How to Write a 100-Word Story

We read every story sent to this journal, which means we have seen a few thousand attempts at the form by now. The ones we accept tend to be built the same way, whatever their subject. This page describes that way. (If you want the form’s definition and history first, start with What Is a Drabble?)

One scene, one turn

A hundred words will hold one scene and one change. Not a plot — a change. Someone wants something, or believes something, and by the last line the situation has shifted under them. In Marissa Snyder’s Resolution, a town spends ninety words panicking about a creature; the turn is that the children simply board up the mine. Everything before the turn exists to set it up. If a sentence doesn’t set up the turn or deliver it, it goes.

The common beginner move is to attempt a compressed novel: three characters, a span of years, a summary voice. It reads like a synopsis. Pick the single moment where the change happens and stage only that.

Draft long, then cut

Very few good drabbles were written at 100 words. Write the scene at 150 or 200 words without watching the counter, so the draft has something worth keeping. Then cut in passes: first whole sentences, then clauses, then words. The first pass is easy. The last ten words are the real editing, and they are usually where the story improves, because what survives is only what the piece cannot live without.

Cutting from above the limit beats padding from below it every time. A 78-word draft inflated to 100 reads padded, and padding is easy to spot — it collects in adjectives and in characters nodding at each other.

Cut the scaffolding

Scaffolding is everything a longer story uses to get in and out of a scene: waking up, arriving, noticing the weather, deciding to act, reflecting afterward. A drabble starts inside the event. “Helen had stolen a chicken. She ran now through an open field, bird in hand” — that is the whole setup of C.W. Bryan’s Gosling Math, fifteen words in, theft already committed, chase already underway. The story ends on the gunshot and refuses to describe what comes after. Enter late, leave early.

Verbs over modifiers

When words are rationed, spend them on verbs. A precise verb replaces an adverb and half a sentence of explanation. Matthew Brinkley’s Baggage Claim gives a grieving woman verbs like haunted, circling, hoist — the piece is one 100-word sentence, and the verbs are what keep it moving. Go through your draft and circle every adjective and adverb. Most are candidates; the ones that survive should be doing work no verb could do.

Imply, don’t explain

The deepest savings come from what you decline to say. E.D. Skitch’s The Undertow closes on “My mistake had been in the naming” — one line that reframes the whole piece and explains nothing. Eric Goldfarb’s One Line opens in fragments: “The tire blows in the loading zone. A rider weeps into his phone, leaves one star, vanishes.” No transitions, no interiority spelled out; the gaps between sentences are where the reader works. Trust that. If your ending needs a sentence explaining what it meant, the ending isn’t finished.

Make the title work

The title is the only free real estate in the form — at this journal, as at most, it is excluded from the count. Don’t spend it on a label. Gosling Math names the cold arithmetic the story runs on. Baggage Claim is a place until the last line makes it a verdict. A good test: would the story lose something if the title were “Untitled”? If not, keep drafting titles.

Count like an editor

Before you send a story anywhere, learn the venue’s counting rules. Ours: hyphenated words, contractions, and numerals each count as one word, and the title is not counted. Software disagrees with itself about hyphens and dashes, so hand-count the final draft. An editor who asks for exactly 100 words will notice 99.

Where stories go wrong

The failures we see most in the queue, roughly in order: the vignette (a mood rendered nicely, but nothing changes); the twist that is only a withheld fact (“the narrator was a cat all along”), which reads as a trick played on the reader instead of a story told to them; the synopsis (years of plot summarized at a distance); and the padded sketch stretched to hit the count. All four have the same cure. Find the turn, stage the scene that contains it, and cut toward it.

Send us one

100-word story submissions are open year-round at this journal, and they are free. Every piece is read by a human editor, accepted stories are published on their own pages, and we pay a small token for each acceptance. Read a few recent stories to get a feel for what we take, check the guidelines, then submit your story. If it isn’t chosen, send another — the form is quick to write and slow to master, and we would rather see your fifth attempt than none.