By: Victoria Brun
It’s the classic drabble-writers nightmare: your drabble is perfect—utterly perfect—except it’s 104 words. How can you possibly get it down to the requisite 100 words without ruining it?
Here are nine tips to help you trim it—and maybe even make it stronger while doing so!
1. Cut the adverbs.
Adverbs, particularly those such as “nearly,” “almost,” “slightly,” “usually,” and “very,” add little to your text. In fact, they can weaken your verb even if your intent is to strengthen it. Choose strong verbs that can stand alone rather than weak verbs that need modifiers (e.g., “bolted” instead of “ran quickly.”)
2. Cut the filters.
Filter words are words that screen the world through the character’s perspective. They create narrative distance by putting a layer between the reader and the character’s experience. In addition to cutting words, removing them will make the reader feel closer to the character’s point of view.
- With filter: She saw a dragon outside the donut shop. (8 words)
- Without filter: A dragon stood outside the donut shop. (7 words)
- With filter: She felt cold air brush along her skin. (8 words)
- Without filter: Cold air brushed along her skin. (6 words)
3. Kill infinitives.
In addition to getting rid of adverbs, you can also get rid of infinitives (“to be” verbs). You can replace infinitives with present participles, e.g., change “she began to run” to “she began running.” For even tighter writing, get rid of that modifier and make it past tense: “she ran.”
4. Use active voice.
Active voice is not only shorter than passive voice; it’s also stronger and easier to understand. Put simply, active voice is when the subject (the actor) performs the verb (the action).
- Passive: The axe was thrown into the bushes by the boy. (10 words)
- Active: The boy threw the axe into the bushes. (8 words)
5. Replace two-word phrases with a single word.
We have a lot of two-word phrases in English that can easily be replaced with one stronger word:
- Going up à Ascending, climbing, scaling
- Go back à Return
- Fall down à Fall (People rarely fall up.)
6. Use contractions.
This is an obvious one, but writers immersed in formal business writing all day sometimes forget they can use contractions! Every contraction saves a word.
7. Turn prepositions into modifiers.
Instead of saying “she grabbed the hilt of the sword,” say “she grabbed the sword hilt.” Instead of saying “some of the cows escaped,” say “some cows escaped.” Each time you make this edit, you’ll cut two words. As you can tell by these examples, “of” is one of the common prepositions you can do this with, but there are others (e.g., the “table by the bed” can be the “bedside table.”)
8. Remove implied or redundant words.
There are many cliché sayings that use redundant words, e.g., “she thought to herself.” Unless this is a world with telepathy, the reader will assume all thoughts are internal, so “to herself” does not need stating. Another classic example is “his heart pounded in his chest.” Unless he’s an alien, we know his heart is in his chest, and this does not need to be stated. It can be reduced to “his heart pounded.”
9. Embrace the fragment.
Sentence fragments are allowed in fiction. This isn’t a tip you want to embrace multiple times in a drabble or your writing will come across as choppy. However, a fragment can work especially well at a point of high tension or emotion if you establish a strong voice.
Conclusion
There will, of course, be instances when these techniques aren’t feasible. Maybe your formal character doesn’t use contractions, you need to use passive voice to hide the actor, or you need a modifier to suit the rhythm of the sentence. However, these tips will generally result in tighter, stronger, and shorter writing.
Posted August 20, 2025.
