The 5 W’s of Writing and M. Pilotte – Part 1
Those of us who have written articles for newspapers (in my case, weeklies) will recall the rule of thumb of the 5 W’s--who, what, when, why, and where--to be covered. They worked well enough for me when I free-lanced for Imprint News. With that in mind, I have decided to comment on each of the 5 W’s as they apply to me as a writer. Some of the W’s tend to overlap; I will make an attempt to keep them separate.
I will begin with the “Why” as the W’s do not have to be in any given order for my purposes. People often wonder why one writes at all, why I write. As with most origins, they begin in childhood. Back then, bad asthmatics were treated like hothouse plants—avoid strenuous exercise and cold weather activities, ad nauseum. So when the neighbor kids were outside running around, I was inside looking for things to do so as not to drive my mother crazy. We always had scrap paper and pencils so I took to writing. My plots were fueled by the escapades of fictional sleuths, Trixie Belden and Nancy Drew. Not only did I write, but I also illustrated my stories. In eighth grade I wrote a complete mystery novel, which I shared with a few friends when it got boring in home economics class. The manuscript got relegated to the basements of several homes I lived in only to meet its soggy demise in a basement flood back in the nineties.
In my career as an educator, I had to write for multi-purposes. I even taught College Prep Writing to high school juniors. Expository prose and a research paper comprised the bulk of the course. Oh, yes, there were papers in college; a master’s thesis in French in graduate school and a doctoral dissertation, which explored the stress that could arise from the conflicting needs of the ethic of care and the need for achievement. (Sounds a lot like myself!) Curricula on the secondary level and program development for state certification in world languages on the graduate level involved more and more writing! Oh, I almost forgot—writing was involved in my editing experiences, which I may discuss in another blog.
My doctoral research and writing put a lid on my creativity for seven years, after which I could revive it and get it going to produce a novel. Enter more family ‘stuff’ and the passage of my enemy—time—and I began to write plays, probably because my husband and I are avid theatre goers, and if I dig deeper, I realize this creative urge may also have deeper roots, namely the zillions of French plays needed for analysis and classification for my master’s thesis. And you might ask—why that genre? Oh, sorry I’m getting into the What of the 5 W’s. I need to save that for another blog.
I need to conclude with the Why component, don’t I? Well, in short, I write because I am driven to; because the opportunity arises at any time or place. I write because I can; I write because I think I have things to say; I write to hopefully entertain people—I like to make people happy. I write to learn because when research is needed for a story; I hunt for answers and I learn, and learning keeps our brains working more effectively. Also, when others knit, I write, or at the very least, I let my mind go to work! I write because the child in me enjoys the escape into other worlds.
Those of us who have written articles for newspapers (in my case, weeklies) will recall the rule of thumb of the 5 W’s--who, what, when, why, and where--to be covered. They worked well enough for me when I free-lanced for Imprint News. With that in mind, I have decided to comment on each of the 5 W’s as they apply to me as a writer. Some of the W’s tend to overlap; I will make an attempt to keep them separate.
I will begin with the “Why” as the W’s do not have to be in any given order for my purposes. People often wonder why one writes at all, why I write. As with most origins, they begin in childhood. Back then, bad asthmatics were treated like hothouse plants—avoid strenuous exercise and cold weather activities, ad nauseum. So when the neighbor kids were outside running around, I was inside looking for things to do so as not to drive my mother crazy. We always had scrap paper and pencils so I took to writing. My plots were fueled by the escapades of fictional sleuths, Trixie Belden and Nancy Drew. Not only did I write, but I also illustrated my stories. In eighth grade I wrote a complete mystery novel, which I shared with a few friends when it got boring in home economics class. The manuscript got relegated to the basements of several homes I lived in only to meet its soggy demise in a basement flood back in the nineties.
In my career as an educator, I had to write for multi-purposes. I even taught College Prep Writing to high school juniors. Expository prose and a research paper comprised the bulk of the course. Oh, yes, there were papers in college; a master’s thesis in French in graduate school and a doctoral dissertation, which explored the stress that could arise from the conflicting needs of the ethic of care and the need for achievement. (Sounds a lot like myself!) Curricula on the secondary level and program development for state certification in world languages on the graduate level involved more and more writing! Oh, I almost forgot—writing was involved in my editing experiences, which I may discuss in another blog.
My doctoral research and writing put a lid on my creativity for seven years, after which I could revive it and get it going to produce a novel. Enter more family ‘stuff’ and the passage of my enemy—time—and I began to write plays, probably because my husband and I are avid theatre goers, and if I dig deeper, I realize this creative urge may also have deeper roots, namely the zillions of French plays needed for analysis and classification for my master’s thesis. And you might ask—why that genre? Oh, sorry I’m getting into the What of the 5 W’s. I need to save that for another blog.
I need to conclude with the Why component, don’t I? Well, in short, I write because I am driven to; because the opportunity arises at any time or place. I write because I can; I write because I think I have things to say; I write to hopefully entertain people—I like to make people happy. I write to learn because when research is needed for a story; I hunt for answers and I learn, and learning keeps our brains working more effectively. Also, when others knit, I write, or at the very least, I let my mind go to work! I write because the child in me enjoys the escape into other worlds.