When I am writing I often battle with how much adult language or violence to put into my writing.  Sex (yes I wrote sex in capitols to get your attention 😉 lol) makes up the three risqué topics I want to talk about.

Adult Language

This is one that I do put into a lot of my fiction, but I try to be very careful with how I use it and what words I use exactly.  I know some writers wont use any swear words what so ever in their work and I can understand that.  I have work that I wont use adult language in because I’d like all ages to be able to read it, but I want my work, generally, to be as realistic as I can make it.  I know that we all would like to think that people don’t use these words but in real life we all do (believe me I do) so why should we hide it in what we write?  In my Vampire short story series I don’t hold anything back at all, that includes violence but I have held back from graphic sex scenes, but I’ll talk about those in a minute.  This Vampire series is probably my most realistic writing that I’ve done so far so bad language is a big part of it because a lot of the characters come from worlds where language is used to its most obscene.  This is why I think it feels authentic because I don’t hold back with things like bad language.  In other things that I’ve written I’ve deliberately avoided putting in any swear words which has been great for exercising my vocabulary and can be really frustrating.

I try to find the right balance when it comes to swear words because in the right place the right swear word can be used to emphasize a point that a character wants to make and if the reader has not read forty f-bombs already then it will be far more shocking.

Violence

Violence features a lot in my fiction and some of it does get very brutal but as with the harsh language I try not to over use it.  I don’t like violence for violence sake, obviously in say a war story there can be a lot of fighting but I try to save the more severe violence for when I have a breaking point for one of my characters or to advance the story.  For me violence as a general part of fiction is key to what I write because almost all of the things that I have written have some sort of violence in.  It’s just generally the type of fiction that I do.

Sex

Sex is something that I rarely delve into, graphic sex anyway.  I’ve never been one to read erotica and the fiction that I have read has not been sex heavy so I’ve never really put too much into my own fiction.  When I have done though it has never felt like it fitted into my style of writing.  I’d rather write the lead up, building the moment and then discreetly back away from the actual act.  Sex can be as dramatic an event as a violent act but I don’t think that I need to write in detail about it as, like i said, it did not fit into how and what I write.  It’s more effective to deal with the emotional side of sex and the betrayals that it can be part of.  Lets face it, aside from greed sex is what motivates a lot of people so I’d be rather stupid to ignore it.

I suppose all of this depends on what the writer is writing, obviously erotica will have a lot of sex in, and a novel about war atrocities will be full of extreme violence.  As for adult language I think this falls into potentially every genre that one could write in, aside from children’s fiction that is.  It is just down to the writer themselves on how they deal with language, or any of these subjects and who a writers target audience is.