Born To Write

Pip: Born To Write is the kind of blog that asks whether an earworm can literally kill you, and then answers the question in the most committed way possible. chrischonos has been busy.

Mara: Very busy. Today we're moving through flash fiction and short story drafts, then into some genuine questions about morality and human nature. Let's start with the fiction.

Flash Fiction And Story Drafts

Pip: These pieces share a particular quality — ordinary situations that tip over into something much darker, or just much stranger.

Mara: The Marty story earns that strangeness. After a brutal day at work, Marty gets a song lodged in his head, and the story tracks his increasingly desperate attempts to silence it. It ends with him reaching for a power drill, and the final line reads: "He made the music stop, that was The Day that Marty Died."

Pip: That is a punchline delivered with a completely straight face, which is exactly the right way to do it.

Mara: Flash Fiction — The Confession goes somewhere darker without the dark humor. A man confesses to a childhood murder on a foggy morning outside their old school, framing it as heroism. The narrator only shares it from his own deathbed. Keep Romance Alive takes a similarly sinister turn — what looks like a date night reveals itself as something genuinely disturbing. And the excerpt from The Last Train shifts the register entirely: a longer work in progress, grief-driven, quieter, where a man named Mark chases a glimpse of someone called Billy through a diner crowd.

Pip: Four pieces, four different tones. The range is worth noting. Which brings us to the ideas underneath some of this.

Morality And Human Nature

Mara: These two short posts are doing real philosophical work. The Villain opens a question about moral justification — when, if ever, does a villain actually have a point?

Pip: And it lands on Dexter as the test case, which is a genuinely interesting choice.

Mara: The post puts it directly: "The one villain I can really see has a point is Dexter. He killed only bad people even if he was trying to curb his own quest to kill."

Pip: So the argument is that motive and target together can shift the moral calculus — not exonerate, but complicate it.

Mara: Right. And the post acknowledges the tension honestly — Dexter is still a killer, still satisfying something in himself, but the victims were themselves predators. Whether that makes him a hero depends entirely on your framework.

Pip: Which is exactly where Chaos picks up. If our sense of right and wrong is built on a perceived norm, what happens when the norm itself is unstable?

Mara: That post argues that small doses of chaos — the harmless kind that disrupts routine — are actually healthy. It forces the mind to think outside its own patterns. The implication being that a rigid moral framework, like a rigid daily routine, might calcify rather than protect.

Pip: Put the two posts together and you get something interesting: a villain who operates outside the norm might be monstrous, or might be the chaos that corrects a system that failed to punish the actually monstrous. The fiction we just covered keeps circling that same question.

Mara: Jack in The Confession calls himself a hero by exactly that logic.

Pip: Fiction as a testing ground for the things we can't quite argue in plain prose.

Mara: That tension between chaos and order, villain and hero — it doesn't resolve cleanly, which is probably why it keeps showing up. More to come from Born To Write.