Darkness and Crudeness

There’s a fine line between being dark and being crude. As someone who’s tried to experiment with the dark style all my life, I’ve crossed the blurred line several times in my career. No matter how many times I try to avoid it, somehow I keep crossing that border whenever I’m pumping out first drafts. And then I end up feeling horrible about it since there’s a slim chance I may have unintentionally offended someone. Offending people is good, but not when it’s unintentional. Here’s an example. There’s a short story in Foe vs. Blade called Choice, where an MMA fighter named Rachel Gustafson has an abortion so that she can continue to compete. When she finally has her next fight, her pro-life opponent Violet Smith compares her to Phil Garrido since abortion is allegedly the same as child abuse. Before publishing Foe vs. Blade, I removed that crude and unnecessary comment and replaced it with both fighters instead electing to go back to their corners. The DeviantART and Facebook versions of Choice still have the Phil Garrido remark, but that’s only because nobody pays attention to first drafts anyways. You can apply the darkness-crudeness continuum to your own work as well. For example, let’s say you’re going to make a joke about Cleopatra’s menstrual cycle. A calm and sensible person who still wished to be dark and offensive would phrase the joke like this: “Q: Why did Cleopatra use tampons? A: Because she was on her pyramid.” A crude and tacky person would phrase the seemingly innocent joke like this: “Q: Why did Cleopatra shove tube steaks up her fucking twat? A: Because the bitch was on her pyramid, yo!” The lesson learned here is that swearing is not always a good way to enhance your material. If all you have is swearing and no substance, you’re not going to survive the creative world. That’s why whenever I’m walking the streets of downtown Bremerton and I hear a random guy rapping about a woman “sucking a dick in less than a minute”, I cringe and try to get the hell out of there as quickly as possible. The only purpose swearing and other forms of darkness serve is to make the story realistic. There are people out there who use crude language, but when writing, try to capture it in such a way that it doesn’t completely make your audience’s stomachs turn. A good example of darkness used to perfection would be Tales From the Hood. Yes, the characters love to cuss, but whenever Bulldog yells, “Where’s the shit?!” your stomach is sore not from nausea, but from laughing. Leave the nausea up to Crazy K as he gets spun around several times on a torture table while watching black people getting killed, which is apparently what he’s been doing all of his life according to Dr. Cushing. Peace! I’m out!

　

***COMEDIC QUOTE OF THE DAY***

“One of the side effects for these diet pills is anal seepage. If you take this pill, I don’t care how much weight you’ve lost, you ain’t looking good in them jeans.”

-Jeff Foxworthy-