Introduction
A few years ago, I wrote a drabble chain, and last month, I posted a sequence of sonnets.
Early in the composition of the poems, I noticed that these are rather similar forms. A quick calculation is quite suggestive: where a drabble is exactly 100 words, a sonnet has at most 140 words, and quite probably less, since you’ll find yourself using plenty of polysyllablic words. Indeed, a word count on the text of Shakespere’s sonnets confirms: 17k words for 154 sonnets, averaging 113 words per sonnet.
But I digress. Similar in terms of length, perhaps, but there’s a profound distinction. Writing sonnets means keeping a meter and finding rhymes: it’s a true form. By contrast, drabbles ask nothing more of you but reaching a specific numeric finish line.
You write a few words, check the count. “What now?” you may ask, and the form offers no answer. As soon you find a rich vein and words begin to flow, often you’ll sail right past the end point and be left with the painstaking task of paring down what you wrought.
Writing sonnets is quite unlike this. The constrains give you a much clearer sense of a “progress bar.” Everything fits in a slot. It’s inspiring — you write a line and it prompts a thought like, “Okay, now I need a rhyme for ‘embrace’, what are my options?”
Enough preamble — all this should make clear my goal. How might we augment the drabble to be a true equal to the sonnet, a prose form with meaningful constraints?
My first thoughts were along the lines of, what if it must include X lines of dialogue? A scene turn, a character development, however minor? Some sort of miniature five act structure, even? But I soon decided these ideas were misguided. Key to the sonnet is that whether a sonnet is valid is a borderline syntactic feature. Subjective at the fringes, but at its core, what a sonnet is stands out clearly.
So, evaluating our nu-drabbles ought to require no deep semantic analysis.
Now that I’ve shown the problem and its difficulties, let me finally move on to explaining what I came up with.
First Form: Three Pair Drabble
The central unit of verse is the line, and what should the core of prose be but the sentence? This, I think, is the core weakness of the drabble. Words aren’t actually a perceptible unit, not in matters of quantity.
A poem with a particular rhythm or rhyme scheme sparks joy because you can hear it, feel how it conforms. You don’t actually notice if a drabble is a bit off, unless you consciously count the words (a distraction from, you know, reading them). In fact, the definition of “word” is famously fuzzy — I love poetic constructions like whale-road, but is that one word or two? Different programs disagree.
No, at best, the reader-facing value of a drabble is the second-order effect: the requisite word-pinching results in especially honed and careful prose. And this is enough — I’m often proud of the results.
But I digress! As I said, prose is an art of sentences, not words.
I believe “tell a story in three sentences” is immediately a more productive form than a raw drabble. Now, the nature of sentences leaves this range very wide — on one end, there’s “veni, vidi, vici,” and on the other, entire novels have been penned that are ostensibly one run-on sentence long.
But let’s give it more structure than that. Sonnets aren’t just fourteen lines long: they also rhyme. What is the equivalent of rhyme for sentences? We’ll discuss this more in a later section, but for this first form, our answer is “flow”.
After all, in a sense, what a couplet achieves is setup and payoff on a sonic level.
In Techniques of the Selling Writer, Dwight Swain argues at length that causality is at the heart of prose and scene-craft. In each beat of each scene, the world ought to impinge on the focal character, events inflicting sensory stimulation, and this inspires an emotional reaction and action in response. Such is the Motivation-Reaction Unit. This concept has already come up in other blog posts, but I only wanted to briefly gesture at it here.
Despite their almost tautological simplicity, these “MRUs” are too bloated for our purposes — the value of Swain’s model isn’t just reducing prose to a matter of cause and effect, it also posits that what happens inside the character should be more than just a equal and opposite reaction — it’s broken down into a subsequence of emotional response, instinctive actions, and deliberated speech.
That’s too much! For our purposes, we actually do want to simplify it down to the triviality of cause and effect.
But enough background.
A Three Pair Drabble is six sentences results in three cause-effect pairs, exactly 100 words long. The drabble has a subject, which must take central action in one and only one sentence of each pair.
My introduction was written almost a week ago; I had held off on writing this blogpost so as to get some practice writing stories in this mold. And after a week of this writing exercise, my verdict? They’re great fun! But there’s a catch to it. My efforts to write three pair drabbles have gone horribly right.
Each and every time I try to write a flash fic in this form, I glimpse an interesting conclusion I can build toward if I push a bit further, and I promptly abandon the pretense of writing a drabble and turn it into a short story.
If you’ve been wondering why I’ve written so many Vermin Cathexis shorts lately, this is what’s up with all those “études.”
But let’s see if I can’t edit down some of those recent results into something that actually complies with the constraints.
Adapted from “Market Signals”:
From a sky nursing only faint embers of sunset, snow descended on two drones. In the deepening chill, one slid closer, smaller frame scraping concrete.
At once, the larger, slender drone stiffened, head snapping around, silver hair whirling, narrowed eyes focusing. The worker drone flinched, purple eyes blinking to empty circles, lips stuttering something like, “I was just — it’s not — don’t act like —”
Then J leaned closer, glare sharpening, catalyzing further stuttering — but she interrupted: “Try being coherent, toaster.”
“Bite me! It’s cold, you’re hot, do the math,” Uzi said. “shouldn’t be too hard for you!”
Adapted from A Sculptor Most Delicate:
Shell-sculptors had the sharpest claws, and this one was honing that edge further. The surrogate paused at the chamber’s threshold, tugging on invisible bindings to the hive beyond, as if to pull away from some terrible drop.
—Sit down, sister! (the shell-sculptor sent, antennae perking up at the promise of being helpful.)
She acknowledged with a terse —Tuned, and ceased tugging, unable to overcome the gravity of her appointment: six legs ferried her to the workbench.
All was lit apale by shimmerbugs — all lit, save for the chrylurks’ own shadows.
The surrogates’s forearms folded, hugging her thorax — wound-shy.
As you can see, the definition of “sentence” is fluid where dialogue is concerned. But the core of what makes these stories tick — the cause-effect pairs — should be discernible.
Give it a try yourself, or keep running to get a look at my also-rans.
Second Form: Arc Collage
In my years of reading fanfiction, I’ve at times encountered something I tentatively call “collagefic,” and it’s long fascinated me. As this is the first time I’ve mentioned it publically, I ought to explain what I mean, though a proper explanation won’t be here, buried in a blogpost about something else entirely.
My original characterization in a chatroom in 2023 is still apt: “fast paced to the point of extratone, elliding a bunch of shit, basically a collection of small moments.”
The key feature of collagefic is the way it bundles together vignettes telescopically, cutting across days and weeks in a rapid montage. These are fics that might cover all of canon in a few thousand words.
And all of it exudes what I’ve taken to calling “AO3 lyrical style.” Not to be confused with the established concept of the “AO3 house style”, AO3 lyrical style is a similar vibe taken to an extreme. The whole story is covered in a mist of poetic-omniscient storyteller cadence, abstracted from a character-grounded viewpoint.
But again, I don’t want to spill too much ink covering tangential matters. What matters is that this style is a toolbox of tricks that can be repurposed to our ends. In “Theories of Narrative Harmony”, I noted the potency of the “when” construct.
Saying “when” simultaneously accelerates and slows down time. “Cassandra let the heavy wooden door fall behind her. When she arrived at the graveyard…”
How long as the journey between those two sentence? How much happened? With one word we are unmoored from the chains of sequential time, snapping right to the next moment of consequence.
This is a very powerful tool for short-form story writing.
All of this insight came to me one morning last week, five hours into my night’s sleep. Not as a theory, but a defining example. I couldn’t close my eyes for a moment more until I wrote it out.
When I had finished the results exhibited what I thought was a very productive structure. Here’s the first three beats, pared down substantially to meet our 100 word requirement:
When the headaches begin, inconsistent yet intense enough to leave her a twitching, blinking mess… Uzi assumes it’s just misconfiguration, nothing rebooting herself won’t fix.
When class drags and a migraine-aura bristles… Uzi realizes it’s so easy to hack, to find reprieve inside drones, insinuating into glitches like cracks in armor, each segfault a language she was already fluent in.
When yet another drone falls prey to her (each time coming back changed, coming back more — closer to completion)… Uzi decides it’s too messed up, too dangerous, and altogether too irresistible — no, she can’t let herself out again.
The full thing has seven beats total. You can easily see the broad structure: “When motivation… the protagonist responds.” In that regard, it would take barely any work to transform this into a formally correct Three Pair Drabble.
But the power of an Arc Collage lies in the verb. The full version of this story has seven beats, and simply quoting the verbs already conjures the shape of the arc portrayed.
Assumes. Realizes. Decides. Commits. Witnesses. Understands. Doesn’t deny.
Now, there’s slight infelicity here — to my ear, “witnessing” and “understanding” blur too close together, and if you simply visually inspect the fic itself you can quickly see exactly what’s happening: continuity has gotten the best of me, the details are sprawling out of control, and the prose burgeons with altogether too much narrative.
Suffice it to say, this isn’t a platonically perfect structure for any story, though I think it’s a broadly useful set of lines to color inside.
Decide on a character. First, they assume X; then they realize Y, then they decide Z. Pin down a concrete ‘why’ for each, and make sure it’s exactly 100 words long, and you have composed an arc collage.
When the knights come face to face with an insectoid maw, enhaloed with webbed horns and blood-sucking tendrils, Mikalam assumes the bestiary (memorized to the very last detail) would not lead her astray: chrylurks lay parasitoid egg inside their prey — and the sole survivor had fled unpenetrated, though stinger-grazed.
When her flesh swells with pus-leaking sacs, Mikalam realizes the grimoire was incomplete — an egg squeezed into mortal flesh was sufficient, but mere exposure to its verminous secretion had infected her.
When a traveling merchant, law-bound to aid any knight, asks if she is well, Mikalam decides to give an incomplete answer.
The verbs themselves can be selected to taste. It’s an instructive writing exercise to come up with a array of verbs that could serve as a suitable précis of an arc. How about struggles / practices / overcomes? Flirts / dates / loves? The famous Story Circle is built for this — needs / wants / goes / searches / finds / takes / returns / changes — but as you can imagine, it’s more suitable to a double or triple drabble.
Likewise, for all that I’m the strongest soldier of “when”, it’s not some peerless artifact. Other words and patterns are capable of conjuring the same effect. Does this opening sounds familiar? “For want of a nail the shoe was lost…”
But the core here isn’t mere parallelism or repetition — consider the Three Pair Drabble. Part of what makes them pairs, by construction, is that a logical “and so” or “but then” exists in the gaps between sentences; they flow into each other. (And, in practice, there’s a overarching flow that hops between one pair and the next.)
What truly distinguishes the Collage Arc Drabble, then, is that its structure breaks the flow between pairs. A true alternative must allow the same gaps in time. “Before” and “after” are almost drop-in replacements. Or perhaps: “In summer… / In autumn… / In winter…” With this example, you see how far the possibilities extend — you could structure the Collage Arc around any sequence of (literal, metaphorical) landmarks that have in-story coherence.
Third Form: Square Drabble
You’ve probably already noticed an ugly tic in these drabbles. They’re wordy, clauses packed breathlessly to squeeze out a few extra unit of information before the deadline of the full stop.
Now, this is exactly what we asked for. What poet hasn’t arranged their words awkwardly to appease the draconics of rhyme and meter?
In this post I’ve tried to present my final results rather than walking you through every step of my brainstorming process — there have been some dead-ends — but I think it’s instructive to note that the first form is defined by three pairs specifically because I’m such a wordy bitch.
My original concept was for there to be five pairs — that seemed enough room to do interesting things — but I immediately discovered I naturally take two or three dozen words to make one pair.
Alas, shifting the goal posts like that meant run-on sentences became a requirement. But if we refuse to indulge them? Requiring that we get through five back and forths by word one hundred would certainly force us to break up our sentences.
And if we’re writing ten sentences anyway, why not make things nice and square?
Looking back, Uzi decided everthing went wrong in the bar.
They’d carded her — the kinda joint with the high-grade diesel.
(Her ID was real, information faked — Doormans ran this town.)
A camera-feed review confirms he threw the first punch.
(Sure, she might have hacked him beforehand — should’ve secured better!)
When her full-force bite drew oil, he screamed like murder.
Music stopped, every head turned — worse, that included his friend.
They checked cards but they didn’t check for frickin’ guns???
Barrel pointed — muzzle flash — didn’t think it’d end like this.
Sucks for them! to this gun-fight Uzi’d brought latent psychic powers.
It’s a pretty tricky thing to pull off, though I dare say this is the best form of all for clearly demonstrating the quasi-poetic effect of drabbles. The constraints binding each line makes it palpable, in no small part because 10 words is in the range where it’s no imposition to count it by eye.
I did try to keep the sentences from getting too repetitive, which is a big risk when they’re all the exact same length. It’d feel a bit more organic if there was even a little ability to redistribute words into emphasized and interstitial sentences.
Which means that this principle implies the possibility of a “lose” square drabble — though I think it’s best if this exactly-ten-words variant is called a perfect square drabble — which is also applicable to almost all the other forms we will discuss today. A Square Pair Drabble has five cause-effect couplets, but I’m torn as to what a Square Collage ought to be. Ten lines beginning with “When” would result in a pretty diffuse collage, but it seems to only semantically appropriate way to do it.
But I had a silly idea, as soon as I decided to call this form a square and evoke that geometic analogy.
What do you make of this?
Uzi, to no surprise, always hated J (murderous annoyance).
J, spiting the toaster’s continual presence, remained — sometimes — steadfast:
Never, regardless of slights J suffered, think about Uzi.
In fairness, J never completely erased Uzi from consideration.
Because always would that pest punkishly subvert J’s authority.
(Of course, Uzi insisted, “Punk? J, I’m goth. Sometimes.”)
And then sometimes, rather inexplicably, Uzi would help her.
The goth’s excuse: J looked pathetic, never ever smiling.
If J smiled, well… she always craved Uzi’s attention.
Can you see the trick? If not, this table may help clear things up.
| Uzi | * | J | ||||||
| J | Uzi | * | ||||||
| * | J | Uzi | ||||||
| J | * | Uzi | ||||||
| * | Uzi | J | ||||||
| Uzi | J | * | ||||||
| * | Uzi | J | ||||||
| Uzi | J | * | ||||||
| J | * | Uzi |
That’s right — you thought a perfect square drabble was tricky? How do you like a frickin’ suduko drabble?
If you treat each sentence as a row and assign each word an appropriate column, then three motifs in this passage obey the constraints of suduko: once each column, once each row, and once each of the nine 3x3 squares.
Two concessions to readability were made: first, epitheths that refer to the same character are considered equivalent to that character’s name, and second, one word was treated as ‘variable’ to keep things from getting super repetitive. This is the star in the above passage — it can be ‘always’, ‘never’, or ‘sometimes’, and — mostly as a consequence of how I composed this piece — each column and paragraph has one of each.
I do not recommend this exercise. While it was fun, it’s also naturally a bit excrucitating.
Fourth Form: Decimated Echoes
I have more or less suggested that the true equivalent to rhyming couplets in prose is the motivation-reaction pair, and I have found that to be the most fruitful approach, but you may be a bit skeptical. If you stop and consider the problem on your own, you’ll probably hit upon the more natural candidate. It’s the first form I tried, and it’s the dead-end that almost killed this post.
Repetition, repetition, repetition. Words echoing, phrases ringing again and again, points given a sycophantic chorus to make them resound. Famous is the power of a recurring motif to elevant rhetoric and prose.
So, why not design a drabble around that? Pick a word, or perhaps a collection of motifs, and task yourself with using them over and over.
Here’s tercet from a cut section:
Clouds were darkly engulfing the sky above a party traveling the wastes. Hagard from fruitless pursuit, injured from the savage nail of beasts, no travel-song abated the malaise darkly engulfing in their hearts. Then with a thunder, wind split in twain the sky, letting fall a stark solar glare, each ray a savage nail.
I might have a little pride in these sentences, but the repetition itself is a rather sour note. It just feels clumsy.
Is this a skill issue? Is there a way to make repetition work?
“You’ll relent to it, exšh’t.” The insect’s voice was wheezing through a orifice unused to breath, unsuited for it, mouthparts scraping and chirring. Hungerless.
Tied down, bound and swaddled in that damnably strong silk, no escape. It pried lips open, projecting that mouthful of chitinous tendrils and tubes. Vomiting something rotten-sweet and mold-sour into those lips.
Spat it right back up.
“Spoon-feed me, pour it down, anything else!”
“Why? You’ll relent to it soon enough.” Then it pushed those tubes deeper.
Spat up again — was pinched shut now.
Then fangs bit, venom cold, and muscles slackened.
Relenting to it.
This repetition of a longer phrase feels a bit easier to make sound deliberate and effective, and just like the principle of squareness, it’s is a device you can overly on other drabbleforms.
But it’s not the same structural effect as rhyming — I would argue it’s closer to stanza breaks, if it’s anything. Squareness or the pair rule effect how to pick sentences, but pursuit of these phrasal echoes is something you steer the whole piece toward, across sentences.
Fifth Form: Three Voice Harmony
What is theme? I’ve gotten into long arguments on the topic, and I won’t be bringing the final insight into the matter today, but I did want to note something that intrigued me.
Read enough posts on this site, and you’ll easily recognize my obsession with “but” and “so.” They’re grease for narratives, and whenever I come up with a new theorectical model, they’ll always be at the scene of the crime. “X but Y so Z” is my winning formula.
Are they exhaustive? Perhaps, but they’re certainly effective, the 20% in that gets you 80% out, if nothing else. So many other logical connections are synonymous or at least capable of being expressed in terms of them — they’re the core logical connnectors.
What about illogical connections?
The sun crested the horizon, like an army rallied for a battle, and the night was entrenched.
Is this a formula of the same class as “X but Y so Z”? It has three components — sun cresting, army rallying, night entrenched — and it clicks together with a nice punch. Is this a story?
There’s a conflict here, a kind of development — this line expresses what amounts to: “The night is dark, but the rising sun is bright, so the land was illuminated.”
And isn’t this the sort of expression in equivalent terms that I used to lump all the other connectors as special cases of the fundamental but/so?
But I don’t know, that reframing changes the structure and content, and overall I’m left with the instinct that something different is happening when a story is, by fundamental structure, an analogy.
How should we put this? “X like Y where Z”? I’m not sure, but this is all a big digression. To back to our opening question — theme, I contend, involves pattern and analogy as means of tying elements together. Perhaps the complete formula for story goes “X but Y so Z — like W.”
What relevance is this to drabbles? Well, return to the idea of flowing pairs. Each motivation reaction pair is joined by an (implicit) connector, but we’ve largely focused on the core logical connectors. What happens if we do pairs joined by nothing by gossamer strands of metaphors?
Clad in my waxed canvas armor, I gazed out over the wharfs’s edge. Beneath the skin of the rain-wrinkled lake, water had turned brown from the creek’s muddy inflow.
On the temple beds, attended by masked and gloved physicians, the fever-faced and gaunt fleshed patients moan for a miracle. Walk astray near stagnant puddle, and blood-sucking blightflies left larval gifts.
It took days for the sun to expel the storm-clouds, but I returned to the lake as soon as it shone bright and clear. Those rays descended through waters like foggy glass… but they were blue — mud buried below, forgotten.
I admit, my worm has turned on the tricolon, so I think it speaks to something necessary that it insisted upon itself here. My outline originally titled this section “Four Part Harmony” — and formal analogies naturally have four components. A is to B as X is to Y.
But I think that would belabor the point; you augment the power of this device by letting the metaphor complete itself in the reader’s head.
Sixth Form: Question Nesting
A keenly skeptical reader might have nursed a frustration from the very first form. What is a sentence? A series of grammatical words ending in a full stop, exclamation or question mark?
What about dialogue — a character delivers a paragraph-long monologue to which the narration appends “he said.” Was that one sentence, or several?
A similiar vertigo assails consideration of flowing pairs. Let me quote from drabble #1 above:
J leaned closer, glare sharpening, catalyzing further stuttering — but she interrupted: “Try being coherent, toaster.”
I passed this off as J’s half of the final pair, but isn’t this sleight of hand? Look at the cause and effect, and you see a micro-pair nested right in the middle of this sentence.
Anyone who’s probed the mysteries of craft is quite familiar with the rejoiner “it depends.” It’s always true, everything’s so complex and subjective — the question is what does it depend on?
We care about sentences because they express a complete thought — you may have heard an English teacher say as much. They’re atomic. With this insight, it might be appropriate, in those drabbleforms that demand a set number of sentences, to pepper in interstitial fragments to supplement the proper beats, not unlike a verse substitute iambs for trochees or anapests.
The illusion of form is that you can draw a line around what does and does not adhere — form is a process, form is a pretense. Drabbles aren’t stories that happen to be a hundred words long, they’re stories noticeably warped by that constraint. If it has no effect, it has no relevance.
What is a sentence, a pair, a drabble? It is whatever meets your pen with frustrated friction. It depends, and it depends on what challenges you — fruitfully.
Most of all, though, it depends on why you’re bothering, whom you’re showing it to. If the point is technical demonstration or contest qualification, then rules take precedence. Likewise, when if the point is a writing exercise, you cheat not only the game but yourself by bending the rules. It’s frustrating to find something that almost works, but growth and insight happen when you keep looking.
But when you’re posting the results, art trumps technique. Constraints are prompts — to nudge you into motion, twisting your head so you see a new vista, but once you’ve spotted your destination, you can leave the path behind.
Where were we? I had a more proasic goal when I began dissecting what is and isn’t a proper pair. We’ve seen lines with mini-pairs nested inside themselves — but what happens if we follow that recursion to its natural conclusion?
Do you even have a heart? She called you her friend — but what was she to you? When was the last time you saw her? Where were you last night?
Warm summer evening, air thick with cheers and the scent of wine; a party to celebrate her return from studies abroad. She’d invited you, old childhood friend — a surprise she even remembered your name.
You’d asked if the pond was still there, with the rock jutting like a tooth. Three witnesses to you entering the woods together — holding hands.
No sign of struggle. Tell me why.
As demonstrated above, this can be a very nebulous form, but we can sharpen it to formality. Key to the structure of the Nested Questions Drabble is to present a series of questions — or just suggestive prompts, setup-guns loaded to fire — and then, in the manner of a chiasmus, close each parenthesis, one by one.
Instead of a chains of pairs, it’s a dolls within dolls.
Now! When I began this essay, I only had the Three Pair Drabble to describe, but I had that first example of an Arc Collage that seemed worth mentioning, and if one is the loneliest number, two is the most incomplete. Mathematicians and computer scientists share a sense that there are only three numbers: zero, one, and arbitrarily many. If there’s two characteristically distinct forms, why not a whole menagerie?
Six is a respectable effort, I think — if I go any further, I fear I’d repeat myself, or contort my words into forms as arcane as that sudoku. I also think, ultimately, the real point here was demonstration — you can come up with your own drabbleform variants, and I’m interested to hear what twists my readers can devise.
Beyond Drabbles
It’s worth asking: does anyone actually read drabbles? “Tines of the Devil’s Fork” is statistically my least successful work on AO3, and I’ve long suspected shortform fiction in general has a pretty limited audience when it’s not smut or jokes.
What was the deeper point of all of this? Certainly, I didn’t cook up the “suduko drabble” for any higher pursuit save the love of playing with words, but I opted to index this post with my high-minded essays rather than my unassuming blogposts, so you might anticipate some deeper point building in the background.
And there is a reason I spent a week fixated on the execution of vignettes, even before I returned to writing this post.
It all comes back to that favorite punching bag and/or beloved muse of this blog, the allure of recursion and the chimeric science of drafting scenes.
Once you really understand what makes the three act structure tick, you can rederive the Snowflake Method from first principles and you’ll yearn for fractal symmetry like one enthralled to a Lovecraftian god. Could writing a whole novel really be as simple as turning one sentence summaries into three sentence summaries again and again?
No. I’ve been trying it for years. Sounds good, never works.
But just maybe, this time I can finally kick that football.
One of the big difficulties with this process is that the middle links of the the plan that goes “1) write a sentence 2) ??? 3) sell a novel” are fuzzy in a way that dumbfounds my imagination. It comes down to the gravities of scale.
Your one-sentence story might be, “A princess and her knight becomes servants to dragon — then they transform into dragons themselves.”
There are natural tacks for fleshing this out, especially since we’re alluding to well worn tropes. If the knight is our protagonist, act one could covers the quest to track and slay the dragon. Or, for the princess, her abduction and acclimation to being an object hoarded.
Already a neat idea occurs to me — tropes call for the princess to be oppressed in her role, chained to expectation and ettiquette, probably betrothed in some arranged, loveless marriage. Held captive by the dragon, she’s paradoxically free from those struggles she’d long inured herself to.
Except arranged marriages mattered, people didn’t do them just to be evil patriarchs — and I’m piqued my the idea of breaking that contract having disasterous political fallout — even sparking outright war — while the princess is more concerned with indulging a draconic tryst, utterly removed from human woes.
But I digress. I know from experience that if I decided to outline this story, I could easily turn one sentence to 3, and then do it again.
If we map it out mathematically, then our one sentence story will be 10–25 words long. Our second pass will produce an outline of about drabble length, 50–200 words. Our third pass will produce something several hundred words longth, but no more than 2k.
Our fourth pass, then, is where we get an outline of several thousand words, as long as multiple novel chapters. Crucially, this is the tipping point where completing the outline is beyond what you can expect to accomplish in a single day. This is the great filter that kills all my recursive outlines with only one or two exceptions — and even those didn’t make it a single step further.
I don’t think this is a skill issue, or a function of attention-deficient executive dysfunction, though I could be fairly charged on both accounts.
Gravities of scale mean that summary is natural. Unabridged, scenic detail is natural. But stradling the line, taking a summary and making it more detailed, but not fully so? An awkward, unidiomatic operation, one writers are untrained for.
I have a complete outline and lots of notes for a series called With Gnawed Wings Defending. Here’s some choice excerpts, semi-arbitrarily picking out the second sentence of each subdivision.
- 100 word pass: “They run missions in the criminal underworld of the city, and when it all starts falling apart, Karoo chooses to stick with the surviving crew and hold it together.”
- 500 word pass: “Karoo runs missions with Ghaus’s crew and learns more about each member, seeing the desperate families each supports with their work.”
- 2500 word pass: “Karoo’s confidence is wavering — she’s still hurt by Lysandra’s avoidance — and she’s talking to Ghaus about it; the boss shores up her confidence.”
You can see the scale slowly inching more intimate. First a brushstroke for weeks of plot, then days, then an individual episode. You can see how “first pass” prose differs starkly from “third pass” prose.
But can you keep this going? My outline calls for 4-5 volumes, so several hundred words. If the geometric progression continues, there would be a 7500 word draft, then 25k, then 125k, and maybe it’d feel done there, but if hope springs eternal, there’d be a last push for a multi-book final draft.
What does a 25k draft version of that conversation between Karoo and Ghaus look like? How is it different from the passes before and after?
(I’ve done a lot of self-linking in this post, but I would be remiss if I didn’t mention Weave Me Another Cocoon, which uses advanced formatting and programming to interactively show you exactly what it looks like for a story to grow longer, substition by substition, from one word to over six thousand.)
Suffice it all to say… I have spent a lot of time thinking about this problem. And by now, I think a frame challenge is in order. No, the problem of crafting a story is not a matter of chiseling ever-finer indentations on a stone.
First pass prose does not differ from third pass prose. It’s all prose. Like atoms and the void, there are sensory details and dramatic judgments. That’s it.
You’ll notice the first pass has a lot of judgments that get refined into sensation, but that’s the means, not the end. In a novel, “they run missions in the criminal underworld” could work as a line of dialogue, or a bit of exposition amid character introductions.
No, what defines the first pass is an emptiness, both in the gaps between sentences, and a vagueness that rings hollow. I’m left with questions, and I squint for a clearer view.
But I’ve entered the weave, haven’t I? Delivering the same stump speech about outlining and show-don’t-tell that I’ve been iterating on since 2022.
Let me explain how drabbles fit into this picture.
The theory is straightforward. If the problem with the middle stages of recursion is that writers are unpracticed telling stories of middling detail, what better way to improve than to practice in this narrative register? Already the rhythms are becoming familiar to me.
But the insight I cherish most from this exercise is the demonstration of narrative ontogeny. It’s not a ascent by fractal symmetry. Or, conversely, to tell a story concisely doesn’t mean to to blur it into scaled-down, indiscernible pixels. Think about the Arc Collage. These are islands of narrative meaning, carefully selected to imply a grander curve unseen.
Stories grow by fits and starts. The difference between a scene in 7.5k word draft of a novel and a 25k draft depends, foremost, on the importance of the scene. Each part of the novel to be is (tautologically) allocated a certain number of words. Or, at a broader level, a certain number of details.
There’s a type of table beloved by dungeon masters and fantasy writers, which breaks down mediveal demographics by the principle that, as a settlement scales in population from village to town to city, differences businesses become viable. Supposedly you need 150 people to support a shoemaker, but over a thousand for butcher.
If you have to convey a scene with only a few details, there are certain essential things that come first. Who’s there? What they want? As you expand you can support more luxuries — conflict, subtext, atmosphere — and you can relax from terse poetics and sweeping summary to something with a sense of pacing. Rather than chiseling, you lay bricks between scaffolding.
But finally, do you see the relevance of drabbleforms?
Consider the three pair — here you have some six beats to work with. But what do you have room for if you expand that out to a double drabble in ten beats? Fifteen?
The dramatic pair is probably the device I’m proudest of analyzing here. I don’t want to play with the but-so tripytch anymore — no, the pairing of two interlinked ideas, chained or nesting, feels so much more flexible as an atom of narrative.
The outline of Aurora Moonrise was born pedogogically, as an example to demonstrate the principles expouded in my essays. Its sprawling “third pass” was chiefly catalyzed by the insight of the scene formula. It made outlining scenes simple and approachable to me.
So my hope is that what I’ve learned about drabbles have a similarly inspiring result — I want to be able to look at a sketch of a scene and think it trivial to graft on a dramatic pair, slide a new bricks into a gap, and now that I’ve already gotten the ball rolling, why not add just one more, and like that smoothly transmute sketch to vignette.
Is that a siren as beguiling as the myth of snowflakes? Is it even possible?
It depends, it always depends — complexity ensnares and silences. I doubt there’s a magic trick that can make writing effortless.
But I had fun playing with words today, and as spring comes I feel something that had alluded me for months last year — I’m having fun writing and I’m excited to write more.
And while I’m sharing words I find fun, I’ll tack on one last detail. As the rigid formalism of the tricolon feels increasingly constraining and rote, I’ve found myself enamored with the word polyptych, and all the organic freedom it implies.
Perhaps that’s a strange note to end on, for a blogpost so deeply concerned with exacting numerical constraints, but it depends, and I only chose these rules in the first place to force a swerve into weird and unconventional possibilities.
The abrupt end, the subversive sendoff, is one of the first tricks you learn, writing drabbles.