Character Names

Chapter Length

There is no standard for chapter length, really. Mine are usually between 1500 and 3500 words. It's up to you as the author to subdivide your story how you want. However, you shouldn't do it randomly. Each chapter should have some sort of unity and continuity to it. The scenes/parts of your story contained in a chapter should fit together in some way.

That said, keep in mind that twenty or so lines of dialogue for a chapter is usually frowned upon. If that's the entirety of your chapter, then it had better be some extremely deep and meaningful and revealing dialogue and not just a filler where the characters speak for the heck of it and make idle small talk. At the same time, if a chapter is too long, readers might get bored or frustrated, depending on whether anything exciting or significant happens within that large chunk of story.

In short, chapter length doesn't matter all that much as long as you make each chapter count for something. They don't each have to contain a major plot point or a hugely important character development, but it probably shouldn't look like "A and B saw each other at the bookstore and said hi while avoiding eye contact like the awesomely awkward people they are and then left." Exercise discretion.

What defines a oneshot?

In the broadest sense of the term, a oneshot is a story that isn't broken down into chapters or other similar types of segments. It can contain more than one scene, but it's not deliberatedly and distinctively divided up with page breaks, chapter titles, labels, etc.

However, if you use this definition, you have to ask yourself, what's the cutoff for length of a oneshot? After all, you could write a 50,000 word story without putting chapter breaks in it, but few people would be inclined to call it a oneshot.

In general, a oneshot will probably not exceed 10,000 words (though the ones on lj are really pushing this limit, haha). The oneshots I write are usually about 2000-7000 words long.

I think a better way of defining a oneshot is by how narrow the focus of the story is.

A oneshot doesn't have to occur within the span of a single scene or a short period of time. It can span multiple scenes, events, and even years of time. Oneshots are narrow in the sense that they focus on a very specific unifying subject or theme and don't have any extraneous subplots. They tend to be slice-of-life type snapshots in the lives of the characters that they focus on, but they don't have to be.

Oneshot, Two-shot, Three-shot, the Author Gets Shot

How long should you make your story? If there's any advice I can give, it's that you shouldn't just go by what's popular. There are quite a few stories on AFF that are eighty-something chapters long that probably should have been five. Yes, readers do say "I'm sad that this is over" when stories end, but the truth of the matter is, they understand when the story needs to end. If you think your readers will love you for prolonging a story that should have ended twenty chapters ago, you are sadly mistaken. The length of your story should be dependent on the complexity of the plot as well as how much detail you provide in your narration rather than whether or not your readers want you to write more about DongwooxYou or your desire to milk as many subscriptions, views, and comments out of a story as possible.

From a practical standpoint, your story should last as long as it takes to resolve the major conflicts and give a sense of closure (remember Chapter 9). The problem with AFF is that people keep tossing in brand new conflicts into their stories and don't know when to stop. Rather than develop a relationship to a reasonable point and call it a day to let their readers imagine a bit of what happens after "The End," they write the characters' entire life stories, just about. Within the story, the characters get orphaned, get adopted, get abused, get introduced, get to know each other, get drunk, get a detention, get laid, get kidnapped, get into a car accident, get , get arrested, get pregnant, get engaged, get shot, get married, get amnesia, beget an army of children, get into affairs, get divorced, get remarried, get buried, and then some before the story is finally marked "complete." That, my fellow writers, is the definition of overkill. Think of it as trying to blow a bubble that's too large for the amount of bubble solution you have--all it does is pop on the bubble wand in your readers' faces. All of that potential wasted because you were too ambitious about blowing a huge bubble. You're better off blowing a smaller bubble that actually has a chance of flying free from the wand for your readers to admire until it pops on its own.