A Saying That Has Stuck With Me…

Printed and Framed On a Card…

This saying has been in my writing offices for 43 years now.  Don’t really care who originally said it. But it came about because Nina Kiriki Hoffman and I were challenging each other to write one story per week, not rewrite it, and put it in the mail. Nina called it “Dare to Be Bad” and that stuck.

And is the reason both of us started selling regularly.

Takes far, far more courage to write and put out your work than to be so afraid as to not write and not publish anything. And that’s a fact.

So the saying I have had in my writing offices since 1982 is this…

“If we could dare to write as ill as those whose voices haunt us still.”

I just went back to my writing chair and there were those words staring at me, eye-level.

Never been a day in all these decades of writing I didn’t need to look at those words.

Dare to be bad.

Dare to have fun.

Dare to defend your own writing.

Dare to believe in yourself.