Before beginning this exercise read:

For this exercise, begin with an informal survey. Ask a writing partner, "What's a story?" Ask your mother, ask your brother, your best friend, your lover. Ask yourself.

Collect your answers. Write them down. What have you got?

In previous classes you have learned about the little triangle of rising action, climax, denouement. At least part of this logic derives from Aristotle, who, long ago proposed that the middle of a story should come after the beginning, and the end should come after the middle.

Between then and now, E.M. Forster developed the concept of causality. The king died, then the queen died, is a story, he said. But if the queen dies of grief because the king has died, then it is a plot, for one thing has not simply followed another but instead has been caused by it.

Story writing depends a great deal on plot, but contemporary stories may organize themselves around different kinds of logic, structures and forms than the classic causal triangle we have already described. One common such structure explores fragmented form, or what Annie Dillard calls "narrative collage." Such stories may come together as bits and pieces, sometimes as passages with section titles, sometimes as items in a list, sometimes apparently random, separated from other fragments with just white space. Sometimes the unfamiliar structure of these stories is confusing, but if you read them carefully coherent narrative often emerges, which can be reconstructed with its own beginning, middle, and end.

Indeed, as Annie Dillard argues, the imperative for fragmented texts to hold together may even be greater than we are accustomed to, and we may find them to be even "more highly structured than leisurely traditional tellings."

This exercise is one that asks you to experiment with fragmentation as a formal convention. It proceeds from the assumption that a story will coalesce around randomly (or not so randomly) assembled objects, concepts or experiences to the degree that the writer seeks order.

Begin as a collector.

Collect words: fence, apricot, wainscoting, wren, piecemeal. Gun, rock, babe, icon, shelter. Socks, teeth, pulse, auto club, apostle.

You may collect your words out of books, your memory, a letter from your mother, the evening's newscast. Collect them around a particular theme-a sport, a construction trade, a hobby, a professional discourse. Or just collect them at random.

When you are satisfied with your collection, arrange your words on the page according to some pattern you devise—repetition, alphabetization, numerical sequencing, something random.

Now, write a prose fragment that spins off from the first word, then the next, then the next. Don't think about it, just start. Like this:

Fence: My father built fences for a living. He was a short man, with thick shoulder, and my most vivid memories of him are of him standing chest deep in the foundation of a fence, sweat pouring off his face, and with a look about him between determined and frantic.

Apricot: If you want to grow apricots, be prepared for three things: blankets of soft rotting fruit on your yard all summer that squishes into mush when you try to clean it up, the ever present stink of apricot sweetness, and that the life of any apricot tree is maybe fifty years. You may outlast it. You may watch as it rots from the inside out.

Wainscoting: In his spare time he built wainscoting, the old-fashioned kind, carving it and working it by hand.

Fence: I did not know then what my father was afraid of, but it lay underground, and for years we both dreamed of its darkness.

Maybe you already have some idea of where this story is heading, something about the loss of a tree, a rebuilt fence, a view of a father and how it changed the summer that the tree died. Maybe you don't yet. Keep adding fragments until a whole story emerges.

How else might you structure your own story? What finally holds it together for you?

Note: Two widely anthologized fragmented stories are "In the Heart of the Heart of the Country," by William Gass, and "The Babysitter," by Robert Coover. What other fragmented narratives have you read?

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Adapted from Katharine Haake's exercise in Metro