Drabbles: Literary and Not-So

There are some great drabble anthologies out there, and most of them operate within the assumptions of modern literary fiction. Realistic fiction along with sci-fi, horror, etc., but still very much within the bounds of literary fiction and those modern literary conventions.

What I will be exploring at this site is something different. I want to see how the 100-word form lends itself to the telling of traditional types of stories: myths, legends, parables, jokes, etc. These are story forms that are ideally suited to the compressed 100-word format, and I'm excited to see what I can learn by practicing this format myself.

This project began by accident, with help from a friend at Twitter. I had just finished a Nasruddin story project for NaNoWriMo in 2019, and I wanted to create a randomizing story widget for the sidebar of my blog. I figured 100 words would be a cutoff for the stories that I could include in a text-based widget, and so I started writing Nasruddin stories that were 100 words in length, or shorter. Not all Nasruddin stories can work in that short format, but lots of them worked really well.

Then, since I was excited about how well that was going, I shared it at Twitter, and a friend of mine there told me about a 100-word story contest at his local newspaper. I had no idea 100-word stories were a thing! I started poking around online, and quickly learned that 100-word stories are indeed a thing. With a name of their own: drabble.

This was happening in December, just in time to make the New Year, 2020, into a year of drabble experiments. I will be teaching my Myth-Folklore and Indian Epics courses as usual, with lots of content there that lends itself to "drabbling," and I hope I can get my students excited about creating some drabble experiments of their own.

Meanwhile, I've always wanted to do an Aesop's fables collection that was not a translation from Latin or Greek fables but instead the stories told in my own words... and now I know I want it to be a "Drabble Aesop," drawing not just on the classical Greek and Latin Aesop, but also the larger Aesopic tradition that goes beyond Greece and Rome to include the medieval fable tradition and also Renaissance fabulists like Abstemius. I'm even thinking about doing a Drabble Bible (a Drible!), where I retell famous Bible stories as drabbles. For my class project in the Indian Epics class, I'm going to try some Ramayana and Mahabharata drabbles too: epic drabbling!

I'm also keen on doing a NaNoWriMo again for 2020 since I had so much fun in 2019, and the math works out very nicely: 500 drabbles equals one 50K NaNoWriMo "novel" (okay, not exactly a novel... but then Nasruddin was not exactly a novel either). Maybe that will be a good time to try the "drible."

So, I'll be using this blog for all the drabbles, with labels like Nasruddin, Aesop, etc. to label the different kinds of projects I explore here. And give if a try yourself: it's an incredibly liberating and fun story form! :-)

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