Profanity report

I’ve been too busy writing to keep up the blog recently. A poor excuse but I just couldn’t justify spending the time while I had so many other things to do.

But at least the novel is pretty much done, just busy with the details now. And the spec screenplay is finally presentable enough to go out in public.

I knew it was finished when I started playing about with the report tool in Final Draft.

I find it quite useful for finding characters’ names that might be misspelled somewhere in the script but other than that I don’t take much notice.

Except for the profanity report. That always has me sniggering like a naughty little boy looking up bad words in the dictionary.

Here it is, in alphabetical order:

“Asshole“  (4 occurrences)
It is spoken by the following characters:
ANDREW, MERCY

“Bullshit“  (1 occurrences)
It is spoken by the following characters:
DOUG

“Fuck“  (12 occurrences)
It is spoken by the following characters:
ANDREW, BETH, DOUG, GRANT

“Fucked”  (1 occurrences)
It is spoken by the following characters:
BETH

“Fucker”  (1 occurrences)
It is spoken by the following characters:
ANDREW

“Fucking”  (11 occurrences)
It is spoken by the following characters:
ANDREW, BETH, BOB, DOUG, FATHER JOHN

“Piss”  (1 occurrences)
It is spoken by the following characters:
BETH

“Shit“  (16 occurrences)
It is spoken by the following characters:
AMERICAN MAN, ANNA, DOUG, GRANT, MERCY, POACHER #2

Quite mild, I think. Only 60 swear words in 100 odd pages. And no cunt.

Amazingly enough, this does give a little snapshot of each character.

Andrew and Mercy are the Americans. They’re the only ones who say asshole.

I was surprised that Beth had such a potty mouth. I thought she such was a nice girl.  But she is under a lot of stress with all these murders to solve.

Doug is the main character, so it’s fair enough that he appears so much. But it’s funny to see that he says ‘fucking’ so much, along with his best mate, the laddish priest, Father John.

This provides proof, I would say, that swearing really isn’t a pointless use of bad vocabulary.

And whoever said it was is a bastard.