Waiting for the Sun is Done!

And thankfully, it seems to retain the humor I originally intended it to.  The problem is sometimes I begin a screenplay with this busting at the seams burst of idea energies, only to use my analytical skills to dampen it down.  This time, I went wild with my imagination, sketching out the possible path of scenes in outline form. I chose the best one and placed it into the script.  This worked for a few reasons, one being the outline helps me from aimlessly wandering around for 5 or 10 pages, and two, by doing this, it's almost like doing a partial rewrite on the fly.  And third, this allowed me to focus in on the humor of the situations within each scene, instead of the overall screenplay.

By doing this, I feel it's consistently funnier than anything I've written.  Sure, I had screenplays that were hysterical in spots, those spots I deemed needed to be so.  There were too many peaks and valleys. But with this one, I have definite peaks of humor, and the dips never bog down so far as to be unfunny.

Now to sit back and let it stew for a couple of weeks...then tear it up again.

Bad Language To Bad Writing Spiral

As I type away, mashing the keys, misspelling words because my fat sausage fingers can't quite hit one key at a time, I tend to take a break when I feel I have accomplished enough in that one spurt. During these breaks, I sometimes check the cool little features tucked away in Final Draft, such as what percentage of the dialogue thus far belongs to which character? Another I check is the profanity list which keeps a running count of how many curses you have used so far, what they are, and where they occur. I never change any of it because of the list, mind you, but it does make me over analyze my writing. For instance, in one script, my characters uttered fuck 23 times, mother fucker 4 times and shit 40 times. So 67 curses there. And that's my Rom/Com! (it's also a fairly dark one, but that should go without saying) To be fair, the entire screenplay contains over fifteen thousand words, so that's not too bad, is it?

So question: Do you ever feel you're cursing too much in a screenplay? Or do you feel good writing is good writing no matter if it's full of swears, or clean as a whistle? I tend to follow the latter, but I'm just curious.