I took my kids to the park last week. Since I hadn't brought my Kindle along, I spent the time creating an ending for my WIP (it is AWESOME), and trying to narrow down my next shiny idea (still working on that). In the middle of this brainstorming, the high and middle schools down the street let out for the day. The park was soon swarming with teen boys, who needed to run off their energy just like the little guys. And the swearing began.
I work with teens on a daily basis and in my school, bad language has consequences. So I rarely hear it while I'm teaching. But the park was a free-for-all. The vulgarity was constant, automatic and completely unselfconscious. If the f-word had exploded with blue smoke each time it was uttered, the air would've choked us all.
Which made me think of language in YA. I've noticed that edgy or dark books generally have more profanity in them than, say, a contemporary or romance. Their target audience includes more males than other subgenres, and apparently, it's culturally acceptable - even expected - for males to use vulgarity more than females.
Last week, ABC ran
this: Swearing Characters More Popular, Attractive in YA. In 2010, agent Mary Kole wrote about it
here. In Feb, writer
Colin Mulhern discussed it. And
Absolute Write has a thread on the BYU study ABC quoted in their stories.
The BYU study* - which found that characters who swear were better looking, wealthier and of higher social status than others - made me wonder if swearing has replaced smoking in the Cool Factor. It used to be that lighting up a cigarette and blowing smoke in somebody's face was an expression of teen rebellion. It also proved you had the connections and the money to get the smokes. Twenty years ago, had my friends hit the park on a sunny day, a small percentage** would've been sneaking off into the trees to smoke. They turned the air blue with toxins
and language.
But smoking can give you cancer; swearing does not.
ABC's reporting hints that the taboos against vulgarity are softening...(Who defines bad language, anyway? Doesn't part of a word's shock-value come from the fact we rarely hear it? And if we hear it all the time, has it simply become a figure of speech?)...and it's basically our fault as parents. We can blame TV, or movies, or whatever other media, but the fact is, all of it caters to
us. To an extent, media is simply a mirror of society.
So where does that leave YA writers? James Dashner, whose trilogy started with
The Maze Runner, comes up with his own lexicon of swear words for his group of desperate teen guys fighting a dystopian zombiefied society. The words accomplish some important world building, which works for his genre. Not every writer can do such a neat side-step.
Some of my characters do say 'hell' or 'damn' occasionally. I'm not a big fan of repetitive language - IMO, constant vulgarity is the product of a weak mind - but if the word fits, and if it gets through twenty rounds of revision, in it stays. One of my goals as an educator/writer is to expand teens' vocabulary whenever and however I can. And it's so much more fun to think of a colorful expletive that's unique to a specific character (like my six year-old saying 'cheese-and-sprinkles!' when he's mad) than to resort to a boring four-letter word.
So what do you think? Is it our job as responsible YA writers to hold our characters to a higher standard in the hopes it'll rub off? Or is our role just to hold up the mirror, not as a preacher or a teacher or anything else but a story teller...no matter what words we use?
Can we do both?
*Important note: the BYU study only included 40 YA books.
**I never inhaled. :) Also, the smell makes me sick.
