Where Does The Five Things Essay Come From?
Back in the misty olden days of writing on the Internet (i.e., some time around 2013 or so), writers I followed online would often share posts on Tumblr or other blogs that were structured around a numbered list of five things. These “things” usually included a mix of observations, thoughts, confessions, memories, recommendations, or questions, each ranging in length from many paragraphs to just one short sentence apiece.
I don’t know who, if anyone, originated the form. It may 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 might have been adapted from a fanfiction trope that goes back at least to the early 1980s, called Five Things, or Five Times. Or it may have developed separately, a kind of writerly convergent evolution, a carcinization of words, like the way 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. {read}