Listen to me instead of a robot here: Apple, Spotify, Pocket Casts

“What's that? Something on my... Oh, the drabble on this shirt. Well, this is embarrassing. Yeah, no matter how many times I wash it or take it to the cleaners, it's still there - always and forever, forever my partner in this button-down life, ha. I know, I know, why not just get rid of the shirt? Well, it's a good shirt; it was a gift. I don't care if she left me for a French pianist; most of the time, it goes unnoticed by... I'm sorry, do I know you? You seem to care an awful lot about my drabble.”

©️ Nash Urban, 2024
All rights reserved.

No, that’s not what a drabble is at all… (But I guess it could be. My world, my rules and all of that.) So what IS a drabble then?

According to Wikipedia: A drabble is a short work of fiction of precisely one hundred words in length.[1][2][3][4] The purpose of the drabble is brevity, testing the author's ability to express interesting and meaningful ideas in a confined space.

To which I reply, “Brilliant!” and “How have I never heard of this?”

Backing things up a bit, I was cruising through my feed of Substack Notes, iced coffee in hand, trying to figure out if [Notes] was something I truly want to engage with, when I stumbled upon an article by Veronica Llorca-Smith on minimalist writing. I'm simple and I like to keep things simple (for the most part) so the title caught my attention. Part of the article talked about practicing short-form writing and introduced the concept of the drabble to Nash Urban for the first time.

This idea of prioritizing brevity to test ability appealed to me on many levels from haikus to puzzles to wanting to share a nice tidy little piece of fiction. I have a tendency to over explain things both in real life and with my writing—as you might have well noticed. I think there is a saying out there that goes something like "Don't say in ten words what you can say in two." Something like that. Anyway, you get the point.

So today I took a detour from my coursework with the self-assigned writing prompt:

WRITING PROMPT: "100-WORD DRABBLE"

In this prompt, quite simply, I completed the very straightforward task of writing 100 words. No more. No less.

How I ended up with what I wrote was kind of unusual in that it started out as the very first paragraph of the Nash's Notes section. I was going to write the note first, as I kind of had all of that information in my head, and then go back and do the actual prompt. After editing a bit I thought hell, this is pretty much what I needed to write anyway. I mean, it's humorous. It satisfies the writing prompt. I enjoyed writing it. Why not just futz around with it a bit to hit the word count and call it done.

So, that's what happened.

And, as my good park-bench-box-of-chocolate friend always says, "That's all I have to say about that."

See you on the next page,

Nash

…

• Send me a telepathic high-five

• Like, comment on and/or collect this post

• Share with a friend or casual acquaintance

• Buy me a coffee (I love coffee!)

• Consider becoming a free or paid subscriber

Listen to me instead of a robot here: Apple, Spotify, Pocket Casts

“What's that? Something on my... Oh, the drabble on this shirt. Well, this is embarrassing. Yeah, no matter how many times I wash it or take it to the cleaners, it's still there - always and forever, forever my partner in this button-down life, ha. I know, I know, why not just get rid of the shirt? Well, it's a good shirt; it was a gift. I don't care if she left me for a French pianist; most of the time, it goes unnoticed by... I'm sorry, do I know you? You seem to care an awful lot about my drabble.”

©️ Nash Urban, 2024
All rights reserved.

No, that’s not what a drabble is at all… (But I guess it could be. My world, my rules and all of that.) So what IS a drabble then?

According to Wikipedia: A drabble is a short work of fiction of precisely one hundred words in length.[1][2][3][4] The purpose of the drabble is brevity, testing the author's ability to express interesting and meaningful ideas in a confined space.

To which I reply, “Brilliant!” and “How have I never heard of this?”

Backing things up a bit, I was cruising through my feed of Substack Notes, iced coffee in hand, trying to figure out if [Notes] was something I truly want to engage with, when I stumbled upon an article by Veronica Llorca-Smith on minimalist writing. I'm simple and I like to keep things simple (for the most part) so the title caught my attention. Part of the article talked about practicing short-form writing and introduced the concept of the drabble to Nash Urban for the first time.

This idea of prioritizing brevity to test ability appealed to me on many levels from haikus to puzzles to wanting to share a nice tidy little piece of fiction. I have a tendency to over explain things both in real life and with my writing—as you might have well noticed. I think there is a saying out there that goes something like "Don't say in ten words what you can say in two." Something like that. Anyway, you get the point.

So today I took a detour from my coursework with the self-assigned writing prompt:

WRITING PROMPT: "100-WORD DRABBLE"

In this prompt, quite simply, I completed the very straightforward task of writing 100 words. No more. No less.

How I ended up with what I wrote was kind of unusual in that it started out as the very first paragraph of the Nash's Notes section. I was going to write the note first, as I kind of had all of that information in my head, and then go back and do the actual prompt. After editing a bit I thought hell, this is pretty much what I needed to write anyway. I mean, it's humorous. It satisfies the writing prompt. I enjoyed writing it. Why not just futz around with it a bit to hit the word count and call it done.

So, that's what happened.

And, as my good park-bench-box-of-chocolate friend always says, "That's all I have to say about that."

See you on the next page,

Nash

…

• Send me a telepathic high-five

• Like, comment on and/or collect this post

• Share with a friend or casual acquaintance

• Buy me a coffee (I love coffee!)

• Consider becoming a free or paid subscriber