A Final Dilemma: To Swear or Not to Swear

This happened about a week ago.

I had the entire text of SPOTD: The Final Face-Off revised, copy edited, proofread, and ready to export with Adobe PDF Presets [PDF/X-1a:2001]. Yeah, that's pretty much 5 minutes away from being ENTIRELY done (upload to LSI, order my proof copy, done).

I was stuck on one word.

I'll be vague enough to avoid spoilers. There's a short scene where Chase eavesdrops on some older kids. The older kids are angry. Older kids swear and use impolite insults and rough language when they are angry. I was writing dialogue. The dilemma: to swear or not to swear.

On the one hand, Stephen King says in On Writing that “if you expect to succeed as a writer, rudeness should be the second-to-least of your concerns. The least of all should be polite society and what it expects. If you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days as a member of polite society are numbered, anyway.” 

On the other hand, my books are for elementary kids.

So, I brainstormed swear words and insults that would fit the sentence in question, and settled on the word asinine. It has a nice forbidden sound, without being a four-letter word per se. I could hear the speaker in question using the word.

Then I imagined my elementary teacher friend Karinda Groothuis reading the sentence aloud to her class. Would she hesitate and possible skip over the word? Um, yeah. I imagined 10-year-olds bringing their copies of the book to their parents for a definition. Would they wonder what on earth their precious little ones were reading? Um, yeah. I imagined the word finding its way onto the school bus or out to the playground. Would it be repeated? Possibly. Would that make the word a better place? Probably not.

In short, was it worth it to write the scene as I heard it, with the language the characters were screaming in my head? Again, no.

I finally decided that I would regret insulting readers and parents and teachers more than I would regret a small lapse of writer's integrity. Integrity to the dogs, I worked around the rough language by stating, "He swore." I did include the insult "stupid," which is an accurate description of the action in the scene. It took me 45 minutes to decide on this one word. I'm satisfied.

Done.