For the past three years I’ve run a 14-day drabble challenge (#TwelvetideDrabbles) around Christmas time. It’s the only time I write 100-word stories, but I love the discipline of it.

The challenge of looking at the daily prompt and thinking about how to create and resolve narrative tension in a way that speaks to the prompt, is true to the characters and relationship I’m writing, and comes in at exactly 100 words (a personal challenge I set myself). Each year, I write the drabbles around a particular couple and post the individual drabbles as chapters of a 1,400 word story—but each chapter still has to stand on its own as a scene.

I usually begin with an idea, a moment, an interaction, that has to be trimmed away and trimmed away in both concept and language. An evening needs to be distilled into a moment; a post-coital conversation into a single exchange. The first draft will be three hundred words, easy, and then I have to go back make sure each word I keep is essential as I slash and burn.

I typically write much longer fic—it’s rare for me to drop below 1,000 words—so drabbles are a change of pace that I have come to look forward to, in the waning of the year. Sometimes they end up prompting something longer that I take up later, but not always. There’s a freedom in that, in writing an idea in such a compressed space, and letting it go, saying: that is enough.