Drabble Fun

[kriadydragon]

From bratfarrar

The first 5 people to comment on this post get to request a drabble of their choosing from me. In return, they HAVE to post this in their journal. The rule is, don't ask unless you plan to pass it on! I reserve the right to request a different prompt, but name your fandom (or don't) and a phrase, situation, title...

Comments

[sholio]

Sigh ... I just can't do drabbles; trying to tell a readable story in 100 words is -- well, not exactly *impossible* for me, because I have tried it occasionally, but monumentally unsatisfying. For me, adding and subtracting words to try to hit a target word count leeches out a lot of the fun. But I'll be interested to see what you come up with!

[kriadydragon.livejournal.com]

I think for this challenge it doesn't have to be one-hundred words precisely. I just looked at the drabble done for bratfarrar and it was way more than a hundred.

To me, a drabble is a story consisting of less than, oh, 200-300 words.

For me, adding and subtracting words to try to hit a target word count leeches out a lot of the fun.

Which is why I think being so anally precise with a word count is so wrong. I'd always hated it when English teachers had us do a precise number of words rather than do more of a vague limit. Limits are fine and all but that was just ridiculous.

[sholio]

Hmm, I'd always thought that a drabble was a specific literary form. Like a haiku, always needing to have a certain pattern of syllables -- and the challenge to writing one is getting it to fit within its limitations and still be a work of art.

[bratfarrar]

It is, technically, and that's the form I tend to follow, since I enjoy the challenge of fitting something into exactly 100 words, but a lot of people don't. As kriadydragon says, the term is used more loosely to mean a very brief snippet. (Unless you're miss_porcupine, in which case it's a couple thousand words.)

I don't think anyone would object to receiving 243 words instead of 100.

[sholio]

Well, yeah, but ... if the whole purpose of labeling stories is to give readers an idea what to expect, it kind of seems like mislabeling to me. When I see a story labeled "drabble", I expect that there will be 100 words under the cut ... and, honestly, since drabbles aren't generally my thing unless I'm in a very specific mood, I will usually pass them by. Conversely, if I do click on it, I'm in a drabble-reading mood (I approach them sort of like poetry) and I want to see what the writer's done with those 100 words. If the writer labels it a drabble but there's actually 300 or 800 or 1000 words under the cut, isn't that a little misleading?

[kriadydragon.livejournal.com]

I didn't know what a drabble was until I asked. Before then I thought it was a short story of less than a thousand words.Then I thought it was a story less than five hundred words. I also believed it to be a story without a massive, involved plot - something like a quick, simple scene or character study. So when someone labeled a story as drabble, all I knew was that I was going to be reading something very, very short.

But you have a point. If the term "drabble" was created for one-hundred words stories then that is what it should be used for. But I think that when some people ask for prompts for drabbles, it's not to write one-hundred word stories exactly but to write something short and quick. They just don't know what else to call it. And there's kind of a danger in calling it a one-shot as some might take that as a cue to give out massive plot bunnies.

[sholio]

Ahhh, I see. I guess that part of the problem is I come from old-school SF fandom, where drabbles were pretty well established as a "literary" form before the Internet and were very strictly 100 words long. For me, seeing something called a "drabble" when it's not 100 words is kind of like seeing something called a "haiku" when it actually consists of six rhyming couplets. It's a poem, certainly, but not that kind of poem; I expect one thing and get another, and that throws me off.

I would call a story like the one you're describing a vignette or a flash fiction.

But it may simply be that the meaning of drabble has moved on from its original meaning, leaving this fogey behind. *grin*

Did I make it in time?!

[pegasus-01.livejournal.com]

SGA, John. Exhaustion. ^____^

[wildcat88.livejournal.com]

SGA - John Sheppard's biggest regret.

[karri-kln1671.livejournal.com]

Um...Thoughtcrimes, Brendan, anything.

[katstale.livejournal.com]

If it's not too late, I'd like to suggest a title for a prompt?

Fandom: either SGA or Thoughtcrimes (preferably John or Brendan focus)
Prompt: The Cage

If you've already got your five, no problem; I'm going to post this in my journal either way. Thanks for finding and sharing this--it's a really cool concept! :)