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The What Why and How of Drabbles
This post was brought over from the original at our LJ sister community with small modifications and updates:
This is to clarify the content ratings system used in![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
dw100 chosen because it seems to work well over in quickficsupport at LJ.
If your story contains anything that could be disturbing or triggering, use a cut tag and warnings. Examples of such content include but are not limited to graphic violence, graphic sex, and character death. Use your judgment when deciding whether your story has anything that should be warned about. Put the warnings outside the cut and the story inside it.
You can include MPAA-style ratings if you want (i.e. movie ratings, like G, PG, NC-17, etc.), but those can be ambiguous, so the warnings are the important part.
The only other thing that should be cut is spoilers. If your story references any plot points from the newest Doctor Who season, put it behind a cut and mark it with something like 'spoilers for Name Of Episode'.
Drabbles, what, why and how (in more than 100 words):
What is a drabble?
A drabble is a story that is exactly one hundred words long. Stories that are somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred words are not drabbles; they're vignettes, ficlets, or short-short stories. A drabble is not just an excuse to write a quickie -- it's also an exercise in editing and strengthening your writing.
Why write drabbles?
An idea that just looks vaguely clever in a two-hundred-word story will hit like a ton of bricks in one hundred words, simply because it takes less time to read. This is the essence of strong writing. The fewer words you use to express the idea, the less time it will take the reader to read it, and the more impact the story will have.
You've probably had the experience of reading a story where the author kept using the exact same sentence structure over and over. Drabbles force you to think about different wordings in order to keep your word count low. The result will be that when you write longer stories, your brain will be better at keeping things interesting and varied. You will have given yourself experience with many different ways of constructing sentences.
In addition, writing to a strict format requirement is good practice for any writer. Yes, artistic freedom is important -- but so is artistic discipline. Someday you might want to sell a piece of writing, send a letter to the editor of a magazine, or write an important essay for school. Knowing how to make your idea fit someone else's arbitrary format is a very useful skill.
What shouldn't be posted in a drabble community?
Anything longer than one hundred words doesn't really belong here. Stories shorter than one hundred words are debatable -- but cutting down a longer story is harder and more in the spirit of the challenge than adding words to a shorter story. To put it another way, if you've written ninety-five words, you might as well strategically slip in five more. Try to keep your stories to one hundred words exactly, and if you must vary from that, make it shorter instead of longer.
Longer ficlets belong in general fanfic communities. Drabbles often get lost in archives and communities of longer stories, just because many readers don't think a story that short can be interesting. If you've written something that's longer than a hundred words and you really don't feel that it can be cut down, post it todwfiction (even if it was inspired by a dw100 challenge word). Let the drabbles have their moment in the sun. ;)
So how do I write exactly 100 words?
First you need to be able to count them. ;) Don't worry, it doesn't have to be done manually. Most big word processor programs have a word count feature; if you can't find it, just pop 'word count' into the help search function and see what comes up.
For example, if you're using MS Word or OpenOffice Writer: open your document, click on File/Properties and choose the tab marked 'Statistics' in the window that comes up. It'll tell you how many words you've written. (Do this before you add things like title, author's notes, and other extras -- you want to count only the words in the body of the story.)
If you're using a plain-text editor like WordPad or Notepad, it probably won't count the words for you. In that case, try a browser-based word counter. All you have to do is copy and paste your text into the box and hit the button. Here are a few:
http://www.wordcounter.com
http://www.tinman.org/sue/gofish/WordCount.html
http://rainbow.arch.scriptmania.com/tools/word_counter.html
Keep in mind that some counters don't count small common words (it, and, the, a, I and so on). You can write a test sentence that includes some of these words to find out if your program counts them. For example, if you write "I want to give you a hug" and the counter gives you a count of only three or four words, you know it's ignoring something.
When you write your first draft, it'll probably be more than a hundred words. (I find that my own usually start out being around a hundred and thirty.) Be ruthless in deciding which words really need to be in the story in order to get the point across.
Finally, remember that any story can benefit from a spellcheck, and beta-reading to catch stuff that a spellchecker can't.
Drabbles are more than just stories -- they are writing practice, a learning experience, and a game with challenges and rules. If you don't understand the reasoning, or if you doubt the power of a hundred words, remember what the Doctor can do with just six.
This is to clarify the content ratings system used in
dw100 chosen because it seems to work well over in quickficsupport at LJ. If your story contains anything that could be disturbing or triggering, use a cut tag and warnings. Examples of such content include but are not limited to graphic violence, graphic sex, and character death. Use your judgment when deciding whether your story has anything that should be warned about. Put the warnings outside the cut and the story inside it.
You can include MPAA-style ratings if you want (i.e. movie ratings, like G, PG, NC-17, etc.), but those can be ambiguous, so the warnings are the important part.
The only other thing that should be cut is spoilers. If your story references any plot points from the newest Doctor Who season, put it behind a cut and mark it with something like 'spoilers for Name Of Episode'.
Drabbles, what, why and how (in more than 100 words):
What is a drabble?
A drabble is a story that is exactly one hundred words long. Stories that are somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred words are not drabbles; they're vignettes, ficlets, or short-short stories. A drabble is not just an excuse to write a quickie -- it's also an exercise in editing and strengthening your writing.
Why write drabbles?
An idea that just looks vaguely clever in a two-hundred-word story will hit like a ton of bricks in one hundred words, simply because it takes less time to read. This is the essence of strong writing. The fewer words you use to express the idea, the less time it will take the reader to read it, and the more impact the story will have.
You've probably had the experience of reading a story where the author kept using the exact same sentence structure over and over. Drabbles force you to think about different wordings in order to keep your word count low. The result will be that when you write longer stories, your brain will be better at keeping things interesting and varied. You will have given yourself experience with many different ways of constructing sentences.
In addition, writing to a strict format requirement is good practice for any writer. Yes, artistic freedom is important -- but so is artistic discipline. Someday you might want to sell a piece of writing, send a letter to the editor of a magazine, or write an important essay for school. Knowing how to make your idea fit someone else's arbitrary format is a very useful skill.
What shouldn't be posted in a drabble community?
Anything longer than one hundred words doesn't really belong here. Stories shorter than one hundred words are debatable -- but cutting down a longer story is harder and more in the spirit of the challenge than adding words to a shorter story. To put it another way, if you've written ninety-five words, you might as well strategically slip in five more. Try to keep your stories to one hundred words exactly, and if you must vary from that, make it shorter instead of longer.
Longer ficlets belong in general fanfic communities. Drabbles often get lost in archives and communities of longer stories, just because many readers don't think a story that short can be interesting. If you've written something that's longer than a hundred words and you really don't feel that it can be cut down, post it to
dwfiction (even if it was inspired by a dw100 challenge word). Let the drabbles have their moment in the sun. ;)So how do I write exactly 100 words?
First you need to be able to count them. ;) Don't worry, it doesn't have to be done manually. Most big word processor programs have a word count feature; if you can't find it, just pop 'word count' into the help search function and see what comes up.
For example, if you're using MS Word or OpenOffice Writer: open your document, click on File/Properties and choose the tab marked 'Statistics' in the window that comes up. It'll tell you how many words you've written. (Do this before you add things like title, author's notes, and other extras -- you want to count only the words in the body of the story.)
If you're using a plain-text editor like WordPad or Notepad, it probably won't count the words for you. In that case, try a browser-based word counter. All you have to do is copy and paste your text into the box and hit the button. Here are a few:
http://www.wordcounter.com
http://www.tinman.org/sue/gofish/WordCount.html
http://rainbow.arch.scriptmania.com/tools/word_counter.html
Keep in mind that some counters don't count small common words (it, and, the, a, I and so on). You can write a test sentence that includes some of these words to find out if your program counts them. For example, if you write "I want to give you a hug" and the counter gives you a count of only three or four words, you know it's ignoring something.
When you write your first draft, it'll probably be more than a hundred words. (I find that my own usually start out being around a hundred and thirty.) Be ruthless in deciding which words really need to be in the story in order to get the point across.
Finally, remember that any story can benefit from a spellcheck, and beta-reading to catch stuff that a spellchecker can't.
Drabbles are more than just stories -- they are writing practice, a learning experience, and a game with challenges and rules. If you don't understand the reasoning, or if you doubt the power of a hundred words, remember what the Doctor can do with just six.