I wrote a drabble on the train this morning.<\/p>\n
The Merlin<\/i> drabble community<\/a> had as one of the current prompts the word “tree.”<\/p>\n An idea for Merlin and a magical tree instantly lodged itself in my mind a week and a half ago. It drew upon pagan mythology. I knew what the story was, I just didn’t have the words. It needed to cogitate.<\/p>\n After writing out my To-Do List on the train this morning, I continued writing on the notebook paper. To my surprise, it was this drabble, the one about Merlin and the magical tree. I hadn’t thought about it, I hadn’t thought about the words, and yet, there it was, wanting to come out.<\/p>\n Some drabbles take a long time to write. This one flowed out shockingly quickly. All the words were there; they just needed to be on the page.<\/p>\n Surprisingly, it came out quite close to 100 words. The scribbled first draft weighed in at 107 words. A revision to the first paragraph brought it down to 101. Revising a later clause brought it to 100. Then it was just a matter of using stronger verbs and more precise nouns and adjectives.<\/p>\n I wrote out a title. I wrote out a second. I liked neither.<\/p>\n It wasn’t until I typed up the hand-written drabble that I had the right title.<\/p>\n “The Solitary Wood.”<\/p>\n I was pleased with it when it was done. Fifteen minutes work, tops, and it clicked<\/i>. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n I may record it as a podfic this weekend, just for fun, much as I did for “The Twain in Camelot<\/a>.”<\/p>\n You can read “The Solitary Wood” here<\/a>. My other Merlin<\/i> drabbles are here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I wrote a drabble on the train this morning. The Merlin drabble community had as one of the current prompts the word “tree.” An idea for Merlin and a magical tree instantly lodged itself in my mind a week and a half ago. It drew upon pagan mythology. I knew what the story was, IContinue reading “On Writing a New Drabble”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[75],"tags":[737,27,301,4102],"class_list":["post-5537","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-writing","tag-drabbles","tag-merlin","tag-norse-mythology","tag-writing","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5537","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5537"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5537\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5537"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5537"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5537"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}