Our February 24th meeting centered around a presentation by Don Money covering strategies for writing a drabble.
What’s a drabble, you ask? It’s a concise work of fiction — a type of microfiction, to be exact — exactly 100 words in length, excluding the title.
Drabbles first gained popularity among science fiction and fantasy writers. This literary form has now expanded to include most other genres.
To create a compelling narrative in what amounts to not much more than a dozen or so sentences, every word must matter. But it’s about more than brevity; a successful drabble conveys a sense of completeness. It tells a story: beginning, a middle, and end.
Here are some notes from the meeting that can help you develop your Drabble.
Determine the core idea for your story. A drabble needs to follow a single plot line in order to process all the way through the sequence. There’s no room for a side quest in 100 words.
Type with Word Count on and keep the first draft under 150 words. That’s an excess of up to 50 words, but you can pare down the word count as you revise. Cut anything that doesn’t move the story along.
The story premise (beginning sequence) needs to be established quickly with just enough few words to hook your reader.
The middle sequence establishes the heart of the story. This is where you deliver the struggle (or consequence) the character is up against.
The end sequence needs to have a punch. It must wow the reader. The temptation is to leave the reader with a cliffhanger, but if you do that, you must give the reader enough of the story to feel like they know definitively how it all ends.
A loose guideline to follow: 25 word beginning, 50 word middle, 25 word ending.
The story needs to deliver some type of action to have impact. Something needs to happen in those 100 words. The character needs to experience some kind of change between the start and the finish.
Limit your number of characters. Stick with one protagonist and one antagonist / problem.
As with all writing, show don’t tell.
Are you ready to give it a try? Here’s a page featuring some Drabble examples written by WCCW members. We encourage you to write your own drabble and bring it to our next meeting, March 24.
