Be Brave

 https://avi-writer.com/blog/2026/07/2026_summer_blog_series_sara_pennypacker/

Be Brave

I have been writ­ing a long time, so I have been asked this a lot. Before this year, I always answered, ‘To be a good writer, be hon­est and be kind.’ But this year, I’m adding some­thing new. This year, my best advice is: Be hon­est and be kind, but above all, be brave.

Before I tell you why I’m adding Be Brave, some thoughts on being Kind and Hon­est as a writer. Books are some­times referred to as win­dows and mir­rors. This means good books reflect read­ers and their expe­ri­ences back to them, while also show­ing oth­er ways to be, oth­er paths to take. Hon­esty is like the clar­i­ty in the glass. Even if our sto­ries are fan­ta­sy, let’s try to tell the truth about being human. The kind­ness is about the light we shine on our sub­jects. If we’re going to be hon­est, we’re going to show that humans have flaws. My advice is to be kind when our char­ac­ters are less than per­fect, and remem­ber that all peo­ple fail some­times and that fail­ures make good sto­ries. Let’s remem­ber that mis­deeds don’t mat­ter as much as own­ing up to them, mak­ing amends and changing.

So why am I now encour­ag­ing you (and myself) to be braver?

First, I have been think­ing a lot about brav­ery recent­ly. One of the things I respect most about young peo­ple is their moral clar­i­ty. Kids real­ly want to do some­thing about injus­tice, but they cor­rect­ly under­stand that stand­ing up to injus­tice some­times takes courage. I think sto­ries should help. They should mod­el real courage, not the Mar­vel heroes kind, with mus­cles and weapons and con­fi­dence (although that can be fun some­times!) but the every­day kind, the kind that is qui­et, and coop­er­a­tive, and some­times scary, and always root­ed in empathy.

Wait, no, you say. My sto­ries are about rock­et ships and space aliens and cham­pi­onship soc­cer games.  They’re about mov­ing into a new school, or find­ing a friend. They don’t take courage to write.

Yes, I know. Your sto­ries will be about those things and thou­sands of oth­er things. But all of them will also be about hav­ing hope, and los­ing it. About believ­ing in some­thing against the odds. About doing the wrong thing before you fig­ure out the right thing. About mess­ing up, and com­ing through. About feel­ing proud and feel­ing ashamed and feel­ing con­fused. My favorite notes from read­ers say, “Until I read your book, I thought I was the only one who (fill-in-the blank.)” That note tells me I have been hon­est and kind about some­thing hard. And that’s the essen­tial work of sto­ries: to explore all the tragedy and com­e­dy and mess of being human. It takes real brav­ery to do that.

The sec­ond rea­son I advise brav­ery is more dire. If you haven’t yet run into some kind of AI-cre­at­ed writ­ing already, you absolute­ly will soon. I am real­ly, real­ly wor­ried about entrust­ing a non-human enti­ty to write a sto­ry about what it means to be human. AI will be able to spew end­less plots and char­ac­ters, but it will get humans wrong pre­cise­ly because it is not human. Its sto­ries will be like bland, blender­ized por­ridge: easy to eat and you’ll know what every swal­low tastes like before you eat it. But you’ll nev­er run into that flam­ing-hot pep­per seed, that per­fect rasp­ber­ry, that sur­pris­ing crys­tal of salt.

I have a hunch, or at least a hope, that the more AI-cre­at­ed con­tent we’re sub­ject­ed to, the more we’re going to val­ue what’s miss­ing: the unpre­dictabil­i­ty and the mess we authors are tempt­ed to hide. I think that means that going for­ward, sto­ry-tellers should take more risks in order to dif­fer­en­ti­ate our­selves from machines. It means when that you write some­thing in a first draft and then you start to rethink it because you’re afraid it might be too weird, or too dif­fer­ent, and some­one might ridicule it, or might think less of you, well, look again before you cut it.  Ask if it might be you being rad­i­cal­ly hon­est or rad­i­cal­ly kind. This will take courage.

Be brave.

Sara Pen­ny­pack­er’s books have won numer­ous awards, includ­ing a Gold­en Kite Award and a Christopher’s Medal, many children’s choice state awards, and have appeared on many ‘Best Books’ lists. She was a painter before becom­ing a writer, and has two absolute­ly fab­u­lous chil­dren who are now grown. She grew up in Mass­a­chu­setts and splits her time between Cape Cod and California.