I’ve been wanting to get back to semi regular blogging here since I finished my stint as writer in residence over at the Booktrust, where I blogged incessantly for ages. However I’d been having trouble starting. Partly because I really wanted to avoid that ‘Hey guys, I know you’ve been waiting with baited breath for me to write another entry, many apologies for your sleepless nights worrying about where I’ve got to’ type intro but mainly because nothing has grabbed me to moan write about.

However, last week, I received a very disgruntled email from a lady who said that while she enjoyed my novel, she found the language I used very upsetting, distressing and ultimately disappointing. At first I was nearly sick in to my hat, as I thought she was going to tell me that I’d got some aspect of the Australian dialect in the book completely wrong. Or at the very least, that she really didn’t like my description of a tree.
But it turned out, that her email was referring to swearing. Her main objection being that I’ve repeatedly used what she called the ‘F’ and the ‘C’ words. She went on to say that it wasn’t as if I was a 20 year old who had to show off to her trendy young friends. Clearly she felt that as a worldly-wise 30 year old, I should have moved beyond these ‘revolting’ words. She asked me please to write back and explain myself, and not to give any nonsense about a writer using swearwords because they’re trying to be realistic, because that was simply untrue: her father and his friends were men in Australia and they would never have used that sort of language.
Although she did admit that it wasn’t just books ­ society in general was becoming swearier ­she felt that authors have a responsibility to society, and that by using these words we are desensitising youngsters; anyway, a good writer should be able to put her point across without stooping to using these words. She ended by saying that if these words must exist in books, then she would like them to have a rating, like dvds or music albums do.

Now apart from the fact that her email probably had the opposite effect intended, of making me go into a word document of my novel and search for the C word and clap when I found it, I did feel slightly annoyed that my justification for any language used ­ that it be truthful to the characters and moment ­seemed to be so easily swept aside in her mind.

I was still reeling from that telling off, this morning as I read a new Amazon.com review which contains this sentence, ‘Unfortunately for most American readers, (and fortunately for everyone else) she didn’t remove the Australianisms. If you’re not familiar with the language of the outback, there is much to be misunderstood.’

My response to that would probably not have made the lady from the last email very happy.

So these are things that have propelled me back to my inconsistent blog, not outrage quite, just confusion, and perhaps a little fear, though of what I’m not quite sure.

I’d like to ask for comments please – is there an argument for adult rated novels, does anyone else get offended by bad language in novels and what is the answer to a person who wants a book set in Australia to be ‘translated’ into American? And how many letters does it have?

More interestingly, does anyone have any particularly good, or bad, examples of swearing in books?

http://www.booktrust.org.uk/Booktrust-blogs/Writer-in-residence-blog

Go there and see.

If you want to see me looking tired and sounding like I’m speaking through a duck whistle, then this is for you. I also talk about writing the book.