Welcome back to the AI Drabble Challenge, a weekly experiment in human and AI creativity. Each Wednesday, I will set a prompt to inspire a Drabble, a story told in exactly 100 words.
You can use any AI model you like (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or others), or several at once. How you collaborate is up to you. Maybe the AI drafts the first version, or writes the whole thing, maybe you co-write, or maybe you use it to spark ideas. What matters is the process, and sharing it.
This Week’s Prompt
This week’s Drabble Challenge comes with a twist: you’re not just writing a 100-word story, you’re channelling a famous author from the past.
From Dickens’ fog-filled London to Austen’s drawing rooms or Poe’s haunted minds, every writer left behind a distinct voice. The fun lies in slipping into their style for just 100 words, to see what happens when your imagination borrows someone else’s pen.
Here are ten voices to choose from:
- Charles Dickens – vivid streets, moral struggle, and human resilience.
- Edgar Allan Poe – obsession, decay, and the slow beat of guilt.
- Jane Austen – wit, irony, and unspoken emotion in polite society.
- H. G. Wells – science, wonder, and a cautionary eye on progress.
- Oscar Wilde – elegance, wit, and the tragic price of beauty.
- Virginia Woolf – inner lives told in ripples of thought and light.
- Ernest Hemingway – spare words, deep silence, and quiet despair.
- Agatha Christie – deception dressed as civility.
- Mary Shelley – creation, consequence, and the ache of being human.
- Lewis Carroll – logic turned inside-out, where nonsense makes sense.
In your prompt, ask the AI chatbot of your choice to write in the style of one or more of these famous authors.
Example Drabble
In the mixed style of Dickens, Wells, and Hemingway
The fog pressed close, thick as guilt, wrapping the narrow street in silence. From the corner shop came a faint ticking, steady as breath in a dying man’s throat. Samuel wiped the soot from his hands and listened, time itself seemed to hold its lungs. He’d sold the last of his hours to a gentleman with eyes too calm for London, a scientist or devil, perhaps both. Now the clocks refused to stop, their faces twitching like nervous skin. Samuel smiled, thin and weary. “Progress,” he muttered, as the gears behind his ribs began to turn. And turn. And turn.
How to Take Part
- Write your 100-word Drabble with help from an AI tool (or two).
- Post your story in the comments, or publish it on your own website and include a pingback to this post.
- If you can, share which AI model(s) you used and the prompt that started your process, we can all learn from each other.
Community & Highlights
Each week, I’ll read through the entries, share a few favourites, and highlight one that particularly stood out, for originality, style, or the inventive way it used AI.
This isn’t about competition; it’s about curiosity, experimentation, and celebrating how humans and machines can create together.
A Closing Thought
AI gives us the tools, but we give it meaning. Let’s see what stories emerge this week, 100 words at a time.
Your Turn!
Now it’s over to you, can you craft your own 100-word Drabble inspired by this week’s prompt.
Post your story in the comments below or link to your own blog, I love seeing the imaginative twists readers come up with. So don’t be shy, join in and show us what your AI + Your Imagination can do!
New to the challenge? Visit The AI Drabbles Challenge Page for all the details and past prompts.
The AI Grandad 