Tom Comitta takes a database of first sentences (pulled from 268 New Yorker short stories) and looks for patterns in them. Then, within the patterns, he arranged small stories using only those sentences.

"First Impressions" consists entirely of first sentences from 268 short stories published in The New Yorker over the past 20 years, from 1997 to 2017, all of which are cited below. After collecting every first sentence, I found they fell into a number of patterns, some surprising, others obvious: points of view, different tenses, genre fiction like western and military, stories set in smalltown America, stories set in Montana (oddly there were a lot), etc. I then arranged these patterns into a sequence of vignettes, a short story in its own right. —TC (View Highlight)