Why is a thread in a story, like Thea's reunion with her son, Leroy, in Stuart Moulthrop's Victory Garden, split into five parts instead of one or two longer ones, for instance? The author must choose where lexias allow the reader to depart from a narrative sequence to another, but each lexia must be internally coherent as well.

The "hi, mom" thread (as it is called in Storyspace's links browser) starts with Leroy waking up Thea in the lexia "Hi, Mom." The thread continues through "Leroy," "Thirsty," "Full of Surprises," and "Truant" until the reader chooses between the threads "roadwork" and "old man" (different continuations of Thea's and Leroy's reunion). The cuts between lexias either create self-contained fragments of text, draw attention to alternative threads, or both. "Hi, Mom" allows the reader to link to other dreams (figurative or literal) in the Garden before Thea wakes, "Thirsty" ends with a forked path (the line "As in one and only one" ironically cues an alternative thread), and "Truant" ends the "hi, mom" thread in a couple of directions. "Leroy" introduced Thea's son, giving the reader all of his vital information in one page. "Full of Surprises" is a vignette in the kitchen while the text hints he is "ostensibly looking for something to eat. Or a place to hide." This last line reinforces the idea that lexias' shortness helps to produce the indeterminacy inherent in the text.

The lexias convey an idea independent of as well as in juxtaposition to the rest of the work, so although the reader knows from one lexia that Leroy might be hiding, he/she doesn't know why until other lexias are read. In other words, the fragmentation of plot causes indeterminacy. This can happen to other elements of the text, too. For instance, in Richard Holeton's Figurksi at Findhorn on Acid, the details of the plot are not as important as the Notes that express the major themes in the text. It's obvious that the Notes are meant to be more ambiguous than the main directories. They are short, tongue-in-cheek remarks that slip by the reader's attention at first, becoming more significant to the text's meaning as the reader accumulates an understanding of them as a whole ( -- or reads them all at once one after another).