Composite Character

Salon.com advice columnist Cary Tennis runs writing workshops in San Francisco. One afternoon, he distributed a number of sentence fragments, or prompts, suggestive of the nodal points of a fictional person’s life. Each person in the room wrote from these prompts. The result was strangely story-like, yet surreal. So the group decided to make a book of it, to test the limits of what is deliberate fiction and what is accident, or synchronicity, and to demonstrate how the mind makes narrative of the barest outlines of form.