Blogging reflections | Challenges | Creative writing 101

A Drabble Challenge for Authors

JF Danskin’s weekly update, #10

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.

So, that’s my challenge. Write a drabble. And if you can use one of my writing prompts to do it, so much the better!

Tagging a few fiction specialists: Sieran Lane, Jann Christoph von der Pütten, Cathylouise, Ben Ulansey, Ira Robinson, Jonathon Sawyer, Linden Schneider, Sam W., Kathy K, Novus Grey, Bradan Writes Stories, Eko BP, David Perlmutter… and anyone who I forgot is equally welcome 😄.

One more thing — wanna see an example drabble that I wrote myself this week? Scroll down — it’s the last story on the list below.

My week in articles

On to a quick roundup of what I published this week, like I usually share at the weekend. First was the list of challenges that I mentioned at the start of this article:

My writing prompts were food-themed this week. As a heads up, I am soon going to be putting together a list of all my prompts so far, and I’ll include links to stories that used one of the prompts. So if you have written a response, let me know either via a tag, or a private note!

This week I decided to drop 2 chapters of ‘Sorcerer’, and I might continue to do two per week from this point on. I’ve already written as far as chapter 110, after all 😆. In chapter 15, Alcar fights for his life and that of his poisoned companions. In chapter 16, he has no choice but to hurry off alone to rescue his master.

Something different next; the publication Choose Your Own Adventure — Collaboration is about writing stories together. The clue is in the name! I therefore decided to take a brief time out from my own story arc there and add to one begun by Jonathon Sawyer. Check it out!

I’ve signed on as an editor at The Community Building Movement, a new general-interest publication. The next story explains more about the context:

Next up, my usual weekly ‘craft’ piece. This one returned to a favorite author of mine, Raymond Carver. No matter how many times I read the man’s words, I learn something new. I hope you do as well:

And finally, here’s the drabble that I mentioned earlier. Fiction, but heavily based on childhood experience. I hope you enjoy, and that it provides a good example that 100 words is enough to do a bit of storytelling…

That’s all from me this week! After getting ‘back in the saddle’ last time, I am rapidly getting back to a better routine, and looking forward to many more weeks of writing.

Have a good weekend, and happy reading. And I hope you do have a try at writing a drabble! 😎