Right v. Writer

I've been thinking about some of these issues off and on a lot lately over the last few years.  And this post is bound to be a bit rambling, but I'll try to be interesting and make some degree of sense.  Also, I'm going to talk about some mildly racy-ish stuff here, so fair waring.

A little background.  I am, for the first time ever, working on two writing projects both of which have adult main characters and are intended for an adult audience.  One story is sort of a magically informed cross between Sherlock and Jane Austen, with a little action movie thrown in for good measure.  This book doesn't pose much in the way of Mormon-writer dilemmas for me because, well, it has Victorian-esque moral values and, since it's fantasy, I can make up whatever rules I want.

The other project is a different matter - and honestly it will probably never get published - so it probably won't ever matter to anyone but me.  The important thing for this post however, is that it's a modern day story about two adults who are friends and creative partners whose relationship later develops into a more romantic one.    And unlike me these two adults aren't Mormon, and one of them is definitely not particularly religious in any way.   I've already drawn a firm line in the sand when it comes to sex scenes; I won't write them, and I'm standing on my head to keep them out of the story, but so far it's working (though largely the reason why I can't see it getting published).  For some reason, this dilemma, which I know should be the bigger one, isn't one that's bothering me.

Believe it or not, the bigger issue for me in writing this story is profanity.    I take a lot of pride, justified or not, in writing dialogue that actually sounds like people talking to each other.  And, I can't even really start to write a character until I can (in a non-mentally disturbed way) hear them talking in my head. The problem in the scene I'm writing tonight is that when one of my characters talks in my head, shocking as it is, the guy swears in casual conversation....not a lot...and not in any horrifying way... but that's just who he is.

I've gotten around this in other stories by making up profanity that isn't profanity (again, yay fantasy!) or in tense situations just using the phrase "He swore."  Which has tended to work well 99% of the time.  But that won't work in the scene I'm writing tonight.

Some people I know would say I shouldn't even be writing a character or situation like this.  I get that - after all, I choose the ideas and the characters I write about, so I could in fact just kick Alex (my character) and his story to the curb and tell a different story....maybe one with some nice pioneers or a ward bake-off or something (okay, snarky moment over).  But I don't want to...and what's more important I don't want to be the kind of writer who can only write about people who are just like myself.  

So what do I do?

Well, for now, I took my version of the moral high ground and re-wrote the dialogue with a PG-rated swear word in it's place.  I know, I know it's the right thing to do...the problem is, it's not the writer thing to do.  And that scene is going to bug me every time.  And it's probably going to happen again.

Sigh.