WivP originated as a private collection of notes maintained by J. W. Werson, initially intended as a place to record observations, fragments of writing, and references that Werson considered worth preserving. The collection was informal in its early years and was not intended for public distribution.

Over time, the material was organized into several categories, including short writings, quotations, personal observations, and unfinished pieces. The name WivP appears to have been adopted during this period, although its exact meaning is uncertain. No definitive explanation for the abbreviation has been found in the surviving material.

Werson's work was largely independent of contemporary literary movements. He was more interested in collecting ideas than presenting a consistent body of work, and many entries were apparently written without the expectation that they would ever be published.

Werson's writings are generally associated with three recurring interests: language, observation, and memory.

He frequently drew from older literary and philosophical works, particularly texts concerned with perception, morality, human behavior, and the reliability of personal recollection. Religious writings and classical philosophy also appear occasionally among his references.

Another recurring influence was ordinary conversation. Werson reportedly considered everyday speech an unusually useful source of material, particularly the ways in which meaning could change through omission, ambiguity, or simple misunderstanding.

Werson did not follow a consistent writing method. Some entries were apparently composed as complete pieces, while others began as isolated phrases and were developed later.

He was known to revise individual words extensively, sometimes retaining an otherwise unusual expression simply because of its sound or structure. Several surviving notes contain alternative versions of the same sentence.

His writing also makes occasional use of numerical references, abbreviations, quotations, and intentionally incomplete statements. The purpose of these markings is not always apparent.

Very little of Werson's material appears to have been formally published. Most known pieces circulated privately or remained within the WivP archive.

The archive itself appears to have been periodically reorganized. As a result, the original order of several entries is uncertain, and some pieces have no reliable date attached to them.

Interest in WivP emerged primarily from attempts to catalogue Werson's surviving material. What initially appeared to be a miscellaneous collection was found to contain recurring references and structural similarities between otherwise unrelated entries.

Whether these similarities were deliberate remains unclear.