in an expletive and let the reader fill in the rest. It works, and plenty of wonderful writers use it well. I just do not have that road available to me, so I have to find another way across.
Take that road away and you are forced to do something better. You have to ask what this person would actually do. How their hands move. What they say instead. The way fear sits in the throat and changes a voice. You have to find the precise image that delivers the same gut punch without the offense. That search, sometimes maddening, is where real voice is born.
A man who goes very quiet and very still can be more frightening than a man who screams a curse. A whispered line can land harder than a shouted obscenity. When you cannot lean on the shock of a word, you have to earn the shock of the moment. And earned shock lasts.
A Gift I Stumbled Into
So the way I write and the way I work turned out to be the same thing wearing two faces. The words I happened to leave out pushed me to become a sharper storyteller than I might have been otherwise. I did not plan it that way. It was a gift I stumbled into, and the longer I write, the more grateful for it I am.
If you are a writer too, I would gently offer this as something to play with, not a rule to follow. Try writing your angriest, most frightening scene without the easy words and see what you find. You might be surprised, the way I was, at how much more there is underneath them. And if you are a reader, I simply hope the stories keep you up at night. That is all I am ever really after.
Mary Ann Poll is America's Lady of Supernatural Thrillers and the author of the Ravens Cove Iconoclast Series. She writes stories with real dread and no profanity, and loves discovering just how much a quiet word can carry. She hosts the Real Ghost Chatter podcast and never stops looking for the line where the seen world meets the unseen.