Piney Woods Philosopher: Keeping truth as focus of writing

Piney and She had an argument about writing. Was it better to plan what you were going to write, or to let your brain feed the story to you as it came out automatically?
Piney had written and published about 2,000 stories, and if you counted textbooks, about 175 books, but most of those were “chores” rather than works of art.
At Roanoke College in a journalism class, a young teacher (about 1942) had stressed the old news formula of who, what, when, where and how?
It seemed to Piney that the formula still applied to today’s news writing as well as most other writing.
What Piney deplored was a writer getting so emotional about a cause that he abandoned the truth in faith. That often happens in political times when there were two or more definite differences of opinion.
In the last election, Piney felt that he had perhaps been over-enthusiastic sometimes in his support of his side of things, but he hoped he had not told any untruths.
On both sides of the election, he had seen and read things that were patently untrue, but he supposed that lying came naturally to some people.
But certainly not to people who wrote for papers, and had the basic not-to-be-forgotten-rule: write however you wish, but don’t deviate from “dat ole debble,” truth!

A writer, Bill Cobbs divides his time between Florida and Southwest Virginia.