Last night, I dreamt a woman was following me round saying, "a novel is only five hundred drabbles". At the time, I was a bit annoyed (don't remember why) but now, awake, I'm wondering about it. I mean, numerically it checks out (100 x 500 = 50K) which is odd, because my subconcious isn't reknowned for it's mathematical ability; but does it work as a method for writing? Previously, on setting out to write a novel, I've started with a group of characters and some idea of the plot, and let them go, the way I'd approach a fanfic project. On the rare occassions I finish such a thing, it's nowhere near novel length.

If I set out to write a novel all in drabbles, though, I'd still have to set up some characters and a plot; but I could write the sections of the plot in almost any order, and it would be easy to slip them together into order, because they'd be neat blocks of 100 words. It would make it easy to feel sure that I hadn't made it to length by adding in extraneous words; on the other hand, I'd have to find 500 seperate 'points' to make. Any thoughts?

I've never used the drabble technique, but if nothing else, your subconscious has a point that if you faithfully wrote 100 words a night, you'd have a novel-length manuscript in less than two years.

I think a purely successful drabble, which stands alone has a more emphatic structure than a drabble which would be a building block in a chapter or novel -- a standalone has to introduce characters, setting, dramatic tension and resolution, whereas a structural drabble has to successfully link up with the dramatic tension and resolution of the previous drabble, and provide hooks that set up the successive drabble (unless the dividing line is going to be a scene or chapter break, in which case you want to push some plot resolution while leaving strong setup to cause the reader to be really anxious to start reading the next section ASAP. A cliffhanger doesn't have to be imminent bodily peril....)

A writing teacher once told me that not only does every paragraph have its own mini-plot (setup, rising action, climax, denouement), each sentence has an action arc as well, whether it's description or dialogue. Not all parts of the "plot" are necessarily overt, because the reader can fill in the blanks with previously supplied information, and will actually enjoy doing so. (This is how you seduce a reader into being "involved" and invoke a page-turner.) The successively bigger-yet-nested sets of sentence-plots, paragraph-plots, scene-plots and chapter-plots make the larger work cohesive and flowing.

You could do a lot worse than approaching 'every hundred words' of your longer stories as drabbles, and subjecting them to the same level of intensive scrutiny and manicuring, judging every word and phrase as to its value to the micro-plot of the immediate dramatic unit, plus its utility to the macro-plot. It's a lot to juggle... but that's why writing is one of the fine arts, and why you can practice it for the rest of your life and still enjoy it.

I've got lots of page ones, but that doesn't count.

Sean, to answer your question, I don't believe anyone has been comfortable posting original fiction onthread. Email to those interested is a more circumspect way to go. This way you won't end up at a writers' conference a year down the road with someone handing out their pages with your words on them, as someone who posts here tells us has happened.

your subconscious has a point that if you faithfully wrote 100 words a night, you'd have a novel-length manuscript in less than two years.

Which is a thing well worth remembering, I think-- if only because it makes the task sound manageable!

a purely successful drabble, which stands alone has a more emphatic structure than a drabble which would be a building block in a chapter or novel -- a standalone has to introduce characters, setting, dramatic tension and resolution, whereas a structural drabble has to successfully link up with the dramatic tension and resolution of the previous drabble, and provide hooks that set up the successive drabble

One of my concerns would be linking them; but I think it should be possible to use the drabble structure to make busts of information that, like a mosaic, sort of fit together in the reader's mind to create a story.

You could do a lot worse than approaching 'every hundred words' of your longer stories as drabbles, and subjecting them to the same level of intensive scrutiny and manicuring, judging every word and phrase as to its value to the micro-plot of the immediate dramatic unit, plus its utility to the macro-plot.

It would certainly tighten up the writing. Which needs doing.

It's a lot to juggle... but that's why writing is one of the fine arts, and why you can practice it for the rest of your life and still enjoy it.

Heh. Yeah. Thanks for the thoughts.

Which is a thing well worth remembering, I think-- if only because it makes the task sound manageable!

That's the way to do it. It's entirely too easy to psyche yourself out of a big work, even when you're doing an equivalent amount of work each day for your own pleasure.

One of the lessons I've learned in my short time writing fic is the value in writing small, just let each piece be self-contained and stand on its own, and just try to build on the last bit you wrote. Don't know if it'll work for anyone else, but ti's serving me well on Nihilist Chic. (Where, in tonight's posting over on LJ, BTW, many characters finally all meet, and there's even quality violence. (:

In other writing thoughts, after the Horror Writers panel last night, I was looking over some of the boks I have on writing horror and fantasy. Oddly, there's not much particular discussion on character, and this disturbs me.

One of the lessons I've learned in my short time writing fic is the value in writing small, just let each piece be self-contained and stand on its own, and just try to build on the last bit you wrote.

I'm definately going to try approaching it this way. I can, after all, write 44K words of fic that way, quite naturally; my old novel writing "one big rush" method doesn't get past 15K mostly, never past 30K.

after the Horror Writers panel last night, I was looking over some of the boks I have on writing horror and fantasy. Oddly, there's not much particular discussion on character, and this disturbs me.

Yeah. Characters are what make any story work. The power of the best fantasy, IMHO, comes from the fact that while we don't recognise the world, we can understand the people. Horror isn't so much my genre, but what I have read leads me to the opinion that truly good horror springs from characters as much as situations.

The best book I've come across on characterization is Characters and Viewpoint by Orson Scott Card -- most of the Writer's Digest books I've come across are fuzzy and useless, but that had some crackerjack examples and explanations that really helped me formalize my technique.

Susan, what Betsy said. Why an entire trip to London and parents who have no earthly purpose in the rest of the novel? Lose 'em, I say.

Sean, I'll beta anything you want to send me.

Back from LA and I am going to get no writing done this week. Damnation.