I haven’t posted a story before and when reading the rules I noticed it said stories needed to be at least 1000 words long. I was wondering if there was a cap on words. is there a limit before I need to cut off my story and start writing the rest as a 2nd part and if so what is that cap? I just wanna know.
There’s only the minimun of 1000 words. There is no upper cap on word limit so far as I know, but the cap comes about through how much effort it is to read through your work. I generally as an author try to avoid the 10,000 word range as I feel it too much to ask readers of fiction to read. 10,000 words is around 20 pages single space and I associate that with my academic writing, so I tend to go under that range because I want to not make my fiction writing similar to my academic writing. I try to aim for 5,000 words but it’s not a hard rule for me. One thing the site does do is color code the amount of words in your story. You’re more than welcome to look at my stories and you’ll see green, blue, and yellow as far as length is concerned. There’s no red and no 10,000 word length story among my work so far. But my short answer is how long your story should be is up to you, but think about how much effort the reader has to give to reading a long story.
There is no official limit! There are some single-chapter stories on the site that reach upward to 40,000 words, I think, though those stories are definitely rarer. And they tend to take longer to approve for posting (since the site approvers read every story that is submitted for posting before they approve it and publish it).
Single-chapter stories (or chapters!) that are 15,000 words or shorter are very common, though.
In some cases, it really does make sense to break up a long story into separate (shorter) chapters. It can attract more readers, too, when the chapters are shorter. But with certain other stories, it just doesn’t feel right to do that—the narrative being told feels like one long single arc, and in that situation a chapter break would come off as artificial.
So you can go with what feels right for your story, I think.