#my fandom knowledge is lowkey rusty so i might be wrong about this but thats how i think of it

[timelesslords]

is there a rule for how long a drabble is? like at what point does it turn into a one shot?

I'm pretty sure the old school technical definition of a drabble is 100 words exactly, but now people just use it to describe short pieces (so like less than 1000 words typically). I think ficlet and drabble have sort of morphed colloquially to mean kind of the same thing because ficlet used to be fics between 100 and 1000 words, like the transitional phase between a drabble and a one shot.

I feel like using the word drabbles now sort of implies that it was written quickly or without much effort, which was not necessarily the case before but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I think most people would classify one shots as one chapter stories that are above 1k words in length.

What's really interesting is when people stop considering one chapter works one shots, because you can have a whole 50k story in one chapter, so does that still count as a one shot? Personally I feel like my limit is in the 10k-15k range because any longer and it feels too narratively complex to be classified as a one shot but i know others disagree.