Using Real World Slang and Swearing In Your Fantastical Story (Dos and Don'ts)

This week I want to talk about a very particular trend that seems to be cropping up in a lot of books. It is, simply put, the tendency that a lot of writers seem to have of letting modern colloquial slang and swear words just drop out of the mouths of characters in settings where that kind of language simply doesn't make sense. Whether you're out on the rim of a far-off asteroid belt, or riding shaggy aurochs across the frozen tundra of Marvosa, the words your characters use shape the story... and if you end up having them sound like someone from small town America somewhere in the mid 20-teens, that's going to shatter readers' immersion.

"Yeet!" Scarbrand roared, hurling the great spear toward the charging frost giant...

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Why You Shouldn't Do This

There are a lot of books that have done this in recent years. Fourth Wing, Quicksilver, and A Court of Thorns and Roses to name a few. However, each of these acts as a good example of why using modern language in a non-modern story without thinking is a problem... because it undermines your world building, and it takes your readers out of the story.

Now, for clarity, I'm not talking about digging deep into the cultural origin of words here. If you're writing a story about a war on the other side of the galaxy between alien factions, and one of them has a heavily-armored vehicle with a large main gun and additional support weapons, you can still call it a tank. The fact that it's completely divorced from the weapon development during the first World War on Earth when the British tried to hide the development of these armored vehicles by claiming they were new kinds of water tanks (hence the name) isn't the sort of thing that's going to take readers out of the story for the most part.

Yeah, this one you can get away with.

No, for this case what I'm talking about is using modern slang, or truly modern phrases, but letting them come out of the mouths of characters who have no business talking like this. As an example, if you have a high fantasy story about dragon riders, and one of them wants to compliment the other on a great feat of riding, or bravery in battle, they wouldn't clap them on the shoulder and say something like, "Based maneuver, comrade," or, "Poggers flying! You're lucky Skyrake didn't yeet you off."

If that example got a laugh out of you, good. However, the point remains that the way people talk, and the words they use, are a part of the underlying nature of the world your story takes place in. So if you're going to have particular phrases in your world, or particular pieces of slang, it's worth asking why they exist, and if they make sense given the culture of the world you've set up.

Just like how an urukhai declaring, "Looks like meat's back on the menu, boys!" means that there are restaurants in Mordor, and that these magically-grown murder monsters understand the concept of a menu in the first place, you can sometimes get away with one or two instances... but not if you're using it every, single conversation.

When You Can Get Away With It

As with every rule, there are always going to be exceptions. The first one, which might be a slightly controversial take, is that you can get away with these words if there is some kind of explanation that makes sense in-world. If you're writing a historical fantasy, for instance, you might come into contact with The Tiffany Problem, which is when we don't realize how far back into our history certain ideas, concepts, or even names can go. The other side of this coin is when you have stories set in the far future, but there are still bits of our colloquial language that have survived the test of time, even if the exact origin and meaning has been lost by those who've adopted particular turns of phrase.

More on the Tiffany Problem in the video below, if you haven't seen it yet.

The second time when you can more or less get away with modern parlance is when it's a word that conveys a particular feeling, but you don't want to make up something unique to this setting. As a for-instance, lots of fantasy novels will have made-up swear words in them ("bags" was a common one in the fantasy novels by Terry Goodkind, for instance), but it's quite common for grittier or more hard-edged books like the Witcher series, or the First Law series, to just use modern swear words. Shit, fuck, damn, and so on are all perfectly serviceable, and they've existed in some way for hundreds, if not thousands of years. So even if these aren't the specific swear words we're hearing (if you subscribe to the idea that fantasy stories are written in the native language of that world, and we are seeing a translated version of the tale), the meaning is more important than the specific word in this context. And sometimes made-up swear words just don't convey the right feeling.

The third situation where you can get away with this, and where it might even be the whole point of the story you're writing, is when it is done for comedic effect. This is particularly true when we stray into the realm of parody. For example, perhaps you want to have a traditional high fantasy story, but all the characters talk like they're in a high school teen drama from the 1990s. Maybe you want to write a cyberpunk novel set in an alternate year 2020, but while the technology is all vastly different, the subcultures and slang are largely the same, which is kind of a hilarious juxtaposition. Perhaps you want the aliens to talk in an ancient Earth dialect because that was the most recent trasmission they received, so they all sound and act like they're from the 1950s, even though the book is set much further along in the future than that.

This is perhaps the most important thing to remember... the juxtaposition of something familiar from our world with a fantastical setting is inherently funny in a lot of ways. So if you're doing this for comedy, it's going to go over pretty well. But if you want people to take these characters seriously, the way they're talking is going to be a pretty big issue to look past, even if the rest of the story is meant to be poe-faced... and honestly, that might just make it funnier.

As an example, check out my mystery-solving noir cat novels Marked Territory and Painted Cats. They're inherently ridiculous... which is part of what makes their very serious tone just add to the joke!

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Like, Follow, and Come Back Again!

That's all for this week's Craft of Writing! For more of my work, check out my Vocal archive, or at My Amazon Author Page where you can find books like my sci-fi dystopian thriller Old Soldiers, the Hardboiled Cat series about a mystery solving Maine Coon in Marked Territory and Painted Cats, my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife, or my most recent short story collection The Rejects!

 

And to stay on top of all my latest news and releases, collected once a week, make sure you subscribe to The Literary Mercenary's mailing list. 

If you'd like to help support my work, then consider Buying Me A Ko-Fi, or heading over to The Literary Mercenary's Patreon page! Lastly, to keep up with my latest, follow me on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, and now on Pinterest as well!

Diamonds Are Worthless (And What This Has To Do With Your Book)

Diamonds have, for most of our lives, been a symbol of wealth. We see celebrities dripping with these rocks, and everyone knows that in order to prove your love for your partner you propose with a big, fat diamond that probably cost several months of your salary. However, diamonds are actually a pretty common rock. Not only that, but with the ability to grow one in a lab, there's zero justification for them being so damn expensive.

So why do we think they are? And what does that have to do with your book?

The answer to both of these questions is perceived value.

How much do you think this is worth? Really?

Before we get into the nitty gritty this week, don't forget to sign up for my weekly newsletter to get all my updates right in your inbox. Lastly, to be sure you're following all of my followables, check out my LinkTree!

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Value Is Made Up (And Too Many People Think It Isn't)

So, to finish the history lesson, the current campaign to convince us that diamonds are intrinsically valuable was started by the De Beers company in the early part of the 1900s. They controlled a huge part of the market, but their product wasn't seen as intrinsically valuable, and when the Great Depression hit and wallets got tight, they ran into a serious issue. The answer... a marketing campaign!

Decades of marketing were conducted to convince people that diamonds stood for true love and eternal devotion. Why did a shiny rock need to cost 3 months' salary? Because the people selling the rock wanted you to buy it at a grossly inflated price. And because one company controlled so much of the supply, they were able to determine to a large degree how many diamonds were on the market, and what that going rate was. The result was that generations of people see diamonds as a necessity for a successful marriage proposal, and that people think they're an extremely valuable commodity, when the truth is that the only thing that made diamonds so valuable was that the people who had all the diamonds said they were valuable over and over again until people believed them.

No, it's worth more than that. Yeah, that should do it!

What does this have to do with books, though?

People have this mythical belief in the idea of an author's skill, and the quality of their story, giving the book an intrinsic value. This means that if a book is good then it will sell a lot of copies, and the author will be rewarded for their efforts. I don't know if this is an offshoot of the prosperity gospel, or just the idea that a reader base of 10 million people can't be wrong, but this myth persists, and it is pervasive in the mind of the reading public.

It doesn't matter how many trashy, poorly written, low-quality books make the bestseller list, and have for decades. It doesn't matter how many Twilights or 50 Shades we have, so many people believe (often without questioning this belief) that if a book sells a lot of copies that it is a direct reflection of the skill of its author. The problem is that the quality of so many books, just like the value of diamonds, has nothing to do with their intrinsic value.

They sell copies because of marketing.

In the small sense, perhaps you came across one of those rare authors who has a solid pitch for their books at a convention, and they knew just how to target the parts of you that made you interested. Maybe you saw an ad that looked cool on a banner, or a book reviewer you enjoy couldn't stop gushing about it. It's possible the algorithm decided to show you this book in your recommended tabs over and over again, or maybe you were at a convention and you saw the author at a signing table with a line of folks, and you decided to ask about it.

All of those things can make a book look like it's successful (and thus popular and valubale by extension), but none of that has anything to do with whether or not the book is well-written. It says nothing about whether the plot is cohesive, the prose is engaging, or the writer sticks the landing. But all of these factors, from the cover art, to the name of the author, to how many conventions or bookstores you see them in, is a factor in you deciding whether you'll buy their book, and whether the price you pay is worth it.

I've said it before, but it's worth saying again. If you're an author, you not being able to build a massive, national marketing campaign to get thousands of people to buy your book doesn't mean it's not a good book. And if you're a reader, remember, just because you've never heard of someone, or never seen their book before, tells you nothing about their work... except that they probably don't have the money and connections to reach a bigger audience.

Just pick it up, and read a few pages. See if you like it. That is the only real way to detemine whether this is a book you're going to enjoy.

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If you want to see me produce more work, consider some of the following options!

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Like, Follow, and Come Back Again!

That's all for this week's Business of Writing! For more of my work, check out my Vocal archive, or at My Amazon Author Page where you can find books like my sci-fi dystopian thriller Old Soldiers, the Hardboiled Cat series about a mystery solving Maine Coon in Marked Territory and Painted Cats, my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife, or my most recent short story collection The Rejects!

 

And to stay on top of all my latest news and releases, collected once a week, make sure you subscribe to The Literary Mercenary's mailing list. 

Your Setting Needs To Be a Character in Your Story

Too often when we write we focus exclusively on our cast of characters, and what they're doing. However, we sometimes forget that for the story to really stick in the minds of the audience, it needs to have a setting. And not just any setting, but a vibrant setting that feels like it's part of the unfolding drama the audience is watching. Because without a strong setting, a story is like a sandwich without bread; messy, and unappealing.

Where is this place? And why is our story unfolding here?

Before we get into it this week, don't forget to sign up for my weekly newsletter to get all my updates right in your inbox. Also, if you've got a bit of spare cash that you'd like to use to help keep the wheels turning, consider becoming a Patreon patron! To be sure you're following all of my followables, check out my LinkTree!

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Where The Hell is This Story Happening?

To illustrate this week's point, I want to tell a story about something I was asked to edit as a freelancer many years ago. I won't mention the title of the work, nor the name of the client (and it's entirely possible it was never even published), but I feel that one of the major mistakes this author made drives home this point.

The plot of this book was not at all uncommon. We had a kid from the suburbs who was on the cusp of turning 18, and hoping to flee an abusive situation. He ran away to the big city, and while he was there wound up on the streets. He met an older man with a penchant for taking care of strays, and the two of them formed a relationship.

We all know how this story goes.

There were a lot of things wrong with the nuts and bolts of this story when I got it, but one that I drew a big, red circle around was that it was never made clear what city our suburban teen was running away to, or what part of the country (there were enough earmarks to trig that this was America) he had grown up in. Even accounting for the fact that there was a truly cold winter in later chapters, that didn't narrow anything down. This still could have been New York, Chicago, Boston, Minneapolis, Seattle, or even L.A. if it was a particularly bad year for the weather.

But every, single one of the cities I mentioned (to say nothing of places like London, Paris, Belfast, etc.) would have their own personalities, history, architecture, and setup to inform the story. Everything from the layout of the city, to what kinds of public transportation exist, the sorts of social services one can find, neighborhood cultures, and just the way people talk will be radically different from one place to another. And, for this particular example, the suburbs of these cities also have their own histories, personalities, etc. that should be a part of the character's makeup, to say nothing of the story itself.

Now, including those elements would have fixed one problem with this project, but it would have been a sizable, and obvious one. Because it's not enough to just say there are cars on the street, or tall buildings around you... that's a light sketch. Your audience needs you to paint the picture for them so they can really get immersed in this tale you're trying to tell.

And this goes double if you're story is set in a fantastical realm, or in the sci-fi future... because in those situations you can't even draw on the assumption that your audience may have visited a place like where you're story is set, or at least seen one on TV.

Support The Literary Mercenary

For folks who just want to do their part to help keep me making more content, please subscribe/follow me in these locations:

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And if you happen to have some spare dosh lying around, and you want to be sure my supply doesn't run low, consider become a Patreon patron, or leaving a tip by Buying Me a Ko-Fi!

Also, consider checking out my show Tabletop Mercenary if you've ever thought about becoming a TTRPG creator, but you want a glimpse behind the curtain before you just jump into the deep end.

Like, Follow, and Come Back Again!

That's all for this week's Craft of Writing! For more of my work, check out my Vocal archive, or at My Amazon Author Page where you can find books like my sci-fi dystopian thriller Old Soldiers, the Hardboiled Cat series about a mystery solving Maine Coon in Marked Territory and Painted Cats, my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife, or my most recent short story collection The Rejects!

 

And to stay on top of all my latest news and releases, collected once a week, make sure you subscribe to The Literary Mercenary's mailing list. 

If you'd like to help support my work, then consider Buying Me A Ko-Fi, or heading over to The Literary Mercenary's Patreon page! Lastly, to keep up with my latest, follow me on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, and now on Pinterest as well!

You Can't Change History Without Changing Your Language (A Modern Fantasy Pitfall)

Most modern fantasy stories that you come across use the hidden world trope. From Vampire: The Masquerade to Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere, the fantastical world was always here, but it was kept secret from your prying eyes. This allows us to show the audience a world they know, and then to bring them past the veil and into the realm of the supernatural. Part of the reason we see this trope so often is that it's what readers really expect to see... but another reason is that modern fantasy without a hidden world requires so much retooling and redesigning that it can get exhausting.

And in some cases, it no longer resembles the world we know at all. This goes all the way down to the language we use, and the pop culture references that can be made in our stories without snapping the reader out of the narrative.

And things can get conspiracy-board complicated with this.

Before we get into it this week, don't forget to sign up for my weekly newsletter to get all my updates right in your inbox. Also, if you've got a bit of spare cash that you'd like to use to help keep the wheels turning, consider becoming a Patreon patron! To be sure you're following all of my followables, check out my LinkTree!

Lastly, make sure you check out my Vocal archive for several hundred other articles about geek ephemera, weird history, writing, and more!

When You Alter History, Everything Changes

We're all familiar with the idea of the Butterfly Effect. Often used as a science fiction premise, it's when someone goes back in time, changes one thing, and then they come back to their present only to find that seemingly tiny action has resulted in massive, unanticipated changes in the present.

This is something you have to do when you remove the secret world trope from a modern fantasy story. It's also why so many stories that you see have a major supernatural event set relatively close to the present. Whether it's the revelation of the supernatural world in Trueblood, or the world-shaping alterations that occur in Shadowrun, most of the world's history played out the same way it did in our history books, with a divergent point happening somewhere in the modern era (typically in the 1980s or 1990s, though sometimes later).

But when you go back further than that, you have to change more. And you don't just have to change major world events (such as the necessity for adding necromancy to the Geneva convention if there were Nazi sorcerers raising corpses in the trenches to continue the fighting), but you also need to change the language people do and don't use.

For fantastic examples of this, check out Lindsay Ellis's video Bright: The Apotheosis of Lazy Worldbuilding.

While there are a lot of points made in that video (and you should go watch it) the one I want to hit on is a point that a lot of writers often overlook; if you change history, then you change the culture. You alter the course of events, and that should lead language to develop in different ways, or for particular touchstones to operate differently.

One of the smallest, but most deeply-rooted, examples is when Will Smith's cop character tells his neighbor, "Just crip walk your ass back over to the barbecue."

This statement, especially said by a cop, is a direct reference to the Crips, an infamous street gang. However, for this statement to make sense in-universe that means you needed to have the trans-Atlantic slave trade, leading to the Civil War in America, leading to the exodus of freed slaves from the harsh conditions of the south, leading to the building tide of social concerns that created the Black Panthers, you need the Black Panthers to be destroyed by government actions, and for the Crips to be created to fill that power vacuum. And you need all of that to happen in a world where, apparently, 2,000 years ago the 9 armies of all the various races (elves, humans, and other fantasy creatures) came together to defeat some unspecific Dark Lord.

That's stretching it, to say the least.

Now, that's not the only example we can take from Bright, whose world has fantasy creatures and magic going back even more than the 2,000 years mentioned (unless that was when all fantasy arrived on Earth's doorstep, though the film doesn't say, so we can't assume that). There's the moment Smith says, "Fairy lives don't matter today," which implies the existence of the Black Lives Matter movement, and all the historical precedent that goes into that, including the existence of all of our real-world human racism, which seems weird in a world with half a dozen other fantasy creatures added into the mix for millennia. There's also a moment where Smith yells at an orc, "So take your Shrek-looking ass back to Fiona!" This, of course, implies that somehow Grimm's fairy tales were still written in this world, that the Disney company exists, and that the specific events that led to the creation of Dreamworks still happened, and that they made Shrek in this setting, and that it still became a massive, box office hit.

Which is asking a lot from your audience in terms of believability.

You Can Do It... But Think It Through

I don't want anyone reading through all of that and thinking that it's just not worth the effort of writing modern fantasy without a masquerade, or a relatively recent divergence point. Or that's it's not even worth writing modern fantasy at all, if you have to police every reference your characters make, song they quote, or turn of phrase they use. All of that, though, is part of doing your due diligence when it comes to keeping your setting internally consistent, and minimizing the amount of times your audience asks you questions that your story isn't going to answer.

You're the one who decides your own workload.

With all of that said, though, if it sounds like too much effort to alter the real world with an older divergence point, then it might be worth taking the dramatic step of building your own modern fantasy setting; one that isn't on Earth at all. Especially because this can let you make echoing references, where you have something that is in-context of the setting you've made, but which feels like a reflection of a similar piece of media, turn of phrase, etc., from our real world. For example, replacing the phrase, "Don't take any wooden nickels," with, "Don't take any brass tacks," could refer, in-world, to a name for a coin that's no longer in distribution (a brass tack) from a country your nation was once at war with, and so their currency wasn't accepted (or was considered a sign that you're a sympathizer for their cause) long enough that this became part of the lexicon. Alternatively, if the coins are outdated and no longer in circulation, they might be only used by criminal elements, making them a crime to hold, even if they're valuable in a certain part of society. This would also allow the phrase, "Let's get down to brass tacks," to also be co-opted, as you're discussing a serious, sensitive matter that is not to leave this room.

Just as an example.

Support The Literary Mercenary

For folks who just want to do their part to help keep me making more content, please subscribe/follow me in these locations:

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And if you happen to have some spare dosh lying around, and you want to be sure my supply doesn't run low, consider become a Patreon patron, or leaving a tip by Buying Me a Ko-Fi!

Like, Follow, and Come Back Again!

That's all for this week's Craft of Writing! For more of my work, check out my Vocal archive, or at My Amazon Author Page where you can find books like my sci-fi dystopian thriller Old Soldiers, my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife, or my most recent short story collection The Rejects!

 

And to stay on top of all my latest news and releases, collected once a week, make sure you subscribe to The Literary Mercenary's mailing list. 

If you'd like to help support my work, then consider Buying Me A Ko-Fi, or heading over to The Literary Mercenary's Patreon page! Lastly, to keep up with my latest, follow me on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, and now on Pinterest as well!