I’m working on something big. It’s a 90,000-word novel. A beast like that takes time and effort. It’s stretchy and fickle – I’m still uncertain of its final form. It seems to get longer the more I edit it, when it probably needs to get shorter.

Because my main project is so unwieldy, I’ve been on the hunt for more grounded forms of creativity to satisfy the less patient parts of my brain. That’s where drabbles come in.

Drabbles are 100-word stories. Exactly 100-word stories. A crystallised piece of prose with a beginning, middle and end – and a word count that’s a nice round number. Why is it called a drabble? That appears to be Monty Python’s fault.

Dribbles make word-space twice as tight, allowing for just 50 words. Dribbles are my favourite (despite their disgusting name).

Going through the entire process of taking a nascent idea, writing a first draft, editing the draft repeatedly and ending up with something polished is a lot to accomplish in an afternoon. But it reminds me I’m capable of every step of the process. It gives me new energy to tackle larger works.

It also helps me not to be precious. More words I write will be cut than kept. Yet more will be polished then never published. Nothing is final; even published stories can be tweaked and improved, reworked for an open mic night. You never finish a story; you just stop working on it for now.

But focusing on writing at the sentence level does wonders for craft. Novels are forgiving, whereas micro-fiction demands each word be carefully chosen. Multiple layers of meaning can be squashed into a single adjective. That meticulousness, in the long run, helps me ask more of my longer pieces too.

Writing Fifty-Word Stories

I start with a pen and a notebook. I head out to the nice beer bar three streets away – the one that stocks Guinness West Indies Porter.

Sometimes I have an idea in mind. More often I don’t. Looking back through my notebook helps; maybe there’s a writing exercise or discarded thought from a few weeks back that resonates.

Sometimes I start with an opening line, as was the case with “The Modern Brometheus”: (I built a man from discarded parts, mostly found online.)

Sometimes it’s just the shape of an idea. (Werewolves, but they’re dads?!)

Once or twice, it’s been something that’s knocked around my head for years but has never quite found the right form. (I’m thinking of “Carbon Vampire”.)

I write a draft. It’s inevitably more than 70 words long.

I cross out a bunch of excess words. Sometimes whole sentences. I think of clearer, sharper ways to convey certain emotions. I swap out a mention of running shoes for a mention of birth control pills.

The draft is still 70 words long.

I frown. I find the strongest sentence in the draft and reform the story around it, rewriting everything else. I move lines around and say them out loud, earning raised eyebrows from the barman.

When the story starts to take shape, I count words. Usually, I’m hovering around the 55 mark. I reread the whole thing ten or eleven times, swearing blind not a single word can be removed. Then I cross out a sentence at random and see if things still make sense.

The last stage is trimming. Is there a single word as powerful as this two-word phrase? Are indefinite articles necessary or can everything be plural?

I realise it needs a title. In micro-fiction, titles are powerful things. They set expectations, which will be quickly subverted. They’re a legitimate cheat to squash in extra words.

I find the perfect name for the story. Then I realise it uses four of the same words already present in the text.

I spend another twenty minutes down the editing mines.

Finally, gloriously, it’s finished. One last count – a perfect fifty. A beautiful, immutable, whiskey-strength shot of a story.

I inevitably go through at least two more drafts as I type it out to submit it.

Read Dribbles and Drabbles Online:

50-Word Stories: A personal favourite, run by the indefatigable Tim Sevenhuysen. My full back catalogue of publications on the site is available here.

100-Foot Crow: Speculative drabbles of the phantasmagorical for the literary ornithologist.

101-Word Stories: They are kind enough to give you an extra word which sometimes makes all the difference.