Born To Write

Pip: Born To Write — where daily prompts meet flash fiction, and occasionally Benjamin Franklin shows up to remind you what century we’re in.

Mara: chris chonos has been busy this week — we’re covering personal wisdom and hard-won advice, resilience in the face of real storms, the reading life that shapes a writer, and a flash fiction piece that takes a very sharp turn.

Pip: Let’s start with the wisdom.

Liberty, Dreams, and the Art of Adapting

Mara: This segment is about the beliefs and personal philosophies that shape how someone moves through the world — the quotes they carry, the advice they live by, and the skills they’ve built along the way.

Pip: The anchor here is a post called Favorite Quote, and the quote in question is Benjamin Franklin: “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”

Mara: That’s a two-hundred-year-old sentence that still lands hard. The post pairs it with a second Franklin line — “Freedom of speech is the great bulwark of liberty; they prosper and die together” — and frames both as a warning against letting fear become the reason we surrender what matters most.

Pip: Franklin as a founding philosopher of the blog. Honestly, worse choices exist.

Mara: The post is direct about the stakes: freedoms taken away for any reason are a dangerous proposition. That conviction runs underneath the other posts in this segment too.

Pip: Tip distills it down to one sentence — follow your dreams, not because it makes you rich, but because it makes you genuinely happy. Simple, and the post owns that simplicity.

Mara: And Skill takes a different angle entirely. The skill on offer is adapting to change — something most people resist. The post credits military training for building that capacity, noting that things were constantly changing and life in general is constantly changing.

Pip: Which is a harder-earned insight than it sounds. Adapting isn’t the same as not caring — it’s closer to choosing not to be paralyzed.

Mara: Best Advice ties the whole segment together. The best advice ever received was simply: be yourself. The post notes it came a little later in life, but it stuck.

Pip: Liberty, dreams, resilience, authenticity — these posts are essentially a personal operating system.

Mara: That instinct to keep going, to stay yourself through disruption, carries right into the next theme — what happens when the storm is literal.

Letting Go and Surviving the Storm

Pip: Two posts here that approach resilience from opposite directions — one quiet and internal, one loud and atmospheric.

Mara: No More Worries is the quieter one. It opens honestly: “There are more than enough things to worry about in this world.” But the thing that dropped off the list is what other people think.

Pip: Which is its own kind of freedom — smaller scale than Franklin’s, but just as hard to actually practice.

Mara: The poem Poetry Sunday — Surviving The Storm works the same theme through weather and community. It moves from sirens and terror to debris and shattered glass, and ends on “Survive this storm together now, you know you will some way some how.” The rebuild is the point.

Pip: From personal opinion to poetry — the reading life that feeds both of those is next.

The Reading Life Behind the Writing

Mara: Wednesday Thoughts — My Reading List opens with a practical discovery: after finally using a book-tracking app, there were duplicates everywhere — including one title owned three times.

Pip: The real find isn’t the duplicates, though. It’s the pattern underneath them — mostly Dean Koontz and Stephen King, which the post names as the authors that shape the writing.

Mara: The post is direct about why: “I love the weird and strange so when I find a book that offers a twist on the outcome I pounce on it. Especially if it involves a strange or odd psychological edge.”

Pip: So the reading list is also a mission statement for the fiction.

Mara: Which makes the flash fiction piece The Circus Came to Town a direct demonstration. A dreamer named Mathew follows a compulsion into a desert building, gets shoved into a circus cannon, hears the countdown — and wakes up. Then walks to his window and sees the circus arriving in town, and decides to stay home, just in case dreams come true.

Pip: The twist is quiet, which is somehow more unsettling than a loud one. That’s the Koontz-and-King influence doing its work.

Mara: The joyful everyday moments segment is up next — and the title is doing some heavy lifting.

When Play Turns

Pip: Flash Fiction — A Good Day to Play opens with a man named Bradley whistling Mr. Rogers, feeling light on his feet, watching children play in a park. It is aggressively warm.

Mara: The post earns its title before dismantling it. Bradley sits beside a mother, they talk, her daughter gets hurt — and he offers to help. The story turns on this line: “You thought we were going to play, didn’t you? Well, we played alright.”

Pip: The predator was the woman. Bradley was the threat who became the prey. The twist is clean and cold and completely earns that reading-list mission statement from the previous segment.

Mara: The horror is in the craft — the same warmth that made the opening feel safe is exactly what the ending weaponizes.

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Pip: Liberty, resilience, a reading life built on the weird and strange, and a flash fiction that proves the point — it’s a coherent world over at Born To Write.

Mara: Next time, we’ll see what the prompts pull up next. There’s always another storm to survive, or a cannon to climb out of.