Drabble

Drabble is also the title of a comic strip by Kevin Fagan

A Drabble is an extremely short work of fiction with exactly one hundred words (although some have extended this to mean 'short story of less than 500 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, 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"

Related concepts

Microfiction is a story in 250 words or less, and nanofiction is a story with a maximum of 55 words.

100 Words isn't much

For a comparison, the above section, stating with "A drabble" and ending with "or 'ficlet' ", contains just under 300 words.

External links

[Article on Drabbles and their origin]
[The Drabble Project] One version of "How It All Began"
[Instant Drabble Generator]

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