Five Things: Brief Notes On A Recurring Genre
Back in the olden days of writing on the Internet, a group of writers I knew would often write brief essays or nonfiction blog posts structured around a list of “five things.” These “things” were usually observations, thoughts, confessions, referrals, or investigations. Each thing could be many paragraphs, or just one short sentence. I don’t know who originated the form. It might have been adapted from the fanfic trope of the same name, which goes back to the early 1980s, in which five scenes are presented from a story or relationship. It may also have come from LiveJournal blogs of the early 2000s, out of which emerged a popular type of entry called “five things make a post.” Or it may have developed separately, a kind of writerly convergent evolution, a carcinization of words, like how different animals keep independently evolving into the shape of crabs, over and over again in the dark depths of the seas. Creatures forged by the same environmental pressures. Regardless of where it came from, I found it to be a good way of getting thoughts down. There seems to be something about the number five that helps to give a satisfying structure, at least to the writer, if not to the reader. As I find my way back into regular online writing, I’ll be using it again here.