What Is a Drabble?

A drabble is a complete story told in exactly 100 words. Not roughly a hundred, and not “under 500” — one hundred, counted, with the title left out of the count. Everything a story needs still has to be there: a character, a situation, and some kind of turn, all inside a space smaller than most opening paragraphs.

That is the whole definition. The interesting part is what the limit does to the writing, which is what the rest of this page is about.

Where the word comes from

The term goes back to Monty Python’s Big Red Book (1971), which described “Drabble” as a word game: two to four players compete, and the first to finish a novel wins. In the 1980s, writers in British science-fiction fandom borrowed the name for a version you could actually play in an evening. The Birmingham University SF Society is generally credited with setting the length at exactly 100 words. The form spread through fan circles and charity anthologies — the British publisher Beccon put out three books of drabbles between 1988 and 1993 — and later took hold in fan-fiction communities, where the word is sometimes used loosely for any short piece.

Strictly, though, a drabble is 100 words. A 50-word story has its own name (a “dribble”), and anything up to about 1,000 words usually gets filed under flash fiction or microfiction. The drabble is the strict case: the count is the form.

How the counting works

Different venues count differently, so it is worth stating our rules plainly. At this journal, hyphenated words, contractions, and numerals each count as one word. The title is not counted. And the target is exact: not ninety-nine, not one hundred and one. Word processors will disagree with each other over hyphens and stray characters, so a careful hand count of the final draft is never wasted.

Why the limit works

A 100-word ceiling removes every kind of warm-up. There is no room for a paragraph of scene-setting before the story starts, no room for backstory delivered in summary, no room to explain the ending after it lands. Each sentence has to do at least two jobs.

The useful side effect is that compression pushes a writer toward implication. When you cannot explain, you have to choose the one detail that lets the reader work out the rest. Readers finish the story themselves, and a story a reader completes tends to stay with them longer than one that was handed over finished.

Three examples from our pages

Definitions only go so far. Here are drabbles we have published, quoted in full or in part, so you can see the form doing its work.

Gosling Math by C.W. Bryan

Exactly 100 words, and the structure is doing most of the storytelling. The distances organize the piece; the arithmetic carries the feeling. Nothing is explained, and the last four words land because of it.

Care Package by Elizabeth Guilt

A whole fairy-tale premise, a day’s worth of failure, and a kindness at the end, told mostly in dialogue. Notice how much the story trusts you to know the Billy Goats Gruff already; borrowing a familiar frame is one of the oldest tricks for saving words.

Baggage Claim by Matthew Brinkley

This one is a single 100-word sentence. It opens:

The sentence never stops because the woman never stops; the grammar is the grief. Read it in full to see how it resolves — the title turns out to mean something else by the end.

Reading and writing drabbles

The fastest way to get a feel for the form is to read a stack of them, and our archive of published 100-word stories is free. If you want to try writing one, we keep a practical guide: How to Write a 100-Word Story covers drafting long, cutting down, and the mistakes we see most in the queue.

And when you have one you like, send it to us. Submissions are free, open year-round, and read by a human editor.