Born To Write

Pip: Born To Write, where the blank page is less a canvas and more a dare — and this week, someone took the dare seriously.

Mara: Chris Chonos is the writer behind all of it — Novel November updates, daily word counts, and a handful of personal prompts that range from Bob Dylan tattoos to cryptocurrency skepticism. Let's start with the novel itself.

Novel November: Fifty Thousand Words and a Killer

Pip: The setup here is straightforward and a little terrifying — commit to writing fifty thousand words in thirty days, starting from zero, with no outline, no safety net, and a full-time job waiting every morning.

Mara: The pre-November post frames the stakes directly: "I have never tried this in such a condensed time-frame, but I think it is time to do that — shit I've never written a string of thought over about 6,000 words before."

Pip: So the ceiling is roughly six thousand words, and the goal is fifty thousand. That gap is the whole story.

Mara: Day one opened with anxiety and 570 words on the board. By end of day, the count was 1,695 — beating the daily target of 1,667. Day two collapsed to 200 words, dogs and scheduling cited. Day three bounced back with 1,894. By day four, writing was happening at lunch, and the novel had produced its first real artifact — a letter from the killer, signed "The Purifier," addressed directly to the investigating officer.

Pip: The villain writing fan mail to the detective before the detective knows there's a case — that's a genuinely unsettling premise.

Mara: Day five closed at 1,889 words, bringing the five-day total to 7,471. The General Writing Thoughts post puts the running manuscript at 5,527 words as of day four, written in scenes and fragments — the approach of what the post calls a "pantser type writer," someone building without an outline.

Pip: The middle of the book is flagged as the real test. Getting started, it turns out, is the easy part.

Mara: On to the prompts — and what they reveal when the subject isn't fiction.

Prompts, Opinions, and a Dylan Tattoo

Pip: The personal prompt posts are short, but they accumulate into something — a portrait of the writer between the novel sessions, answering questions about fear, money, music, and travel.

Mara: The Song prompt is the one with the most weight. On what changed his life: "I would have to say 'Tangled up in Blue' by Bob Dylan. I was going through a bad spot in my life and the line, 'The only thing I knew was to keep on keeping on' made such an impact I got it tattooed on my forearm."

Pip: A lyric about persistence, worn permanently, by someone now attempting fifty thousand words in a month. The throughline writes itself.

Mara: The Scared prompt names the childhood scene from the Salem's Lot miniseries — a kid floating to a window, scratching at the glass — as a genuinely lasting image. Worth noting alongside a novel being written about a small-town killer, because the horror influences are clearly in the room.

Pip: The Round Trip prompt picks Moscow — Russian history class in high school, a long-standing fascination with culture. And the Cryptocurrency post lands a clean verdict: "completely made up with absolutely nothing to back it."

Mara: The Useless Facts prompt closes the loop with a kind of self-aware shrug — the answer being that pretty much every fact he shares qualifies.

Pip: Fifty thousand words, no outline, a villain writing letters, and a Dylan lyric on his forearm. The fear is the point — he said so himself.

Mara: Next time, more of the draft — and probably more from The Purifier.