One of the great motivations for writing my latest novel, The Tyrant Stratagem (that I’ve been submitting around to agents), has been my personal dissatisfaction in the quality of dialogue in major mass-market novels. It seems we have a cancer eating at modern fiction, even the more insulated elements like speculative fiction.

As an example — and I won’t name names — there is one prominent author whose work I do sometimes enjoy that I take issue with. Problem is, this person’s dialogue is as strong as a premature baby. The descriptions? Great. The world-building? Very sound. The dialogue? It’s like one of those bare fields someone has come through and laid that ridiculous day-glo green grass crap all over. We’d walk around on it and pretend it was grass, but there’s a reason the person doing the planting normally parks a “keep off” sign nearby, lest we get confused if treading on such stuff is a good idea or not.

What do people keep spreading all over in the hopes it will fill in the holes in their prose? Profanity.

I think back to the old novels that came out of this country, which — barring a few exceptions — spawned these terrific black-and-white-era films that had to rely largely on their dialogue. Granted, many of the greats from that period, both print and otherwise, like Catcher in the Rye, were more than profane, but there were quite a few mass-market works that produced enduring, inspiring dialogue without the need for a crutch to lean on. The writing was so strong in these classics because it had to be. Maybe it’s the love I have for a solid screenplay, or maybe it’s my faith dove-tailing into my preferences, but to me Marlon Brando’s impassioned, mournful plea of “I coulda been somebody” is worth its weight in three-dozen modern R-rated action flicks.

I’m all for realism, and understand some profanity is certainly accurate given different situations we might portray. Nor does profanity instantly mean a work is garbage; often quite the contrary. But its like there is this mentality among some writers that they have to produce the most-aggressive, testosterone-charged work they possibly could, and of course they just know they can’t get there without a constant barrage of gutterspeak, like one of those white-noise cannons they used in Falujah. “Pound into their heads how profane and edgy my writing is,” the thinking goes, “and they’ll surely respect my craft.”

I exaggerate somewhat, but I know I’m not the only one out there who wonders if people are leaning on profane word-fillers much like we lean on landfills as our modern waste-management strategy. One asks: Is the idea that if the pages are filled with text, that the composition of said text doesn’t matter?

The Tyrant Stratagem is a throwback book, and I hope delightfully so. Zero profanity. None. Nada. There’s edgy content, sure, but I deliberately avoided any profanity. This was partly done as a challenge to myself, but mainly as a salvo against what I see as a decline in the ability to communicate and spread ideas without resorting to something two syllables above a grunt. I’m sick of cardboard characters, and I think we should all consider cutting them out.

Stay tuned.