I think the way we teach kids to think about and categorize questions is completely wrong. If I think back to any time I’ve been taught about questions formally, I’ve always been taught to think about the 5 W’s: Who, What, Where, When, Why – and the H: How? These are perfectly good questions to focus on if you’re a journalist writing a news story, but most of us are not journalists, and I’ve found a broader range of questions to be useful or relevant in my day-to-day life.

Alright, time to look back at another year of writing. I’m not quite sure what to think of this year. Last January feels like it was ages ago – I barely remember any of what happened, and it feels super removed from now. That being said, I probably did the most variety of writing this year that I’ve done in years, because I took an experimental fiction course, which forced me to write fiction.

One concept that I’m toying around with right now is the idea that events are interpreted on three levels:

Plaintext: what people said they did, or, alternatively, what was concretely observed.

Subtext: what actually happened behind the scenes that you sort of have to guess at unless you were there (incomplete definition but you get the idea).

Context: where this event fits into the bigger picture of what’s going on.