(A side note before we begin: certain close acquaintances of mine may feel this rant is directed at them, to which I plead not guilty. I have been working on this particular essay for quite some time, so although the timing may seem suspicious to some, I assure you it in coincidental. Thank you.)

Doctor Merlin would like to share her latest masterpiece with all of you, a haiku on the subject of frogs:

The frog waits in the shallow pond
Ribbit ribbit ribbit
The fly hovers above, anxious.
There is a splash.

Now, many of you are scratching your heads. (The rest probably just skimmed with your "Ah, poetry" filters engaged. Trust me, you missed nothing.) "Doctor Merlin," you say. "This is not a haiku. We learned in classes long ago that a haiku has three lines and specific syllable structure. What you wrote was a short poem that doesn't rhyme." And Doctor Merlin responds that this is the reason she wants to punch small animals every time she sees a 500 word story called "a drabble."

A drabble is an extremely short story told in precisely 100 words. Not 99 words. Not 101 words. Certainly not approaching 1000 words. By definition, a drabble is precisely 100 words, and that's it. Live it, learn it, love it, or know that Doctor Merlin will mock you by name in public places. There may be charades involved, and also puppets.

The drabble is a specific art form, one which teaches the aspiring writer --- as well as the well-traveled author --- the perspicacity of brevity. Stories are winnowed down to their essences, no room spared for flowery prose or crutch phrases. The proper words must be chosen because no other words can be spared, and when applied correctly, true elegance is achieved.  Economy of language is key.

Shorter: you learn to do more with less.

Some of you are still scratching your heads. "But Doctor Merlin," you say again. "You like drabbles, and yet your reputation for long-winded explanations of nothing much are frankly legendary." (You may not use the word "legendary." You may substitute "annoying and frequent," or similar.) To which Doctor Merlin replies sadly, "Shut up, kid. You bother me."

Drabbles are fun. Drabbles tell little bite-sized pieces of story, set up microuniverses, reset your brain about particular characters, can contain drama or laughter or both, and all in a tiny package you can read in less time than it takes to run to the bathroom. Drabbles are the Hershey's Kisses of fiction when they're done right, and are at least M&M's when they're done less right. (Done wrong, they're like eating a raw sardine. It's bad, but it's over quickly.)

Fanfiction is lucky to have the drabble format so readily available. Drabbles are uniquely suitable for fanfic. Backstories are already written. Setting is already created. Everything you'd need to know about the characters appearing in the story, you probably already know and if you don't, you're probably new to this. Drabbles rely on expectation: How would this character react to an event, and how does s/he react instead? What is the character's heart's desire, and how does it differ from what s/he gets? Drabbles have to take into account what the audience already knows (see "You Mean Everyone Brought Potato Salad?") and with fanfiction, it's much easier to know what your audience does and does not know.

As an example, one could write a drabble about Lucy, an orphan girl who's spent her whole life trying to find a stable home, and show how the birth of her first child completes her family. However, there wouldn't be sufficient time (probably --- it'd be difficult) to both give the audience a deep enough backstory on the character to evoke a connection between Lucy and the readers and still tell the story of her child's birth. Unless handled well, the readers would be bored and uninterested in the character and her outcome. Now, if one were to tell the same story, but substitute Harry Potter as he witnesses the birth of his firstborn, one does not have to go into detail about the deaths of his parents or how he failed to find a family in the Dursleys or how he's envied the Weasleys for years even as he's been taken into their home. All of that is already known by the readers before they even open the file. The hundred words can be spent instead on how he feels, and who he sees when he holds his child for the first time. For funsies, the last line can be about how Draco unexpectedly enjoyed his magical pregnancy, except for the cravings for roasted skrewts.

(Okay, the skrewts are optional.)

Fanfiction allows drabble to flourish in places where original fiction falls down, and this is why we write so many.

Drabbles are also good for letting out the crazy ideas writers just don't have time to explore in-depth: the evil twin who kills the character and takes his/her place for the rest of hisher life; cracked-out meetings among time-travelers; improbable romances; the funniest or scariest parts of clear story-dice plots such as "characters in a box" or "aliens made them do it"; single images of happiness for a couple. Each of these allows the writer to get to "the good parts" and then get out before the stories get bogged down in angst or schmoop. (Unless of course the point is the angst and/or schmoop. Everyone has their own thing.) Drabbles are by no means free from badfic, but the format denies excess. Even the most magically gifted, violet-eyed, flame-tressed Mary Sue only gets one hundred words.

It's kind of nice.

But how do you go about it? Like any other writing process, it takes practice to learn to write effective drabbles. The good news is, at one hundred words apiece, no one will lose a lot of sleep on each trial run.

Personally, Doctor Merlin likes to start with an image or an idea. As a rule, drabbles are not suited to multiple plotlines, so think of them as you would the concept of a paragraph back in school: pick one idea to explain. For today's exercise, we will pick the image of the goddess Artemis with her maidens. Greek mythology is known pretty well among people in the U.S. who write, so we won't have to explain as much about the character as we might with an entirely original character.

The story flows from the desired image or idea, and often ends with it:

Setting aside any literary pretensions, this is a decent rough draft. MS Word has a handy wordcount feature (Alt+T+W) which tells me the story clocks in at 102 words. Many drabbles come in over the mark; some writers post them as is, and choose either to use the word "drabble" to encompass them, with or without an explanation that it's an approximate count, or else just call it a ficlet / ficletini. This drabble, in order to become an actual drabble, requires some editing. The editing process for drabbles can take easily as long as the writing, if not longer. The trick is to know what can be cut and what should not.

Let's edit:

A number of edits took place between the first and second draft. The word count was whittled down to exactly 100, the helper "and"s were removed for more stable punctuation, some repetition was removed, and higher-quality words were substituted to describe the scene better. Also, a little sacrilege was added at the end, because the subject matter called for it. The story can be done now, or it can be edited further, but the imagery evoked by the drabble matches my intended subject, so I'm calling it finished for the purpose of illustration.

Drabbles can be made or broken in the editing process, just like any other story. It is one thing to get the words onto the paper or screen, and quite another to go back over each word to decide if that is the one word which must be used, or if another would work better. There is a school of thought that says every word of every work of fiction or non-fiction must serve the plot, evoke character, or else be employed for the sake of setting or mood. When writing drabbles, this rule must be applied rigorously or the drabble falls apart. Figure out what's necessary, and there's no room for the rest anyway. If you find that you have leftover words to spend, tell more story.

That's it. There's no magic formula to drabbles. Like any other story format, time and effort are required, patience to get it right, and willingness to practice to do better next time. The difference is that drabbles don't take as long to write and so should be easier to practice. Just remember the word count, and keep in mind that it's a firm word count, not an approximate one, regardless of what you may have seen on 'fic communities.

Or, for her next trick, Doctor Merlin could show you her twenty-line sonnet.

Further Reading: When Size Matters: Story Terminology as Determined by Word Count by Rana Eros