The Bee and the Flower

The bee came to the garden to talk to the flowers. “Hello, Miss Flower, how are you today?”

“Mr. Bee, I’m a little worried, you see. There’s a girl in the house who picks several of us each day. My cousins are already gone, so are my sisters. I’m the only one left and now she’s certainly going to pick me later today.”

“Worry not, my dear friend. I’ll teach her a lesson.”

When the girl tried to cut the innocent flower, the bee sting on her hand made the girl run away. Surely she will kill flowers no more.

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What is a Drabble?

A Drabble is a self-contained work of micro-fiction crafted in precisely 100 words. The aim of a Drabble is to master brevity, challenging the writer to choose words carefully. A Drabble must be a complete tale, with a beginning, middle, and a clear ending.

Origins of the Drabble

The concept of the Drabble is said to have been conceived by Rob Meades, David B. Wake, and the U.K. science fiction fandom back in the 1980s. The 100-word format was established by the Birmingham University Science Fiction Society, taking a term from Monty Python’s 1971 Big Red Book, which describes a word game.

During the game, the participants gathered around a fire, sipping brandy and partaking in pleasant conversation with friends whilst challenging each other to write a novel. The first to finish wins, obviously.

However, the first game of Drabble occurred much earlier at the beginning of the 19th century. The winner was Mary Shelley with Frankenstein, and John William Polidori, who didn’t actually finish during that stormy weekend, came second with The Vampyre.

In order to make the game possible in the real world, the members of the U.K. SF Society agreed that 100-words would be enough.

Those first games run by the society became so popular that on April Fool’s Day 1988, Rob Meades and David B. Wake, with Roger Robinson of Beccon Publications, published a book of Drabbles, entitled The Drabble Project, containing one hundred stories, each of exactly one hundred words, and costing one hundred shillings. The book was largely Science Fiction based and won the British National Science Fiction Convention award in the category of Best Short Text.

They went on to publish two more Drabble books, each with a limited run of just 1000 copies each:

The Drabble Project (1988)

Drabble II: Double Century (1990)

Drabble Who? (1993)

The three books contain science fiction stories written by such notable authors as: Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman, Arthur C. Clarke, Brian W. Aldiss, Harry Harrison, Stephen Baxter, Bruce Sterling, and Isaac Asimov.

Decades after the invention of the Drabble, the art of writing 100-word micro-fiction is still going strong.