lunabee34

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Come up with a word for me then. Bits of writing that are short but do not exist in exact 100 word increments deserve a designation, cause ficlet implies some meat. To me anyway.

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musesfool.livejournal.com

snippet.

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That's a good word.

Thanks.

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musesfool.livejournal.com

S'what I'm here for. *g*

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Oh see, ficlet implies short to me. "Short short"? I feel like I saw that term in a writing magazine once.

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"DaisyDuke"?

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See, I *knew* you would come up with the clever, funny answer. LOL

*loves*

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ta! But I must be a blockhead because I quite often write for no money.

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Clever :)

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Short short is good, too.

Ficlet implies short to me too, but in my mind it always means longer than a drabble, the max of which is 500 words, right?

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To me, "ficlet" is a short piece of indeterminate length. If I had to define it, I would say anything under one thousand words.

I have seen communities define "drabble" as anything under 500 words and it makes me want to scream, because the prescriptive definition of "drabble" is 100 words exactly, no more, no less.

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Hmmm... I had thought that drabbles could be 100, 200, 300, 400, or 500 words long, but you are of course correct.

Set by the Birmingham University SF Society as thus: a self-contained vignette of exactly 100 words, no more, no less, with up to 15 more words are allowed for the title. Hyphenated words are in dispute. The term originates from a Monty Python skit: "Drabble. A word game for 2 to 4 players. The four players sit from left to right and the first person to write a novel wins." Drabbles started in British SF fandom in the late '80s. A half-drabble is fifty words long; a double drabble is 200 words long.

From the Fanfic Glossary (http://www.subreality.com/glossary/terms.htm#D).

This makes my nomenclature dilemma even more pressing (ha! as if any of this is pressing *g*), since not only is there no accepted word for under 100 words, there's not one for between 101 and 500.

The Glossary has no entry for ficlet.

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The glossary does suggest "vignette," which now that I see it I think I've used/suggested in the past (though it has its own connotations, so I would probably find it an inaccurate descriptor for some v. short stories).

*Googles*

Drabble is also sometimes used colloquially to refer to any short piece of literature, usually fan fiction, where brevity is the outstanding feature. Some stories, called "drabbles" by their authors or readers, total as many as 1,000 words in length. However, such a story might more accurately be termed "flashfic", "shortfic," or "ficlet"

Related concepts
Microfiction (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microfiction) is a story in 250 words or less, and nanofiction (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanofiction) is a story with a maximum of 55 words.

-from Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drabble)

(My personal definition of "flashfic" is like

contrelamontre -- written in a v. short period of time, so I don't like it as a blanket descriptor for a v. short piece of fiction.)

Personally I tend to just avoid the issue and say "I wrote a #-word fic" (having time constraints has caused me to become a big fan of knowing word counts in advance of starting to read a story).

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Simply using the wordcount is probably the easiest way to resolve the issue.

I don't know why, but I hardly ever check to see how long something I've written is in terms of words. But that's easily done.

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Once I started wanting a wordcount on fic I went back and plugged all my fics into a wordcounter and added that info to a header. (My detail-oriented and citation-happy nature shows up like whoa in my fic headers.) I've also come to really enjoy being able to see at a glance how various fics compare to each other lengthwise and get a feel for how long the stuff I write is.

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I managed to get someone else to use my coinage of "Byatt" for "half-drabble."

When I was still writing B7, sallymn referred to both Blake and Avon as "My Darlings" so I referred to Avon as "My Client" and was delighted to hear altariel1 refer to "Your Bloody Client" during a discussion.

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Cool. I need to coin something, now. *muses*

In Byatt, are you referring to A. S., and if so, why?

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She's Drabble's kid sister.

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