#underwriting

[writerpolls]

Writers: do you tend to underwrite or overwrite?

Underwrite

Overwrite

Neither

Depends on the project

Both somehow

Other / unsure

See results / not a writer

Voting ended onMay 12, 2025

[papercraneswriting]

Underwriting vs. Overwriting: Which Are You?

Underwriting vs. Overwriting: Which Are You?

There is so much advice floating around out there about how important it is to follow the expected and established word counts in the industry. For example, many agents, editors, and publishers will not consider works that fall outside of expected word count ranges, and it may even be a reason to reject the work.

The reason is pretty simple: these word counts have been established based on…

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[git-writing-good]

Is there any advice you can give on making a scene last longer? I've wrote before but it seems to move too fast.

 Thanks for the ask!

 The first thing I would recommend is to not worry about it in your first draft. Just get the bare bones down on paper.

 Once you go to edit/rewrite the scene, you need to figure out what it’s supposed to accomplish. Character development, moving the plot forward–it could even just be a light, fluffy scene that goes nowhere. Having a solid outline helps with this a lot, but isn’t necessarily necessary.

 Then, with a goal in mind, ask yourself if it achieves that goal already, and if not, what is it missing?

Description adds meat, but too much can create excess fat that just needs to be trimmed later (Still better than having too little meat). Give the reader a clear idea of where and when they are, what the weather is like, who’s around the character(s).

Mixing action with your dialogue adds meat, and make it tastier too! Someone chuckling and leaning back against a fence as they talk to someone adds characterisation and paints a clear picture for the reader.

 Finding your voice (Hard to do on a first draft) will often add some volume to your work. When starting out, it’s hard to do much more than get your ideas down in their most basic forms. It sucks, it’s not satisfying, but it’s the first step towards a beautiful finished work!

 Personally, I am an underwriter myself, so I feel your pain. My first draft of my first novel was about 85k words. It felt shallow and boring, and unoriginal, since I had yet to find my own voice. Now it’s 141k, and much closer to what I envisioned.

 Best of luck, and if you have any more questions, I’d be glad to help.

 Happy writing, friend!

[casandraleigh]

I need to do the opposite of underwrite for my novel. Someone tell me how to be ruthless. Tell me how to sacrifice the 16,000 words that I don’t need in order to tell my story. I know they’re hidden among the 126,000 somewhere. 

I just need to be brutal, and tear them all out. 

[thepoliticalpatient]

Please take 10 minutes to watch this incredibly illuminating video. Charles Gaba is my favorite blogger for a reason.

[thepoliticalpatient]

Graham-Cassidy may be the most fucked up ACA repeal proposal yet

I’m looking for more sources on this because it’s so fucked up that I almost don’t believe it’s real.

Apparently Graham-Cassidy would allow discrimination against the chronically ill to an extent that is even worse than it was before the ACA. In order to understand this, please take a moment to read these definitions from my earlier post on insurance vocabulary.

Pre-existing condition: This is a big one that I think many people misunderstand. A pre-existing condition is a health problem you have before being covered by insurance. So, for example, if you develop a health problem while you are uninsured, that is a pre-existing condition. If you develop a health problem while you are insured, but later on you have a lapse in your health insurance, that condition becomes a pre-existing condition. If you have a health condition, but you’ve never had a lapse in insurance coverage since diagnosis, you do not have a pre-existing condition. You can switch from one insurer to another without having your condition labelled pre-existing as long as you are covered continuously and do not have a lapse in between.

Before the ACA, insurers could discriminate against people with pre-existing conditions (see Underwriting below). This is now illegal.

Underwriting: The insurance practice of analyzing individuals based on their risk and charging them more if they’re considered riskier. For example, with home insurance (where underwriting is legal), you might get charged a higher premium to insure your home if it’s located where floods are common. In medical insurance, before the ACA, this resulted in higher premiums or even complete denial of coverage for people with pre-existing conditions. This is now illegal in medical insurance under the ACA.

Alright, so the essential thing here is that before the ACA, insurers could not hike up your insurance rates, even if you were sick, unless you had a lapse in coverage. So, even if you were chronically ill, you could protect yourself by being extremely careful to never allow your insurance to lapse - easier said than done, but possible.

But what I’m reading is that Graham-Cassidy would not simply remove protections for people with pre-existing conditions, but would also allow insurers to jack up the rates on people who become ill WHILE COVERED under an individual market plan.

Imagine that you’re healthy and you’ve been paying $200 a month for health insurance for years, while only using maybe $20-$50 of health services per month. You’re clearly operating at a loss, but you’re doing it because that’s what insurance is all about: pay now, benefit later. You expect your insurance to someday be there for you when you need it.

Then you get sick, and you start needing the occasional $2000 MRI, or $10,000 hospitalization, and your monthly prescriptions cost $100. Hey! That insurance you’ve been paying for all this time is finally going to pay off. It’s going to cover you, right?

Oh, yeah, sure, it’ll cover you. But your rate is going to go up to $1000 a month, which you can’t afford, so you don’t get to keep having insurance now that you need it. And you can’t afford the out-of-pocket medical costs either, so you just don’t get the healthcare you need, and you get sicker.

Or maybe you can afford it, but you find that most months you’re still paying more for insurance than it would have cost for you to cover your costs out of pocket, so what was even the fucking point of buying insurance in the first place?

Shit like this is the reason behind my ever-present advice, in so many of these posts, to get yourself covered under employer-sponsored insurance if you’re chronically ill, if that is in any way possible for you. The individual market isn’t safe for us, not these days.

https://thinkprogress.org/trumpcares-back-and-now-it-will-let-insurers-jack-up-premiums-as-soon-as-you-get-sick-38fff5001bf9/

Let me know if you have more info about this.

[intellibooksinsurance]

Claims leakage has an invisible twin, and it's on the underwriting side

Everyone talks about claims leakage — overpaying on claims. Almost nobody talks about premium leakage: undercharging because the risk data was wrong at the point of quote. A property listed as 2,000 sq ft that's actually 3,200. A "clerical" occupation that's really a workshop. A fleet of ten vehicles rated as eight. Each looks like a small data discrepancy; in aggregate it's premium you never collected on risk you fully carry. And unlike claims leakage, it's nearly invisible — there's no payout to audit, just money that quietly never arrived. The fix isn't tougher underwriters; it's verifying risk data against sources of truth at quote time, before the mispricing is locked in for the whole policy term. Full write-up → https://intellibooksinsurance.blogspot.com/2026/07/premium-leakage-invisible-twin-of.html

[gennarobrooks-church]

How Gennaro Brooks-Church Is Simplifying Insurance Workflows With AI

Gennaro Brooks-Church, Founder and CEO of Cazimir and Brooks Energy, has spent his career focused on one persistent challenge in the insurance industry: underwriting teams are being asked to handle growing workloads with fewer experienced professionals available to guide the process. Rather than treating this as an unavoidable pressure, Gennaro Brooks-Church has built his work around solving it directly, developing AI solutions designed to simplify insurance workflows while preserving the expertise that quality underwriting depends on.

The Problem With Manual Underwriting Work

Insurance underwriting has always involved a lot of moving parts. Reviewing documents, checking for missing information, verifying data across multiple sources, and making sure everything lines up before a decision can be made. For years, most of this work has fallen on underwriters themselves, often taking up time that could be spent on the judgment calls that actually require experience. Gennaro Brooks-Church, Founder and CEO of Cazimir and Brooks Energy, has spent his career trying to change that.

Removing Friction, Not Judgment

Gennaro Brooks-Church believes that a lot of the friction in insurance workflows comes from repetitive, manual tasks that do not actually require human judgment, things like classifying documents, extracting data points, or checking for inconsistencies across a submission. His approach has been to build AI that takes on these repetitive tasks directly, so underwriters can spend more of their time on the decisions that matter most.

Systems That Learn, Not Just Automate

What makes his approach different is that the technology is not built around fixed, one-size-fits-all rules. Instead, Gennaro Brooks-Church has focused on learning-based systems that improve with use. Every submission processed, along with any corrections made by underwriting teams, helps the system become more accurate over time. This means the technology does not stay static, it becomes more aligned with an organization's specific processes the longer it is used.

Keeping Workflows Transparent

Gennaro Brooks-Church has also made it a priority to keep these workflows transparent. Rather than asking underwriters to simply trust an output, his systems are designed to trace every extracted piece of data back to its original source. This gives teams a clear way to verify information instead of relying on hidden assumptions, which matters just as much for day-to-day decisions as it does for regulatory reporting.

Faster Implementation, Fewer Delays

Another part of simplifying insurance workflows, according to Gennaro Brooks-Church, is reducing how long it takes to actually start seeing value from new technology. Many AI tools require long implementation timelines and heavy IT involvement before teams can use them. Gennaro Brooks-Church has taken a different approach, working directly with organizations to configure systems around their specific brokers, formats, and internal processes within days rather than months.

Efficiency Without Losing Accuracy

This focus on simplification is not just about speed. Gennaro Brooks-Church has been clear that the goal is to help underwriting teams operate more efficiently without losing the accuracy and judgment that quality underwriting depends on. For MGAs, wholesale brokers, and carriers dealing with growing workloads and shrinking teams of experienced underwriters, this kind of support can make a meaningful difference in how much a team can handle without sacrificing quality.

A Simple Idea Behind the Work

At the center of everything Gennaro Brooks-Church builds is a simple idea: technology should make good work easier, not replace the people doing it. By focusing on removing friction rather than removing judgment, he continues to help insurance organizations simplify their workflows while holding onto the expertise that has always driven quality underwriting.