Dare to Be Bad

In today’s Journal

* Quotes of the Day
* Topic: Dare to Be Bad
* Of Interest

Quotes of the Day

“Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration. The rest of us just get up and go to work.” Stephen King (Amen. Preach it, brother.)

“Without ambition one starts nothing. Without work one finishes nothing. The prize will not be sent to you. You have to win it.” Ralph Waldo Emerson

Topic: Dare to Be Bad

Anyone who’s followed Dean Wesley Smith very long has heard him use this admonition in his blog. According to Dean, it’s something he and Nina Kiriki Hoffman came up with back in the day, when both were aspiring fiction writers.

The two of them regularly challenged each other, even to the point of writing and sending off a short story to magazine publishers every week. If one of them missed, s/he had to buy the other a steak dinner.

But more than that, they challenged each other to “Dare to be bad,” in other words to follow Heinlein’s Rule 3: “Do not rewrite except to editorial order.” (In later years, Harlan Ellison would add, “And then only if you agree with the editor.”) Write it, spell check it, send it out and start the next story.

According to Dean, once he dared to be bad and stopped revising, editing, and rewriting, his stories started selling. And of course, both “Dare to be bad” and “Do not rewrite” mean exactly the same thing: Trust yourself and all the knowledge you’ve absorbed over the years about structure and characters and setting and scene and pacing.

I’ve told the story here many times of my short story, “Old Suits,” which I thought was the worst piece of garbage I’d ever turned out. But I dared to be bad, slapped a (horrible) cover on it, and published it.

A few weeks later, I received an email from a reader I’d never met. She said the story was among the best she’d ever read and that it reminded her of Hemingway’s style. (For a free copy of “Old Suits,” click this link. The download will occur automatically.)

I was floored. Since then, I never take my own opinion into account. I realize I’m only one more reader with one opinion, and my opinion is no more important than anyone else’s.

In the first post in “Of Interest,” James Scott Bell talks again in support of writing with the conscious, critical mind. At one point, he even uses Mickey Spillane as an example.

And he’s right. Spillane didn’t rest on his laurels, and he did continue to improve as a writer. But he didn’t improve by going back over and over and over one novel. Like most of the pulp writers, he improved by always moving forward, practicing and improving his craft by putting new words on the page. Sound familiar?

But don’t take it from me. According to John Sutherland in an article for The Guardian, “Spillane had great faith in the slam bang opening, believing that ‘the first page sells the book’. He claimed never to read galleys or rewrite.”

Yep. Like almost all the pulp writers and most long-term professional fiction writers today, he dared to be bad. He risked believing in himself, and it paid off.

Talk with you again soon.

Of Interest

See “No Risk It, No Biscuit” at https://killzoneblog.com/2022/09/no-risk-it-no-biscuit.html. In which James Scott Bell talks about taking risks, then teaches to take no risks at all.

See “Mickey Spillane” at https://www.theguardian.com/books/2006/jul/18/culture.obituaries.

The Numbers

The Journal…………………………………… 570 words

Writing of The Jury (novel, tentative title)

Day 1…… 2488 words. Total words to date…… 2488
Day 2…… 0789 words. Total words to date…… 3277

Total fiction words for September……… 3277
Total fiction words for the year………… 69708
Total nonfiction words for September… 3110
Total nonfiction words for the year…… 131340
Total words for the year (fiction and this blog)…… 201048

Calendar Year 2022 Novels to Date…………………… 1
Calendar Year 2021 Novellas to Date……………… 0
Calendar Year 2021 Short Stories to Date… 0
Novels (since Oct 19, 2014)…………………………………… 67
Novellas (since Nov 1, 2015)………………………………… 8
Short stories (since Apr 15, 2014)………………… 217
Short story collections……………………………………………… 31

Disclaimer: Along with discussing various aspects of the writing craft, I advocate a technique called Writing Into the Dark. WITD is “the only way” to write, but it is by far the easiest, most liberating, and most fun.

2 thoughts on “Dare to Be Bad”

  1. I really needed to read this! I’ve been going through a writing slump in terms of critical mind getting at me and it has been a rough week. I’ll remind myself to dare to be bad and keep pushing forward with my current projects.

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