I've heard the term, but I don't understand. I know it refers to fan-fiction, but what else? What difference is there between one-shot and flash fiction?
Seriously, this question made me doubt like few questions have before. I dunno, but I had to know the answer to this for my life to be complete.
So I went and piddled about in the deep recesses of the internet and came up with the following definitions (paraphrased by yours truly for better reading):
one-shot => A short stand-alone piece, not being part of a series. So pretty much a short story in general, as long as it doesn't have a sequel or companion pieces.
flash fiction => An uber short piece of writing. The general accepted length I found was less than 2000 words.
So there's a definite difference. The one-shot is all alone, and (I'm assuming, as I found nothing about it) can be any length (so I guess even a novel counts, though it applies more to short stories in my own experience), while flash fiction just has to be uber short.
Funny, I never thought this was limited to fanfiction. I've seen a lot of original fiction writers use the term "one-shot" before.
Eh, here's the general usage of terms I've heard/seen them before online:
drabble - usually about 100 words or so,
flash fiction - 500-1000 words, usually on the shorter side, also, done in one sitting much like how we'd do word wars during NaNo
one-shot - stand-alone, usually around 1k or higher, and not usually longer than 10k
Short Story -- usually bottoms out in the 5k range, from what I've seen, at most maybe 20k
Vignette (usually used incorrectly, if going by dictionary definition, and assuming I've spelled it right and thus the word I checked was right) - short story, usually close in length to short stories, but shorter than a novella. Often ranges similar to short story/one-shots, and I've seen them used pretty interchangeably. By dictionary def (from wiki) "short, impressionistic scenes that focus on one moment or give a particular insight into a character, idea, or setting."
Novella - this is were it starts to get sticky, but I'd say about 20k-70k, until it becomes a novel.
Does that make sense? Um, in terms of any classification being related to another piece of work, I've found it doesn't matter -- one-shorts are almost always stand alone, but often are part of a larger series, like an event that didn't fit in to the main storyline, but the author wanted to tell. And it doesn't have to relate to fanfiction at all! Fanfic is simply huge and happens to use these terms (and probably popularized several of them, I would think -- anyone happen to know?).
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