So many of my thoughts and ideas are just fragments, little wisps of ideas that float into my brain. Invariably, I’ll think up some idea of a story, some part of a relationship that I want to explore. So I sit down and write–and lose it completely after the first paragraph. Writing Like Never Before has been one of the most grueling processes for that very reason, because while I have an outline of my ideas and what I’d like to occur, I still have to fill in… And the fill-in, the fleshing out of the ideas into sentences and paragraphs can take me months, many of them sitting in front of my computer in completely frustration because I can’t get out the words that are there. So often, I feel like an amateur sculptor, staring at a blob of clay, seeing what it could look like, but never knowing how to get it out.

Perhaps that’s why I like drabbles so much. I read other people’s and I’m inspired… They’re short, just 100 words wrapped around one moment, where I strive to express as much as possible. I can put down my fragmented thoughts and somehow get it to say what I want it to–like my drabble about Jess’s leaving and how Luke was dealing–there wasn’t enough in me to make that a complete story, but in a drabble form, I think I got down pretty much what I wanted.

I’m not a person who thinks poetically–there’s too much of the scientist in me, but with drabbles, I can come close. Lately, I think I’ve been thinking in drabbles… cutting out words, rearranging phrases, finding words that get just the right meaning. I think I verge on the sentimental a little more than I would like, but I think the form forgives that.

And I try to experiment more with drabbles than with any other form. Besides my experimentations with LOTR, right now I’m attempting to write two about Kirk–one a sonnet to LuLu and the other in the viewpoint of Cat Kirk… And it’s so hard!! I have a hard time writing humor, but I hope that playing around with this will give me some practice. I’ve tried writing different couples than I normally do (hence the Kirk and LuLu)… but as hard as I try, I cannot write Tristan–I wanted a Tristan/Paris one and considered exploring one about Rory from Tristan’s viewpoint, but it’s no use. I just can’t get inside of that character, he’s so foreign to me.

So here’s a couple more that I’ve been playing with. Same theme: lost cause, first one is slightly AU.

More GG Drabbles