Writing Fragments — An Unstructured Writing Fragment Collection Skill

Skill Overview

Writing Fragments is a writing skill focused solely on divergence, not convergence: through an ongoing interview-style dialogue, it draws out scattered sentences, scenes, assertions, and half-formed ideas from your mind, appending them one by one to the same Markdown file. Throughout the process, it does not establish an outline, divide the material into sections, or impose any structure. Its goal is not to help you finish an article, but first to expand the space of possibilities for what “this article could become.” It is suitable for people who already have ideas but have not yet figured out how to organize them. Note that this skill must be invoked manually; the AI will not trigger it automatically.

Suitable Scenarios

1. You have an idea but have no idea how to organize it: You vaguely feel that a topic is worth writing about, yet cannot even settle on the first sentence. At this point, writing an outline would be a luxury—you do not lack structure; you lack material. The skill repeatedly asks questions around the topic, first capturing and fixing whatever you are able to articulate.

2. Collecting material before writing a blog post, long-form article, or public-account piece: Before formally starting to write, there is often a period in which material only flows in and nothing flows out. The fragments produced during this stage do not need to make sense to readers; they only need to make sense to you: a sharp sentence you want to use somewhere but do not yet know where, an analogy, a code snippet, or a conversation you happened to overhear can all be thrown into the document first.

3. Diary-like accumulation for long-term projects such as manuscripts or columns: Its model is the novelist’s diary—recording unstructured “things noticed” over many years, then later mining them for raw material. The longer the writing cycle, the more it needs this kind of holding pool that does not rush to take shape.

Core Features

1. Interview-style divergent questioning: The skill does not wait for you to organize your thoughts. Instead, it actively and continuously asks follow-up questions. The vaguer you are, the more specific its questions become. Possible directions include: When exactly did this happen? How did you react at the time? Is there a more precise word? Even the sentence you casually uttered at the very beginning of the conversation is captured as the first fragment.

2. Silent persistence of fragments; append-only, never overwrite: Every fully formed fragment is directly appended to the same Markdown file, with horizontal rules separating the fragments. There are no subheadings, labels, or ordering. The top of the file contains only a working title—which can be provisional and changed later—with no metadata, table of contents, or dates. You can edit, rearrange, or delete passages directly in the file at any time—the skill rereads the file before every write, preserves your changes, and only appends new material. You can also simply say, “Delete the last one,” “Make that one more concise,” or “Merge these two,” and it will do so.

3. Encouraging you to distill a leading word: This is what it values most. When the conversation repeatedly circles back to the same idea, the skill pushes you to coin a word for it—a compact metaphor or invented term, like “tracer bullet” or “fog of war,” where a single word names an entire pattern. These words are the most valuable elements among all the fragments: once you choose the right one during exploration, it can in turn determine the structure, transitions, and title that follow. If you cannot find one, there is no need to force it, but it is worth trying several more rounds.

Frequently Asked Questions

What qualifies as a writing fragment?

The standard is not “Does this passage explain itself clearly?” but “Is this good writing?” A fragment only needs to be understandable to its author; it does not need to explain terminology to unfamiliar readers or form a self-consistent argument. It can therefore be many things: a sentence you want to deploy but do not yet know where to place, an assertion accompanied by a one-line reason, a brief anecdote or code snippet, half an idea (“I keep feeling that X is a bit like Y; think about this again later”), a quotation or piece of dialogue, a group of observations loosely connected by intuition, or even a complaint, a confession, or a punchline. It does not even need to be used in the end—a fragment is a “thing noticed,” not a task to complete.

Do I need an article outline or structure before using it?

No. In fact, this skill explicitly rejects structure. It belongs to the exploration stage of the writing process; its task is to expand possibilities. Turning fragments into an outline, chapters, and a finished draft belongs to another stage: exploitation. Therefore, it will not divide the process into stages, create an outline, build an article framework, write the main text for you, or polish your prose. If what you need right now is structure, you are using the wrong tool. Conversely, if you already have a complete outline, this skill’s value will be greatly diminished: it excels when the outline does not yet exist.

What should I do after accumulating enough fragments?

Stop, then switch to another skill. This skill will not tell you when you have “enough”; you must make that judgment yourself. When rereading the document, if you notice that certain fragments are beginning to echo one another, a particular leading word keeps recurring, or several entries clearly belong to the same section, the exploration stage should come to an end. At that point, take the document into the structured-writing stage: select and arrange the fragments, add transitions, and turn them into a real article. The document itself is raw material, not a draft—there is no need to worry that it is scattered, repetitive, or contradictory. That is exactly what it is supposed to be.