A Completely Appropriate Celebration for Fiction Writers

Today, December 12, is the Festival of Unmentionable Thoughts, a holiday that sounds suspiciously made up but is, in fact, rigorously observed by anyone who writes fiction or poetry and has ever stared at a sentence thinking, If I leave this in, people will have questions.

Writing does not begin with respectable ideas. It begins with the ones that show up unannounced, track mud across the floor, and say something you immediately try to un-think. Unfortunately for your sense of decorum, those are usually the best ideas.

Fiction has evolved excellent coping mechanisms for this. It gives unmentionable thoughts a setting, a motive, and a harmless disguise. If necessary, it introduces them to a gnome, relocates them to a grove, or perhaps to a new planet, and insists this is all perfectly normal world-building. Nothing to see here.

Poetry refuses to play along. Poetry hears the same thought and says, “Interesting. Say that again but slower.” If the idea is true and breathing, it stays. If it makes you uncomfortable, even better.

This is why poetry has long been the preferred habitat of thoughts that refuse to behave: grief that ignores closure, joy that feels suspiciously loud, anger that knows where the structural weaknesses are, and longing that declines to fill out paperwork.

And then there is the talking cat.

If you’ve read my gnome books, you already know her. She eavesdrops. She notices things. She communicates freely with gnomes and has very little patience for writers who pretend not to hear the interesting parts of their own thoughts. Her editorial notes are concise: “That’s the line.” “Don’t you dare cut that.” “Yes, it’s uncomfortable. Keep it.”

But dogs appear too.

Dogs in my books do not edit. Dogs do not judge. Dogs write letters.

If you’ve read Gnome Too, you’ve met them. If you’ve seen my letter in Write to Woof, you know the type. Dogs take unmentionable thoughts and state them plainly, with their whole chest, usually about loyalty, loss, joy, or why you absolutely should have noticed this sooner. They do not bother with metaphor unless it involves sticks.

Fiction lets dogs show up as companions, witnesses, and steady presences in the grove. Poetry lets them speak directly, tail wagging through the lines. Both forms understand the same truth: sometimes the most unmentionable thought is the one that is simply honest.

The Festival of Unmentionable Thoughts is a reminder that first drafts are not court transcripts. They are private negotiations with your imagination, occasionally overseen by a cat who knows the grove and a dog who thinks you’re overthinking this.

So celebrate properly today. Leave the odd sentence in. Follow the metaphor that makes you wince. Stop tidying up the ending just to make it behave. You don’t have to publish it. You don’t have to explain it. You just have to let it exist long enough to see what kind of creature it turns into.

Every good story and every honest poem begins the same way: with a thought that hesitates at the door, waiting to see if it’s welcome.

Happy Festival.
The cat has approved it. The gnomes nodded. The dog already loves it.