Reay Jespersen

Years back, I heard about a writing format that was an entire story contained within 100 words or less. The format began, the bit of research I did told me, when writer Neil Gaiman (whose work I’m enjoying more and more - check out his site, he has a link to a free version of his novel American Gods) had written a story on a Christmas card, which happened to be in the range of 100 words in length.

Always interested in trying out a new writing format (which was, along with the encouragement of Alex, what got me into writing screenplays), I started to play around with the sub-100 word style, which I found quite interesting. It tended to require overshooting the needed word total and then cutting back some here and using a different word to encapsulate a phrase there. I also found that while the pieces I was writing could technically be called stories, they more often tended to be pieces of stories, which in order to have their full impact, required the reader to extrapolate the before and after of the events within the story. All in all, a very interesting discipline.

Cut to a few weeks back, when I was revisiting the ol’ sub-100 word formats, and was curious if what I had written to that point could, in fact, be called stories in the real sense of the word (as opposed to said pieces). In doing a quick hit of research, I found that with the advent of Wikipedia came a more specific definition of the format I was working with.

It turns out that the format is called “Drabble”, and whereas I’d understood it to be a story of 100 words or less, it’s actually intended to be 100 words precisely; an even more rigid form than I’d previously been working with.

And so my dabbling with drabble began. I intend on going back to my previously sub-100 word stories and bringing them up to snuff, but for the time being, prefer working on new material. This coincides nicely with the 100 words for 100 days that I’d previously mentioned: write at least a drabble’s worth of material daily. Nice!

In the same spirit as Haiku - Gesundheit!, I finally decided that these would serve me far better seeing the light of day and showing another angle to my writing than they would squirrelled away and never shown publically other than in would-be print publication.

As with all my writing, I encourage feedback, be it good, bad or ugly.

Onward…