by: Victoria Brun

Why should you write a 100-word story? Because—no matter what length you normally write—it’s going to give your writing a turbo boost.

No, really.

Drabbles—or 100-word stories—are not going to get you rich. Even at the SFWA-pro rate (ahem, which 100-Foot Crow pays) you’ll max out at a rather unimpressive $8.00 paycheck. And given historic trends, a 100-word story probably won’t win you a Hugo or put you on the Nebula ballot no matter how brilliant it is.

Yet the humble drabble is not something to be dismissed. It’s small but mighty. And giving it a little practice just might improve how you write fiction—and beyond.

That’s a lofty claim, so let me give you five ways drabbles can boost your writing toolbox.

1. Learn the art of brevity.

When asking 100-Foot Crow contributors the benefits of writing 100-word stories, most of them focused on how it taught them to be efficient with their words—enabling them to tell a larger story through subtlety instead of handing the reader every detail.

By forcing you to think about each word, the drabble will help you find the best one to capture a larger idea. However, it goes far beyond wordsmithing. It’s about giving readers the most bang for their buck—which is why our contributors focused on how this efficiency helped them improve their worldbuilding. By showing small details, you can imply a full and vibrant world that is much more enjoyable to read about than paragraphs (or pages) describing the setting.

“Brevity is an art. Writing short short fiction really makes you hone in on using the right words, the best words to bring across the story you want to tell.” – Kai Delmas

“Writing drabbles has forced me to become more efficient and nuanced at worldbuilding. There can be no long-winded explanations in a 100-word story!” –  Kimberly Ann Smiley

“Practice worldbuilding through implication, not info dumps.” –  Robin Rose Graves

2. Practice finishing things!

One notorious problem for novice writers of long-form fiction is that they often don’t finish them. They have a dozen unfinished novels sitting in their drawer and are starting on a new one. This can become a habit—and it’s a terrible habit.

However, you can help reverse this pattern by writing drabbles and committing to finishing them. Finishing a 100-word story is a much easier lift than finishing that 80,000-word novel, but it will help arm you with the skills to do so.

While drabbles are obviously different from much longer works, there are enough similarities to make them good practice of working a story through from idea to a finished, polished product. Moreover, creating a habit of finishing stories will set you up for success.

3. Find the heart of a story.

As hinted at above, despite their small word count, drabbles still have all the essential elements of a story: character, setting, conflict, plot, theme, and resolution. And they have room for little else.

By forcing you to edit away all those extraneous details to stay at the 100-word limit, the drabble will force you to think about what your story really needs. What is your story really about?

In doing so, you will identify the heart of your story—that “so what?” idea or that vital point that you want to resonate with the reader. Being able to recognize your story’s core will help you write and edit your longer works to be more impactful and not bogged down by threads that don’t truly support it.

In larger stories—whether a 1,000-word flash piece or 100,000-word novel—you’ll have space for more elements: additional characters, settings, conflicts, themes, and side-quests. However, to have the greatest impact, all these elements should support the central idea of your story. Hence, being able to identify your story’s core is a critical skill—and one the drabble forces you to learn.

4. Fine-tune your line editing.

Drabbles are a great exercise in line editing, because that 100-word decree dictates that you agonize over every single word. Drabbles force you to notice, and question, writing habits that you’ve previously ignored, such as your personal crutch words or your use of adverbs.

Editing these stories will also make you realize that some so-called meaningless words are not always meaningless. “Very” or “actually,” for example, often add nothing, but there are times when these words have a large impact on the sentence (particularly in dialogue). Realizing when this happens can make you use these words more strategically and powerfully—not simply ax them from your vocabulary.

“Writing a 100-word story is a great exercise for any writer trying to hone their craft. It forces you to cut any non-essential words (which often turn out to be many more than you’d think) and pick the words—especially verbs—that pack the most punch.” – Greg Schwartz

5. Experiment with new ideas.

Because they’re short, you can write many drabbles in little time. Obviously, this is great practice (especially for finishing things), but beyond general practice, it’s also an opportunity to test new ideas without committing a lot of time to them.

Explore writing in a different tense or point of view than you usually write. Try a new poetic style, or a fresh clunky style. Write something that you think won’t work. Unleash your creativity. You’ll learn from everything you write, even if it’s not publishable.

Also, while you may think of the word count limit as a shackle on your creativity, constraints such as these can actually breed creativity and innovation by forcing you to think in new ways. It’s a phenomena known as creative limitation.

While there is a lot to be gained in the economy of storytelling through writing 100-word stories, they also are terrific outlets to boost confidence and creativity. If you are stuck on another project, writing a 100-word story is a great outlet for (briefly) turning to another idea and giving your mind a break, so that you can come back feeling accomplished for having completed a story and more energized to tackle the behemoth of a short story, novel, etc., with which you were feeling stuck. – M.A. Dosser

Go beyond fiction.

The skills you acquire from the drabble are also skills that will serve you beyond fiction writing. A mastery of brevity and the ability to find the core elements of a story can serve you in almost everything you write.

For example, instead of writing a five-page report for work that no one will ever read, you can write a paragraph—or even a simple bulleted list—that synthesizes the core idea of that report. Maybe then someone will actually read it.

And, of course, even in this economy, $8.00 will still get you a nice cup of coffee, and that’s something.

Ready to try your hand at a 100-word story? Check out this blog for 10 tips to writing a stellar one.

Posted July 15, 2024.