Blogging reflections | Challenges | Creative writing 101

A Drabble Challenge for Authors

JF Danskin’s weekly update, #10

Photo by Marcel Eberle on Unsplash

I am coming up to the 6-month mark on Medium. I’ll write a separate story about that soon, so I won’t say too much more about it here.

Instead — time for a challenge.

There are various creative writing challenges on Medium. I listed a few of them just last week in this piece. While a 50-word story seems to be a pretty popular format, I haven’t seen nearly so many people recommending the 100-word story, also known as the drabble.

So I thought I’d throw it out there!

A drabble is:

• Short enough to be written and edited in one sitting.
• Long enough to have the three main parts of story structure: beginning, middle and end.
• At the lower end of flash fiction (which typically ranges up to 1000 or 1500 words) in terms of length.

All in all, while things like a 10-word story can be a load of fun, to me a drabble is pretty much the lowest length of story where I could find things satisfying — as both a reader and a writer! Here’s a nice example by Dino Mapa.