by popular demand: drabble debate

[wisdomeagle]

In the form of a dialogue between self (Ari) and self's father (Ari's dad)

Ari: In fandom, we have a thing. It's a drabble. It's a fic of 100 words.
Dad: Plus or minus...?
Ari: Zero. A drabble is 100 words.
Dad: Why?
Ari: Because that is how we-the-fandom define it.
Dad: But that's too confining.
Ari: You're going to talk about the haiku now, aren't you?
Dad: The haiku! [long digression about how the haiku is not really defined by its syllable count, but by the pattern of lines and the nature themes that aren't really nature themes, etc, etc.]
Ari: But there is no nature of the drabble. There are no stipulations about themes or structure or content matter. The only thing that defines a drabble is the wordcount, and it is 100 words.
Dad: But that's too limiting. You might be forced to eliminate words that you really need, compromising the artistic integrity of the thing that you have written to make it conform to the totally arbitrary limits of the thing called drabble.
Ari: My finding, when I edit my drabbles, is that I pare away unnecessary words, and am forced to consider every word I've chosen and whether it's essential, whether artistically or narratively. It's so rare as to be impossible to write 104 perfect words your first time around. AND if you discover you have, you post it anyhow, but you don't call it a drabble, because it is not!
Dad: [haiku digression]
Ari: [sonnet digression]
Dad+Ari: [iambic pentameter digression]
Dad [back on topic]: But wordcount, unlike the rhythms of iambic pentameter, isn't, well, rhythmic. It doesn't have to do with the sound, etc. And a word is language-dependent and totally arbitrary, etc. Wordcount is not an accurate measure of how much information is contained in a given passage. [totally boring digression about data compression]
Ari: But literature is arbitrary and language-dependent!

And that's about where the discussion left of. For those of you who were curious.

Comments

[mari4212.livejournal.com]

*hugs you.* *worships both you and your father for being literature geeks.*

[wisdomeagle]

*hugs* Self is lit geek. Dad is primarily computer science geek with various multi-colored interests in other areas. Tis fun yay. :)

[elementalv.livejournal.com]

That was a beautiful conversation. I'm still chuckling over it. And! I'm being very good and not flying to the defense of drabbles (which I love to write).

[wisdomeagle]

*g*

[rosewildeirish.livejournal.com]

But I don't understand. All the time I see info about the 352 word, the 486 word, the 734 word drabble on my flist.

*shakes head*

WHY doesn't fandom understand that 101 words, or 99 words =/= drabble?

[gvambat.livejournal.com]

I think there's a small segment of the fannish population that calls any short fic a drabble...it's annoying.

[wisdomeagle]

This annoys me as well.

[zulu]

That was a lovely conversation. I have that type with my mom all the time; they're excellent. And there's a beauty to restricting yourself just as much as there is to going all out--a lot of a drabble's power, at least, for me-as-author, is what I can accomplish within the form. Anyone can violate the form; only people who really understand editing can write powerful drabbles. [/writing snob]

[wisdomeagle]

*agrees yay!*

[justhuman.livejournal.com]

Actually, a drabble = 100 words was defined outside of fandom and had something to do with some fo the folks involved in Monty Python -- mpoetess dug up the history at some point last year.

[data-warrior.livejournal.com]

The Wiki points to Monty Python's Big Red Book for the word origin but to the Birmingham University SF Society for the format.

[mpoetess.livejournal.com]

Yup, that's what I found too, back when. The word came from Python as a joke phrase, but was made into an actual literature form by the BU SF folks.

[wisdomeagle]

Thanks for the info. :)

[mazi.livejournal.com]

wow... fathers can be intelligent, too? O_o

*feels jipped*

[wisdomeagle]

Aww. It's true yay!

[hermionesviolin.livejournal.com]

So, I read this last night and have been thinking about it, particularly about your father's rebuttal to the sonnet argument (since I usually bring up sonnets in debates about drabbles) and have decided that what your father's argument proves [if one does buy his argument] is that it is a drabble is a stupid idea. But then people should just not use the term. If you think it's an arbitrary stupid term, just call your story a "short fic" or a "ficlet" or whatever.

I, personally, think there's something to be said for forcing something into a specific small word count (because it is a low wordcount, you're making every word count, being very evocative, etc,), and it's a hell of a lot easier than trying to do meter, but if one is going to accept the argument that word count is an arbitrary measure detrimental to artistic integrity . . .

Though on continued thinking about this, while one can argue that meter has artistic integrity because you're mimicking certain rhythms of speech, pentameter means you're only gonna have 10 syllables, and sonnets are limited to 14 lines, so you pretty much have a word limit, it's just slightly more flexible than a drabble's word count -- but you can't tell a 2000 word story in sonnet form (unless you do a sonnet series, and gee, people do in fact do drabble series). Also: meter is not "an accurate measure of how much information is contained in a given passage" either; it just gives you slightly more information about the content of the passage than a wordcount does.

"You might be forced to eliminate words that you really need, compromising the artistic integrity of the thing that you have written to make it conform to the totally arbitrary limits of the thing called drabble." People frequently have to do that to conform to sonnets (and omg, trying to do a villanelle . . . though admittedly its constraints are very content-relevant).

[wisdomeagle]

have decided that what your father's argument proves [if one does buy his argument] is that it is a drabble is a stupid idea. But then people should just not use the term. If you think it's an arbitrary stupid term, just call your story a "short fic" or a "ficlet" or whatever.

Which is essentially what my father was saying. His proposed solution was essentially to create a new category (which he called a drabblish) that was 100 ± 5 words, of which of course the drabble proper was a subset. Since my dad doesn't post fic, or even write it, his perspective was not that of someone who posts 567 word fic and calls it "a little drabble," but was indeed debating the existence of the form itself as, um, worthy of being written?

I, personally, think there's something to be said for forcing something into a specific small word count (because it is a low wordcount, you're making every word count, being very evocative, etc,)

And yeah, I basically agree. My position is that a drabble is poetic -- not a poem, per se, but shares with poetry certain characteristics, which you listed above.

I think what's really coming through in my father's and my debate is that my dad is a computer scientist and I'm not, and that I do a lot more writing than my dad does. I think my sense of the drabble is that ideally, you manage to contain within the 100 words a *lot* of information -- the better the drabble, the more information (in the form of connotation, allusion, whatever) you've pressed into that wordcount. That's exploiting the form to its fullest extent.

Neither my dad nor I is very familiar with the sonnet -- it took us a minute to remember how many lines it was and what iambic pentameter meant -- so our discussion of that was pretty cursory. What we did touch on is that in writing a sonnet (or more generally, I guess, writing iambic pentameter), you can have an occasional glitch, a syllable with the wrong stress, and the thing will still be recognizably itself -- but with a drabble, the only identifying characteristic is its wordcount, so if that's wrong, well, it's simply not a drabble!

But I think you and I pretty much agree on this.

Here via metafandom

[kyuuketsukirui.livejournal.com]

I think my sense of the drabble is that ideally, you manage to contain within the 100 words a *lot* of information -- the better the drabble, the more information (in the form of connotation, allusion, whatever) you've pressed into that wordcount. That's exploiting the form to its fullest extent.

Yes, exactly. That's what makes a good drabble. Or even a good short fic. I'm good at short stuff, both drabbles and other shorts. I just wrote a ~500 word fic the other day and had two or three commenters say how much they admired my ability to convey so much in so few words. That's really the highest compliment to me, because that's exactly what I'm going for when I write short fic. I like paring away stuff and rewriting to just get the essense of it.

[janedavitt.livejournal.com]

That was a fun conversation to listen to!

I'm a rabid 'drabbles = 100 words' writer and I've written getting on for 100 of them.

I've had some stories that wouldn't cut down and I've shrugged and made them into 1,000 word fics but not many. When you're writing drabbles you don't latch onto an epic plot; you choose an idea that's already roughly drabble-sized and then you pare away, whittle it down, polish it up.

There's an internal rhythm to a drabble, I've found, a measured beat ending on a drum roll or a hanging pause.

I can -- sometimes -- tell without counting if someone's drabble is over or under. It's subtle, but there's a sense of wrongness there.

And sometimes I count and it's smack on a hundred and there you go...

I love drabbles.

[wisdomeagle]

*g*

I've gotten much better at drabbling... when I started, I'd have those epic plots and try to drabble them -- not so good, that. I've gotten much better at figuring out which ideas really are drabble-sized. And lo, I love drabbling. :)

Thanks for stopping by!

[estepheia.livejournal.com]

Bwaaahaaaa. This is great!!!

belatedly here via metafandom

[profshallowness.livejournal.com]

I'm memorising this!