Inside Verdant: The Fun in Narrating with Fragments

Most stories begin at the beginning.

Verdant doesn't.

When you first enter the world, you aren't given Chapter One. Instead, you're handed a witness statement. A woman called Mara Reeves has given a police interview, discussing a property she has been cleaning for several months. This is the police witness statement. There are odd details, and it transpires that the occupant is now missing. The story isn't explained to you - it has to be discovered.

A Different Way of Telling Stories

Verdant is built from fragments. Every document is something that could plausibly exist inside that world: witness statements, crime scene reports, text conversations, therapist notes, internal emails, interview transcripts and audio recordings.

Each portion reveals a little more than the last, but never everything. Rather than following a story that's laid out for you, you're assembling it yourself.

Writing the World, Not Just the Story

Traditional fiction usually follows one protagonist through a sequence of events. Verdant works differently. There isn't a single narrator. Every document belongs to someone else - a cleaner, a police officer, a line manager, a doctor. Each person sees only a small part of what's happening, and together those perspectives build a much larger picture.

No individual document contains the whole truth.

Each Detail Matters

Because our documents are short, every sentence has to earn its place. A mug moved from one shelf to another. An instruction buried inside an app. Tape outlines in cupboards. A line crossed out in an email.

On their own, these details feel ordinary. Days later, they can completely change your perception of something you've already read. That's one of my favourite aspects of this format: the meaning of a document can evolve long after you've finished it.

Built Collaboratively

One author doesn't write Verdant. Different writers are creating different strands, following different characters whose lives never need to cross inside the same fictional world.

To make that possible, we maintain a shared canon so every writer understands the world's history, timeline and rules. One strand might follow a detective, another a whistleblower, another a family with no idea they're connected to either. The challenge is making every strand satisfying on its own while quietly adding to the larger mystery.

Why Fragments Feel Real

In real life, we almost never discover the truth in chronological order. We piece events together from conversations, reports, CCTV, memories and rumours.

That's exactly how Verdant works.

Instead of being told what happened, readers become investigators. The gaps between documents aren't flaws - they're where your imagination goes to work.

Every new document expands the world a little further. A witness statement leads to an internal email. A crime scene report elicits questions that aren't answered until weeks later. Characters who seem unrelated gradually become part of something larger.

That's the joy of narrating with fragments. You never feel like you're reading a story that's already been told. You feel like you're uncovering one that's still unfolding.