Born To Write

Pip: Born To Write — where the same person who writes a knife-fight origin story also has opinions about Instagram and Staffordshire terriers.

Mara: That range is exactly what this episode is about. chris chonos covers everything from creative struggles and flash fiction to screen habits and poetry. Let’s start with the writing life itself — the process, the doubt, and what happens when free writing turns into something much darker.

Writing Through the Fog

Pip: Free writing is supposed to be low-stakes — no structure, just an idea that becomes a story. But “Free Writing-A Taste for It” tests how far that premise can actually go.

Mara: The piece opens in a dissociated register, and the narrator lands here: “During the entire attack I was in a fog. Believe me, I don’t remember anything after the crash of the dishes.”

Pip: The fog isn’t an excuse — it’s the whole psychological architecture. The narrator isn’t confessing; he’s reconstructing something he barely experienced as real.

Mara: “Midweek Thought-Struggles” pulls the curtain back on where pieces like that come from — exhaustion, a tablet, and no real structure. “There is no real structure. Just an idea that comes to mind that I put together to tell a story.” The darkness and the craft come from the same unguarded place.

Pip: That unguarded place also produces flash fiction — and the results get stranger.

Suspense, Birds, and Bad Guys

Pip: “Flash Fiction-Suspicions” builds dread the way weather does — slowly, then all at once.

Mara: The birds carry the whole emotional weight. Right before the end: “The birds became quite and as I appeared through the crack to see both of my parents laying down on the floor laying in a pool of blood holding onto each other.”

Pip: The birds waiting on the railing afterward — that final image earns its horror precisely because it was set up so quietly.

Mara: “Let’s Have Dinner” shifts the lens from victim to villain psychology. Asked which fictional character to share a meal with, the answer is Darth Vader — specifically to understand his anger and his sense of betrayal. The bad guys, it turns out, are the fascinating ones.

Pip: Screen time is next, and at least one of those habits is easier to defend.

The App That Wins

Pip: The question is blunt: what eats your screen time, and do you feel bad about it?

Mara: The answer is Instagram, and the reasoning is practical — “it can provide both information and a little entertainment.” Authors to follow, writing videos, and Staffordshire terriers. That last category is offered without apology.

Pip: Information, entertainment, dog content. Honestly a more defensible stack than most people would admit to.

Mara: What makes it interesting is the intentionality. The app is chosen because it connects to the writing life — watching what authors do, staying inside that world even off the page.

Pip: Which makes the pivot to poetry feel natural — another way of staying inside that world, stripped down to almost nothing.

A Few Words on Light

Pip: “Poetry-Bright” is the shortest piece in the episode and maybe the most direct — a five-line argument that color and bloom can push back on gloom.

Mara: The poem reads in full: “Let the Flower Bloom / Colors providing Light / Wiping away the Gloom / Making the world so much more Bright.” It doesn’t complicate the claim. It just makes it.

Pip: After a narrator stabbing someone fifty times and birds circling a hotel room, a flower blooming is not nothing.

---

Mara: The range here — violence, self-doubt, Instagram dogs, a four-line poem about light — all comes from the same writing practice. Free, unstructured, honest.

Pip: Next time, we’ll see where that practice goes. Something tells me the fog isn’t finished.