The one fandom question I’ve never seen answered well: what is the difference between a drabble and a one-shot? I feel like it’s a personal opinion – for me, a drabble is anything under 1k words, and a one-shot is anything 1k+.
Thoughts/comments/etc?
Yeah I feel the same. Maybe 1500 words would be my cutoff point though.
Yeah, 1500 is about right, too. I’m mostly going off the “once you hit a triple digit word count, it’s a one-shot,” theory.
So like 10 years ago when I started out fandom in Harry Potter, a drabble had a restricted word count. 100 word drabbles were really common. But it could be 300 or 500 words. But the challenge was the perfect drabble word count. And then a one shot was anything that wasn’t restricted by a word count.
This was common nomenclature in fandoms about 10-15 years ago. A drabble was, specifically, a 100-word story. A 200-word story was often called a double drabble. I’m not sure when the terminology changed; I still think of a drabble as being exactly 100 words.
Ah, yes. A drabble was EXACTLY 100 words. And then suddenly one day I looked up and drabbles were 1000 words. The times, they are a’changing 😉
Gonna die on this fucking hill, but a drabble isn’t even a fandom term, and it has a meaning and a history, and it’s a hundred fucking words. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drabble#History Damn it. Double damn it for 200. Ahem. (I fucking hate Jeopardy, but my mother loves it.)
Other lengths have variable definitions, depending on who you ask. SFFWA for the Nebulas are as follows:
- Short story < 7500
- Novelette 7500 – 17,500
- Novella 17500-40,000
- Novel > 40,000
And, of course, NANO uses 50k for novels.
But unlike those, which were categories put into place for the sake of classifying existing shit, a drabble is a category designed around a word count as a challenge.
Like I said: I WILL DIE ON THIS FUCKING HILL, IT IS ONE HUNDRED FUCKING WORDS AND I FEEL VERY STRONGLY ABOUT THIS.
Obvs.
::cough::
Carry on.
I’m joining Min for the Hill To Die On:
A DRABBLE IS EXACTLY ONE-HUNDRED (100) WORDS.
A DRABBLE IS ONE HUNDRED WORDS. I remember the pain of having to delete one word here and one word there to dial something down from 103 words and then getting…98. And having to scramble to fit it into EXACTLY 100 WORDS.
One. Hundred. Words.
A drabble has 100 words, by definition, from the beginning. It’s like a haiku. The strict word count is the whole point.
Ficlet is a lovely word for very short stories, and I hope more people would use it.
This hill is getting crowded; I brought some folding chairs for us Fandom Olds.
Thank you. I will take a folding chair. 100 WORDS, THAT IS THE DEFINITION. IT HAS BEEN SO FOREVER, AND WILL BE SO FOREVER. You don’t get to call something a ‘haiku’ just because it’s short and about nature and doesn’t rhyme, you don’t get to call a ficlet a drabble just because it’s small!
The drabble wars!! What a blast from the past. I love the word ficlet, too 😀
I remember having this discussion (sometimes wank) on LJ. I enjoyed the challenge of the 100 word limit, but people could get so rude and mean when someone mislabelled their fic as a drabble. Many people just saw them as teeny fics.
But remember drabble challenge comms? There would be a list of one word prompts, and you’d pick a fandom/character/ship and then write a drabble for each prompt.
Oh! And something I saw when I was in SPN fandom was a short story composed of a series of linked dabbles. Like, each scene would be a drabble. Or people would write a drabble and then write a bunch of drabble sequels.
Aw, I miss drabbles now.
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