A drabble is like a sonnet. It has rules. The rules make it an art form. It should have exactly 100 words.
This has been around since the old fandoms, of live journal and newsgroups.
Ficlet. Flashfic. Those are short things.
A drabble is 100 words.
With due respect to OP, while sure, this has been around since Ye Olden Days (and before the internet, iirc), it is only honest and truthful to note that people have also been fucking with/ignoring this definition and calling things that are not perfectly 100 words “drabbles” just as long, as well as the ongoing fight about how to count those 100 words.
I feel like this is important to note.
I looked it up and Drabble comes from publishing contests and science fiction in the 1970s. (Apparently it started with Monty Python, which is fun.)
Part of the fun of a drabble is the challenge of working within 100 words, and cutting down, or finding just the right thing to add. Like other strict word forms, part of the fun is the structure.
If a writer is tagging it a drabble and it’s not, they’re missing their audience and there are so many other words that are available.
I come from a place of drabble enjoyment, where the restrictions are fun, and it is an art form. I think it takes skills worthy of celebrating to write something that is only 100 words.
I like the ease of writers and readers who enjoy the strict 100 words being able to find each other.
The orthodox, traditional drabble is there for those who enjoy it, and it’s fun.
As noted, I am a drabble agnostic and honestly don’t care (and can’t write anything that short to save my life anyways).
My point is that people REFUSING TO CARE that this is The Orthodox Meaning and using it to apply to things that are not strict 100 words is has ALSO BEEN AROUND THAT LONG. I personally have been watching both sides of this fight since the 90s, and it was already an “oh god this again” thing at the time.
And what I do care about are statements that appear to refer to history I was there to see for their authority that represent that history as far more unified than it was.
Trust me, I have been watching fights about whether it matters how people use the word for so long.
Yes, it is a child of pre-internet fandom. So is the fight between drabble purists and the people that persist in not giving a shit about how the drabble purists feel and just use it to mean a very short fic.
I have watched flame wars beyond sanity fought over this, you understand? I watched people get BANNED FROM PRIVATE ARCHIVES and watched FRIENDSHIPS END.
Yes: the word was invented to mean this. It was also more of less immediately used less strictly. There has never been actual functional consensus.
(And people also fought over how to calculate the word count: does an em-dash count as one word or two (many word processors count it as two, fyi!); what about ellipses?? What about digits versus written numbers? (We count all of these as solved issues now bc we tend to just accept what word count the automated word counter tells us – never mind that they disagree!) Do we include prepositions and conjunctions? Some older, pre-word-processor methods of counting words do not! And so on.)
And regardless of one’s position, it is only honest to note this, especially when making an appeal to “old fandoms” as a source of authority. There were screaming matches about it on livejournals and I was there.
Arguing the value of the orthodox definition of them is something I’m happy to leave you to! Acting like there was consensus for more than about the length of a single competition in the 1970s and that people haven’t been fighting about of ever since…. not so much.
amhrancas 