Dribble Drabble Roommate Babble

Picking a movie with my roommate often goes like this--

Me: I'm sorry, I've lost my ability to brain, I am going to be supremely unhelpful. 

Roommate: In other words you're just going to say no to everything I suggest until I give up and let you go back to watching Fringe.  

Me: ... 

Roommate: ... 

Me: ...No.

Yeah, I don't know how she puts up with me either.

One fun thing we do together is dribble drabbles. Dribble drabbles are 50 or 100 word flash fiction stories. We share different challenges or prompts with each other and take ten or fifteen minutes to write up a flash fiction piece and then share it with each other. It's been super fun, and an interesting exercise.

And that's precisely what it is--an exercise. This is a way to flex the writing muscles and try new things before the big projects. It's like squats before the marathon of working on a novel. It's fun and experimental, and something I might suggest if you want to play around with words for a while.

One of my favorite prompts we do is taking an image and doing a 100 word story based on that. Here are a couple of mine:

This is the trick his dad made. This is the card that ends the trick his dad made. This is the queen that’s on the card that ends the trick his dad made. This is the spade held by the queen that’s on the card that ends the trick his dad made. This is the grave dug by the spade held by the queen that’s on the card that ends the trick his dad made. Gone are the bones inside the grave dug by the spade held by the queen that’s on the card that ends the trick his dad made.

Or this:

 His arms reached around me, fingers set softly on the keyboard. His breath warmed my ear and he smelled like mouthwash and dryer sheets. What piece was I learning again? “Like this,” he said, fingers trickling up the keys like shivers on a spine. “Start the scale with your second finger.” He stayed bent over me while I placed my hands on the keyboard. I placed my fingers where his had been, played what he played. Up and down these keys, these strings, these vertebrae. “Very good,” he said.

Yeah, I had to get Benedict in there somewhere :)

But anyway, its been fun, and if you wanted to try it out I'd love to see the results. I've created an entire Pinterest board for these projects, which adds its own challenge because Pinterest only allows 500 characters in its image descriptions. There are only a handful up as of yet, but if you wanted to check it out I'd love some feedback.

Do you think this could be a helpful exercise? Have you done something like this before?

Sarah Allen