The Art of Splitting Apart

Writing in fragments

I’ve been thinking about my love affair with the fragment this week as my book, The Art of Brevity, enters the world.

I don’t think of life as a round, complete circle — it’s shaped by fragments, shards, and pinpricks. It’s a collage of snapshots, a collection of the unspoken, an attic full of situations that aren’t easily disposed of. The brevity of flash is perfect for capturing the small but telling moments when life pivots (or splinters) almost unnoticeably, yet profoundly.

I am fascinated by the disconnections in my life, whether it’s the gulf between a loved one, the natural world, or God. I don’t want a form that represents comprehensiveness or unity because that’s an aesthetic at odds with my experience of life. In fact, our universe is becoming more entropic as I type.

To write in fragments calls on a different sensibility, a different tactile feel, a different artistry.

Each moment on the page is a brush, a kiss, a reaching out.

“So many fragments, so many beginnings, so many pleasures,” Roland Barthes wrote. He understood the seductive nature of a fragment. It’s a wink of the eye, a revelation, a promise. In fragmentary, ambulatory texts, the reader is less involved with a pathway of narrative construction than a series of…