[ SECRET POST #2462 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #2462 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 057 secrets from Secret Submission Post #352.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 1 2 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Oh, I've read the thread. The whole thread. Oh, my...

I'm firmly in the "drabbles are 100 words" camp, and I tend to argue with people over the title, whether they count it or not. (Does the title belong to your story? Does it add something to its meaning? Then why the heck wouldn't you count its words?)

For me, drabble is "100 words including title", double-drabble is "200 words including title", triple-drabble is "facepalm with or without title", and anything around this length or longer can be ficlet, shortfic or flashfic. Please, let's not pretend that all these three words hasn't been used in the last ten years frequently and interchangeably. Drabble is not the only word that can be used, it's just the funniest one.

Yes, words mean things, and words can mean more than one thing, and we often use words incorrectly. Yes, to all of that.

But words/meanings usually don't evolve without reason. A word changes it's meaning usually because something appears, has been invented/imported/reshaped/created and it hasn't got a name, hasn't got a word, and people either has to create something new, or stretch a meaning of an old word. It happens. It happens because it's needed.

Even fandom-related terms can evolve and change, in spite of them being relatively young. "Crossover" has several meanings outside of fandom, and in fandom, the word nowadays often includes specific fusion!AUs, that are appeared maybe in the last five years. Even "slash" and "het" can be ambiguous with the trend of genderbend/genderswap. I've seen "AU" applied on almost anything, and it is a word with a wide meaning, because it's hard to put the "what if" stories and the "everyone is a kind of flower" stories and the "they meet their alternative selves" stories and the "Pacific Rim recasts" and the "genderswap" stories in the same category.

But these changes in meaning usually reflect on changes in trends, contents, fandoms. The "incredible and unique phenomenon of stories that are not long"... is hardly a separate trend, is it? I don't think "not long stories" never not-existed [sorry, that's an awful lot of negation], that's why fandom has several names for them to define, and "drabble" *is* one of these names, except it has some additional meaning that other descriptors don't have.

I guess I could start to write a scene, or a short story, write just what I want, check a couple of (thousand) times and post it, not caring if its 175 and a half words... But the whole process wouldn't be like writing a drabble. Writing a drabble is meeting a challenge. Writing what I want and then taking my clue from Anthony Bourdain and stir and reduce and reduce and reduce while preserving the original meaning and making it thick, biteable. Trying to make an essence and failing, not even spectacularly (English (of course) is not my first language, and I tend to be verbose, look at this comment, even more verbose than this.)

I've always considered "drabbe" as a fandom-equivalent of "epigram". Short and condensed, has to matching a set of requirements, has to kick.

tl!dr:
1) Words mean things, meanings can change, but they usually has a reason for that.
2) Seriously: What about shortfic, flashfic, ficlet and oneshot?
3) Anon is delusional.