Enjoy!

The gulf between us was so huge I knew we could never be on the same page.

She used her Socratic mind as an escape hatch.

His calming tone took the edge off her fear but didn't jar loose any memories.

Sylvia's words were like shiny beads strung on a necklace that was the raging river of his life, headed for a cataract he couldn't shake no matter what tricks he had up his sleeve.

What did these four sentences have in common? They all used visual imagery, true. And I'm a sucker for word pictures. But used incorrectly, word pictures also have the power to destroy.

What these sentences have in common is that they're all mixed metaphors.

A metaphor is a figure of speech, a fanciful way of speaking that conveys meaning by using a reference to something commonly understood.

A metaphor, if you'll allow me the use of one to explain it, is a word or phrase that helps you "get a handle on" something.

Perhaps you saw "Darmok," the episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation in which the crew of the Enterprise came into contact with a race that spoke entirely in metaphor. The problem was that Picard and company didn't know what the metaphors were. They were specific to that culture. The Universal Translater perfectly rendered every word, but their language was still incomprehensible.

"Mirab, with sails unfurled" meant something like "now you're cooking" and "Shaka, when the walls fell" meant "When it rains it pours."

Visual imagery in fiction, as I point out in Tip #8 (Comparisons), is a great way to bring your prose to life (if you'll excuse the metaphor). Certain people, and most children, actually think in pictures, so using imagery is an effective way of communicating. It's also wonderful to use in your novel.

Enter the Mixed Metaphor

The problem comes when Mirab gets scrambled with Shaka and when the walls fall on the poor guy's unfurled sails.

A mixed metaphor happens when a writer combines two or more disparate images in a single passage.

Observe the ones at the top of this tip. The first one uses imagery of both a gulf and a page. Those don't go together. There are two families of images, two simile sets, being combined.

Here's the rule: When you start a metaphor you have to stay in that same metaphor family until you reach the end of the passage.

If that first example had been, "The gulf between us was so huge I knew we'd never find our way to the same shore," it would've been all right. (Weird, maybe, but not a mixed metaphor.) Or if it had been, "We weren't even in the same book, let alone on the same page," it would've been okay, too.

See how gulf goes with shore and book goes with page? That's what I mean about image families.

Look at the second and third examples. Can you see how the image families are mixed? How would you change them to keep them consistent? Change either image to match the other; just make sure they belong together. I don't know what can be done with the fourth example. Deleting it is probably best.

Watch for mixed metaphors in what you read. Watch for them when you speak or write e-mails. You'll probably find you use them a lot. Work to cut down on them. And pay special attention to the word pictures in your fiction.

Hunt and peck through your manuscript like a bloodhound on a search-and-destroy mission on steroids, and root out every mixed metaphor so your reader doesn't drown in an avalanche of imagery gone bananas.

0:-)

"Frankly, my dear, I don't give a care."

Doesn't quite work, does it? Give a rip? A flip? Frankly, my dear, I don't care one way or the other? Nah.

And yet in Christian fiction, profanity is verboten. The prim church ladies who enjoy inspirational fiction want to do so without having to expose themselves to foul language. So how do we portray characters who use profanity if we're not allowed to use it in our books? 

Ah, one of the great dilemmas of writing Christian fiction.

Let me hasten to say that I actually agree with the prim church ladies. Having to read profanity in something I'm voluntarily reading, and for fun at that, kind of spoils the experience for me. Many people come to Christian fiction to have good stories but to be untouched by the vilest elements of the culture.

In my years in Christian publishing I have had a number of disagreements with fellow publishing professionals on this topic. Some feel—quite vehemently—that avoiding profanity is inherently dishonest. Inauthentic. The way to reach the lost, they argue, is to show lost people doing lost things and talking the way lost people do.

I acknowledge that this is a valid argument. However, I continue to disagree that CBA fiction ought to be laced with profanity. The audience CBA publishers reach, after all, is not the lost, no matter how we wish it were so. The audience we do reach doesn't want to read "that trash."

Other folks want to include a watered-down version of profanity. They want the PG-rated vocabulary, which usually has a 1-to-1 correlation with actual profanity.

Still other folks want to eliminate swearing in Christian fiction entirely. I'm of that school of thought.

However, that doesn't help us with our dilemma. How do you create profane characters without resorting to profanity? Or should you, um, dern the torpedoes and use the profanity the character would use?

In preparation for this Tip I surveyed some of my published Christian novelist friends to hear how they deal with this issue. Their solutions fell into six major categories.

Proposed Solution 1: Use All the Profanity You Want

You can always just let your foul characters talk the way they would really talk. Though it pain you (or not) to do so, you can simply let it all hang out there and hope your publisher will be "open-minded" enough to let it stay in the finished ms.

One problem with this is that your typical CBA publisher will never let you get away with this. And it's not because they're prudes.

See, all it takes is one complaint from a little old lady from Pasadena to the Christian bookstore where she bought the book, and your book is pulled from the shelves and sent back to the publisher in bulk. Along with a nasty letter about how the bookstore owner will never trust that publishing company again. That's bad.

A variation on this is to write your rough draft with all the profanity you think should be in there, and then come back through later and use one of the following solutions to trim it out.

Proposed Solution 2: Use Watered Down Profanity

In this solution you come as close to the real four-letter words as you can, often with alternate four-letter words that aren't perceived as being as bad as the originals. In other words, you let your characters be as foul-mouthed as you can possibly get away with, while always pushing the envelope.

I'm a big believer in Ephesians 4:29, which says we should allow no unwholesome word to proceed from our mouths, but only those words that work to build up or educate the hearer. However, I think that latter phrase will allow me to tell you what I mean here.

In this solution, you use words like crap and dang and heck and geez, all of which offend me personally but are in the daily vocabulary of many people who love the Lord with all their hearts, so I won't judge.

To me, this solution makes your characters seem like B-level foul-mouths. Like they'd like to really cuss but their moms won't let them. It's hard to make someone seem really foul when they always hold back from actual profanity.

In that sense, I think this solution actually works against what you're trying to do, which is create someone truly profane. They all seem like wimps.

Oh...pickle juice!

Proposed Solution 3: Write for Secular Publishers (or Self-Publish)

If you're so committed to authenticity in your art that you can't bear to write something besides what your foul characters would really say, then consider writing for a publisher that doesn't care about bad language.

Namely, a secular publisher. Sometimes you're not writing what these publishers want unless you've got profanity throughout your story. You could make the argument that writing for a secular publisher is how you can reach the lost with your fiction anyway, so maybe that's the path for you.

Self-publishing is another potential outlet for your profanity-laced fiction. Some Christian subsidy publishing houses (like WinePress or Creation House Press) would probably want to tone down the profanity in your book, but secular self-publishing companies don't care one way or another. So long as you don't say anything in your book that might get them in legal trouble, they're probably okay with whatever comes out of your characters' mouths.

Proposed Solution 4: Avoid Writing Profane Characters

When I asked this question of one of my friends and fellow Christian novelists, she had a sort of epiphany. She realized that because of this prohibition against profanity in Christian novels she'd simply avoided writing truly foul characters in her fiction.

Such characters had been on the fringe of her stories but she'd never written one into the middle of her story—which would've obligated her to face this dilemma.

You can do this, too. Probably the most elegant solution to how you can not have to decide whether or not to let your profane characters use profanity is to simply not write any profane characters. Problem solved.

You could make the case that avoiding a major kind of person in your stories puts a certain limit on your fiction and your storytelling, but that might not be a bad thing. We all limit our story choices anyway, choosing for instance not to write romance or horror or YA, so maybe this is the right solution for you.

Proposed Solution 5: Use Euphemisms

This is probably the most commonly employed solution to our dilemma. In this, you let characters be as foul-mouthed as you want them to be—you simply don't spell it out.

When Jerry learned of Mary's affair, he let us all know exactly how he felt about her character, her physical attributes, and choice aspects of her ancestry.

Louise's anger grew throughout the day. Finally, after kicking her toe on a table leg, she let loose with a string of profanity that left the ochre paint decidedly paler.

This kind of thing is the literary equivalent to how old movies used to handle sex scenes. The door shut and we faded to black. We knew what was going on, but it wasn't demonstrated for us onstage.

Incidentally, this is also the way old novels handled profanity. Here's an example from A Touch of Death, a 1953 novel by Charles Williams:

She didn't like me. And you could see the chords in her throat while she was telling me about it. "Shut up," I said.

In Internet parlance, we speak of meta-data. This is data about data. Metaknowledge is knowledge about knowledge. It's a way of describing something by taking one step back from the thing to tell us what it is and what attributes it has.

This solution to profanity is metaprofanity. It's information about the profanity. We don't see the swearing itself, but we see a description of the swearing.

You have to be more creative (and use more humor) to write this way. Anybody can write in a cuss word, but it takes real talent to give us the feeling of the cussing without literally spelling it out.

This is probably the solution you should use most of the time.

Proposed Solution 6: Invent a Language

You can't do this in most books, obviously. But when you write speculative fiction you have the opportunity to create a whole new language. That way, characters can be swearing a blue streak but because it's a made-up language, no one can possibly be offended.

The cancelled science fiction TV series Firefly does this. Sort of. The solution there is to use bits of Mandarin Chinese when the characters go off into cussing. Because in the far future the last great superpowers, the U.S. and China, merged, giving a certain merging of their languages.

It's quite convenient to have a swearing language at your disposal. You might be able to do this, too.

Firefly also uses made-up words not from Chinese. Characters say "gorram," which is obviously a euphamism for something else, but it's not actually cussing and therefore no one has grounds to be upset. Battlestar Galactica uses "frak," which again they get away with because it's technically not a word, though it's clear from usage what it means.

I'm inventing a language for my own epic fantasy. It's mostly English but I use synonyms for all kinds of things: a gnat is a neener, a squirrel is a scratch, and "okay" is "ulda."

I'm also allowing the characters to cuss like construction workers—but only in this nonsense language.

Snoog. Rhyne. Stelnate.

Are you offended? Exactly.

Two more things on this solution. First, there is a theory that a culture's swearing vocabulary arises in areas where that culture feels repressed. For instance, French Canadians use parts of a cathedral as their curse words: Oh, tabernacle! Holy sancrist! Apparently they felt oppressed by the church.

If you're making up a culture, why not use this theory to also make up a curse vocabulary that involves whatever they're feeling repressed by (or did feel repressed by back in the day when such things were being invented)?

In my story, my characters feel overly oppressed by high taxation. "Well, I'll be taxed" is a common epithet in their tongue.

Such a solution allows you to be as crass as you want using words or terms that are, in and of themselves, inoffensive.

Second, there is a wonderful Web site that creates new words from old ones. All you have to do is enter a fairly large pool of words—any words—and click a button. And boom, out comes a new set of scrambled words that sound vaguely like the original ones but are completely new.

Why not use this for your cursing vocabulary? I do.

In my fantasy I wanted to use words that sounded like church words but weren't. Here are some of the new words coined by this Web site: restate, sacle, baptudy, substion, and tesure. Cool, huh? Try it out.

Next Time

Okay, those are the main solutions for showing profane characters in Christian fiction. Hopefully, one is for you.

Next time I'll tell you what I think is the real issue and the challenge for you.

This tip is the first in a series about things to be avoided in your fiction.

Like most of the "rules" in writing a novel, this one should apply to every writer learning the ropes. Like most of the rules in writing a novel, this one holds true 98% of the time. And like most of the rules in writing a novel, a gifted author can violate it flagrantly and have fabulous results.

In other words, it's a rule of thumb, a great guideline for almost every writer in almost every instance, but it's not a Commandment. Still, violate it at your own risk.

Most of the time, most of us should avoid present tense in our prose. Examples:

Jimmy walks across the room and looks out the window.

The crowd reacts with horror when Deborah falls off the stage.

You're using present tense when you're speaking as if the thing is happening right now. It's the use of is instead of was, of walks instead of walked.

Most fiction is written in past tense. "It was a dark and stormy night." (Not "It is a dark and stormy night.") Past tense is what readers expect. It's the convention every reader anticipates in every novel, as expected as black ink on the page or text written in left-to-right lines. It's a given.

When you violate a given, it's jarring to the reader. What if your book's words were printed vertically up and down the page so that the reader had to turn it sideways to read it? Would it make it a better or more interesting book? Not necessarily. Would the reader thank you for doing it differently? Um...not so much.

Present tense is like that. Some readers might not notice for awhile because it's certainly not as jarring as vertical text, but it's still not what the reader expects. I guarantee that editors and publishers and booksellers will notice. And they will object.

I know this because I once tried to sell a proposal in which the prose was all in present tense. I chose present tense because I thought it felt more immediate and accessible. But I was soundly instructed that such a thing was unacceptable. I didn't understand, but I went ahead and changed it to past tense to try to get it published.

After that time, I came onto the editorial staff at a publishing company and have since served with three CBA publishers. I slowly came to realize that they were right. Present tense is great for your synopsis and it's the only way to do dialogue, but for the narration and description it's not the way to go.

Over that time I have seen the occasional manuscript written in present tense that has worked beautifully. That's the exception the proves the rule. It's usually done by a massively gifted author who could violate every tip in this column and still create a breathtaking work of staggering genius.

But most of us should stick with past tense.

As I mentioned above, you should always use present tense in dialogue. Dialogue uses lots of tenses, actually. Spot them: "Where where you? Janine says you were over at Dianne's house, but you told me you were going to a movie."

You should also use present tense in your synopsis.

Now, if your book needs you to call attention to time, like maybe you're making a philosophical comment on the brevity of the moment, or you're playing with states of consciousness in which your viewpoint character is losing it a little bit, present tense might be the right tool for you.

Everywhere else, stick to the convention.

This goes back to Tip #13, the invisible novelist. Your goal is to disappear so that the reader forgets she's reading a book and instead enters into the world of the story. She can't do that if you're waving your hands with odd and obstructive stunts like present tense.

For the most part, most of us should avoid present tense most of the time.