Drabble
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
- For the comic strip, see Drabble (comic).
A Drabble is an extremely short work of fiction with exactly one hundred words, although the term is often misused to indicate a short story of less than 1000 words. The purpose of the drabble is brevity and to test author's ability to express interesting and meaningful ideas in an extremely confined space.
In drabble contests participants are given a theme and a certain amount of time to write a drabble. Drabble contests and drabbles in general are popular in science fiction fandoms and in fan fiction. The concept is said to have originated in UK Science Fiction fandom in the 1980s, the 100-word format was established by the Birmingham University SF Society.
The language greatly affects the ease of writing a drabble. For example, the Finnish two-word sentence "Heittäytyisinköhän seikkailuun?" would translate into English as "What if I should throw myself into an adventure?", a sentence of nine words. This density of meaning makes Finnish a much easier language in which to write a drabble than English. Even easier languages would be those that exhibit extreme polysynthesis, such as Cherokee, where an entire English sentence can often be expressed in a single word.
The word drabble comes from the 1971 Monty Python's Big Red Book. It was a word game where the first participant to write a novel wins. In order to make the game possible in the real world, the science fiction fandom agreed that 100 words will suffice.
Drabble is also sometimes used colloquially to refer to any short piece of literature, usually fan fiction, where brevity is the outstanding feature. Some stories, called "drabbles" by their authors or readers, total as many as 1,000 words in length. However, such a story might more accurately be termed "flashfic", "shortfic," or "ficlet"
[edit] Related concepts
Microfiction is a story in 250 words[citation needed] or less, and nanofiction is a story with a maximum of 55 words[citation needed].
[edit] 100 Words isn't much
For a comparison, the above section, starting with "A drabble" and ending with "or 'ficlet' ", contains just under 300 words. The last two paragraphs contain precisely 100 words.
[edit] External links
- Article on Drabbles and their origin
- The Drabble Project One version of "How It All Began"
- Instant Drabble Generator
- 100 Words Collaborative weblog where a topic is posted every weekday for the writers to use to compose a 100 word story.
- 100 Word Stories Podcast Podcast with at least one new 100 word story every day. Hosts a Weekly Challenge on Saturdays inviting writers to compose and record their own 100 word stories.
