When fragments do what sentences can’t
A published essay, longer writing prompts, and everything coming up this week
Dear Readers,
This week, we crossed 600 subscribers! A humbling milestone that makes me want to write more and work harder to build something worthy of your time here.
Some of you are here to read, and one of my recently published essays is linked below: Green Sky, a piece that means a lot to me, not just because it found a home in print, but because it brings together two powerful forces from my childhood: storms and punishment. I hope it stays with you.
Some of you are here for The Story Place, our new writing community within States of Matter, A shared practice of showing up, paying attention, and shaping your experiences into a story. The month of May is dedicated to telling stories as they emerge, sometimes in fragments or images, and to learning to capture those images to create compelling moments.
If you’re new here or haven’t yet explored the Start Here index, I invite you to look around.
I’ve been a teacher for most of my life. One thing I miss when I’m not in a classroom is that palpable energy, the particular excitement of learning something together, in real time, with other people. That’s what I’m trying to recreate here.
I would love to see you at a live session, a write-in, or even just in an email. However you want to show up, I’m glad you’re here.
What’s coming up this week
Two ways to show up and write this week, both through The Story Place:
Write-in — Wednesday, 6–7pm PDT — free & open to all. An open hour with prompts and company. Show up, write, be accountable. No pressure, just space to get something down alongside others. Want to join? Send me a DM or reply to this post, and I’ll send you the link directly. Space is intentionally small.
The Story Place Live — with Lynn J. Broderick (TBA) Lynn writes Writing {unfiltered} — memoir-driven stories and unfiltered reflections from a former ad exec with a lot to say. She’ll be joining me to talk about how she uses fragments in her posts to create emotional resonance. Date and time TBA — follow Lynn on Substack (substack.com/@lynnjbroderick) and watch this space for the time.
Worth revisiting
Last week, we held our first Story Place live session featuring 60-second image sprints, a little Lidia Yuknavitch, and a lot of dogs almost barking in the background. If you missed it, here’s what we covered and what still applies:
The image sprint 60 seconds. One image, such as a smell, a sound, or something you saw out the window. Don’t think about where it’s going. Just get it down. You can do this right now, in your notes app, before you finish reading this post.
What lyric writing actually is, not concerned with narrative. No beginning, middle, or end required. It starts wherever the memory starts, in the middle, in a flash, in a single sensory detail. As Lidia Yuknavitch puts it, life is “a series of fragments and repetitions and pattern formations.” Good writing can mirror that.
Writers worth reading in this style: Lidia Yuknavitch, The Chronology of Water. Ross Gay, The Book of Delights. Maggie Nelson, Bluets. Each one demonstrates accumulation, proximity, and trusting the reader.
When the fragmented style really works
This week, we go deeper.
Fragmented, lyric writing isn’t just a style; it’s a structure, or maybe a structured suggestion. It says: this meaning cannot fit inside a tidy sequence. A few of the best cases:
When memory doesn’t arrive in order, trauma, grief, and deep childhood memory rarely show up as a story with a beginning and end. The fragment mirrors the way the mind actually holds those moments, in flashes, in sensation, in repetition.
When an image carries more than an explanation ever could, some things lose their power the moment you explain them. A chore chart on a kitchen wall. The sky is going green. Let the image do the work, and trust your reader to arrive at meaning on their own.
When two things can’t be named together, but must be felt together, proximity is its own argument. Place a storm beside a childhood and let the reader feel the connection before they can explain it. The fragment withholds the “because,” and that withholding is the whole point. Trust that the reader can find their way through your image to the other side, just knowing and feeling, rather than being told.
My Sample Writing: Green Sky
Published in Beyond Words Magazine, Issue 63, May 2026,
Notice what it does, and what it doesn’t do.
The sky goes green. Light drains from the fields, leaving the wheat in a hush, each blade leaning in the same direction as if listening. The clouds settle into heavy shelves, dark on dark, and the wind slips along the house like a hand feeling for a pulse. One low rumble moves across the horizon. Slow. Certain.
You felt that shift when you were young, before you understood that the weather was dangerous. In your family, a chore chart grows from the kitchen wall. Clean, rake, mow, sit still. Maybe that day you didn’t obey. You don’t remember why exactly. The offense didn’t matter; the fear arrived before it did.
What to consider: The storm and the violence are never named as related. So what connects them? Do you think it works? Where is the moment the essay turns?
Writing prompts
Give yourself 5 to 10 minutes. The goal is to practice the pivot, the moment when the physical world and the interior world meet without explanation.
Prompt 1 — Weather and the body. Describe a specific kind of weather in physical, sensory detail: the light, the smell, the sound, the texture. Then, without explanation or transition, move to a memory that lives in the same part of your body. Let one hinge line carry you across.
Prompt 2 — The object on the wall. Pick a single object from a childhood home. Something ordinary that held a rule or a routine. Describe it in close physical detail. Then write a few lines about what that object meant in the body, not what it meant in your mind, but how it felt to be near it.
Prompt 3 — Fear that arrived early. Write about a time the fear came before the event. Start in the physical: what did your body notice first? Sound, light, temperature, and the quality of the air? Build the atmosphere slowly. Then shift, with one sentence, into the human world.
You don’t have to explain everything. You just have to put two true things side by side and trust the space between them.
See you on Wednesday.
— Michelle
Optional homework: close reading
The piece opens simply: “Today, as I was walking down Foothill Boulevard to do laundry.” That’s it. That’s the whole setup. Find “Hummingbirds” in Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights and read what follows. It’s short; read it a few times.
Then ask yourself:
Where are the images? Which words surprise you, and which feel exactly right? How do you feel at the end, not what you think, how you feel, and which specific words or images got you there?
Bring your notes to the write-in, or drop them in the comments.
The write-in is free and always will be. But if you're ready to go further, paid subscribers get monthly Zoom sessions for real feedback and sharing, plus 1-on-1 Story Discovery calls. Read more about what that looks like here, and check out a live Story Discover call here.
Thank you! These are really useful prompts that I wll try this week. Please send me the link to your write-in.