In the Christian community, opinions on cursing range from watchdog to apathetic.  This will be an apologetics post targeted to the watchdogs.

In the writing community, opinions on curse words are subjective.  The big question for writers: Does the word work?  Words themselves are tools to express ideas and have no moral tint beyond what humans give them.  The greatest writing sin is, in fact, forcing a word into a place it doesn’t belong.  The word itself does not matter.  The flow matters.  The art matters.

The Bible tells believers to be careful about what we let come out of our mouths, that our words reflect our hearts.  I’ve struggled over the appropriateness of using cursing in my writing.  I don’t curse in day to day life — it’s not how I was brought up.  So my hangup is: if I write it, am I actually saying it?

The gut reaction to that question is “Yes, you are.  Writing isn’t any different from speaking.”  And I know quite a few Christians who stop there and use that as a blanket statement to cover any writing, no matter what.  In their opinion, there is never an excuse to use curse words in any situation.

I respect that opinion, so I offer my own conclusions with humility, wincing, and a few placating hand motions.

I belong to a group of gamers.  They’re like family to me.  Our group has a language restriction — if it bothers someone, be respectful and don’t say it.  This means that they don’t curse around my brother or myself because they are nice people.  But we also had a conversation or two crop up about the subject, and one thing I realized is that most people in this world do not think twice about cursing.  They’re raised with it. It’s actually a struggle for them to hold back because it’s a lifelong habit.

What this realization meant to my writing is this: My characters are not, for the most part, Christians.  It’s important to me that I have diverse personalities and world views among my characters; thus, many of my characters, like my gamer friends, don’t debate the finer points of cursing’s ethical implications. Cursing as a morality issue does not exist in their lives.

So my dilemma becomes: Do I bend to the ideal of a perfectly clean world and force my characters to an unnatural angle, or do I let them be themselves?  By letting them be true to their background, am I being untrue to my background?

It is common to hear among writers that a character lives.  The best characters are not made – they exist, they take on a life of their own.  They do not care what the writer or the reader thinks.  They are who they are.

I believe in that principle.  Let’s call it The Real Principle.  In The Real Principle, characters cease to be words on a page and become real people to the writer, and to censor those people too much is to rip the personality (the Real) out of them so that they become puppets.

I have a character who used to be homeless and never for even a moment had a moral influence in his life.  For months, his voice ran through my head as I put him in different situations, working out his personality and reactions to this and that.  He cursed like a rabid banshee on crack.

So, when I wrote down his scenes, I censored him.  To a point.  He still used more curse words than any of my other characters — I let him have the smaller ones, the ones you hear on daytime TV, and I restricted them to only the necessary scenes — but those words do not exist because I want to shock the reader.  They exist because that character is a shocking person and because that is how he expresses himself.  That’s a major difference to me, the motive behind the words.  I don’t want to spout filth but it is imperitive, vital, and sacrosanct to me as a writer to show my characters honestly.

I understand those Christians who don’t read or watch anything with cursing.  My aunt is one, and I love her so I respect that view.  But my heart breaks a little when I think I might get called out by those who won’t try to understand the ethical difference between writing something down and letting something live.

In my humblest and most placating defense: as an artist, I must let my characters be themselves.