I’ve been impressed by brevity, of late. We hosted Tiff Holland in our 100 Writing Days of Summer Program, and she was amazing. She writes poetry and flash fiction. I’d read her award-winning flash fiction, Betty Superman, years ago. I’m not sure where I met her, some conference, but I knew I wanted her in this first summer writing program. She did not disappoint. Tiff is by nature convergent – great grist to my divergent brain.
This month, Writer’s Digest features the drabble of Ran Walker, Indie Author of the Year and Black Caucus of the American Library Associations Best Fiction E-Book Award for her novel Daykeeper. Ran is committed to storytelling within 100 words. (See her drabble below!)
Drabble is what they call a story told within 100 words, excluding the title.
(Wow, right?) It forces you to be committed to convergence and clarity. What is the story about? What is the primary communication? What stays? What goes? I’m going to try my hand at telling some of my writing experiences in drabbles. I’m excited by this form.
From me, my first ever drabble…
Shut Down
I’d dropped it off at her new office. Left the whole 430-page manuscript in a box by her door. Was this the right place?
Oprah was hosting her last week on talk-TV, abdicating her role as our national conscience. I’d been writing that novel for years, and dreamed of being invited onto the show. Oprah loves to read.
My agent’s call came weeks later. She didn’t like it. Why would she? No one would. I wasn’t surprised. Years went by before I even considered giving my first novel to someone else to read. But Oprah would never read it now.
And, here is Ran Walker’s drabble from her book, Keep it 100, reprinted in Writer’s Digest, used without permission, but buy her books! This drabble is what inspired me:
Dumas
Mrs. Miller had asked her eleventh grade students to give a report on an assigned writer. She tossed surnames at them them with the air of a person who’d been teaching the same subject the same way for twenty-five years.
Kendrick had gotten Dumas.
As Mrs. Miller sat back, preparing to hear about The Three Musketeers for the umpteenth time, she found herself learning about a Black writer named Henry Dumas, who’d been killed by transit cops in 1968, a writer Toni Morrison once called an “absolute genius,” a writer, whom, up until that moment, Mrs. Miller had never known existed.
I engage with writers daily in the FB Group, Write Without the Fight – addressing block, resistance and the creative process. I write. You write. We all write better when we know our creative thinking style and how to work around that, work with it, and get your work done. Come join us. (It’s good.)