Friday Pointless Poll, Drabble Edition

[jeriendhal]

[Poll #1765386]

Comments

[seawasp]

Obviously not long enough, because I wanted some of them to CONTINUE.

[lilfluff.livejournal.com]

Well, as I have been going through ravenswept's 30 Days of Flashfic writing prompts I have been aiming for 1/2 to 1 page on OO Writer's default settings

(Query: Who at Microsoft thought that MS Word should default to x1.15 line spacing, with 10pts of space under each line? I have lost track of how many people have asked me why their computer is double spacing their text when they didn't ask for it.)

I'd say exact word counts for Flashfic/Drabble count only for specific venues and I have seen anywhere from 100 to 1000 words listed.

[drakemagi.livejournal.com]

And while I must choose option one in the category of "technically correct"; my heart agrees with Seawasp.

[seawasp]

Then accept my definitions! Look into your heart, you know it to be true!

[mbernardi]

Technically a Drabble is 100 words (excluding title), however as always seems to happen in English, it's meaning has changed with use to mean a very short, short story.
Pedants shake their heads over this terrible state of affairs.

[aynne-witch.livejournal.com]

At this point the term drabble has become rather fluid instead of the original 100 word concept and has been used interchangeably with ficlet, flashfic and even just plain old short story.

Most likely the tendency comes from English being word heavy when some other languages use terms or short phrases to say the exact same thing. Which would be why English tends to adopt some words from other languages to 'fill in' those needs. Go ahead, translate 'detente' into an English explanation.

[chaypeta.livejournal.com]

I wasn't aware of the original meaning. I consider a drabble to be a short snippet of a scene.

[ankewehner.livejournal.com]

It makes me sad that some people use "drabble" as synonymous with "flash fiction". It's useful to have a separate word for the subset/extra challenge.