Writing fiction in Chinese, Japanese and Korean

Chinese, Japanese and Korean share enough typographic DNA that fiction writers meet the same practical questions in all three: length measured in characters rather than words, a vertical writing tradition alongside the horizontal web, strict punctuation rules, and fonts whose weights behave differently on paper and on e-ink. But the three scripts are not one market, and the honest version of this guide gives the shared ground first and then says where they differ.

Characters, not words

Chinese and Japanese text does not separate words with spaces, so every platform and tool built for those languages measures length in characters, and your targets should too. A "2,000-word chapter" rule imported from English does not transfer; set chapter length in characters and judge pacing by that (see how long a web chapter should be). Korean is the outlier: the W3C's Hangul requirements note that "in principle, Korean words are separated by spaces", so word counting works there, though Korean fiction length is still commonly discussed in characters.

Vertical and horizontal setting

All three scripts have a vertical tradition, and Japanese keeps it strongest. The W3C's Japanese layout requirements state that "novels, which are the most widely read kind of book publication, are almost completely in vertical writing mode", with characters running top to bottom and lines right to left. Chinese composition "has two text directions": publications from the Chinese mainland are "mostly composed in horizontal writing mode", while Taiwan and Hong Kong still set plenty of fiction vertically. Korean, in the W3C's words, "is written both horizontally and vertically".

The web serial you post is horizontal; that is simply what screens and platforms assume. Vertical matters when you aim at print, especially Japanese bunko-style paperbacks, and it is a different production path, not an export checkbox. Know which one a project is for before you typeset anything.

Punctuation that carries rules

CJK punctuation is full-width and lives inside the character grid, and line breaking here has laws, not preferences. The Japanese requirements devote whole sections to "Characters Not Starting a Line" and "Characters Not Ending a Line": closing brackets, commas and full stops may not open a line, and opening brackets may not close one. Korean layout carries the same prohibitions (certain closing marks cannot start a line; opening marks cannot end one), and the Chinese rules add that dashes and ellipses must not be split across a line break. Regional conventions differ too: mainland Chinese uses curly double quotes first, then single, while Taiwan reaches for single quotes first, and vertical setting prefers corner brackets over curly ones.

The practical advice is short: do not hand-manage this. Browsers apply these rules automatically; the failure mode to avoid is text passing through tools that mangle full-width punctuation into half-width lookalikes. Keep the manuscript genuinely CJK-punctuated and let the engine break lines.

Fonts: the serif default, and weight on e-ink

Print convention in all three languages runs to serifs: Mincho is the standard for Japanese bunko paperbacks (Kanonara's font research names Shippori Mincho for that role), Songti for Chinese literary publishing (Noto Serif SC is the open-source workhorse), and Korean readers prefer Myeongjo/Batang serifs for novels (KoPubWorld Batang was created with Korea's publishers' association for e-book publishing). Sans-serif is the default in UI and on web platforms, and readers will not object to it on screen, but if print is the goal, the serif family is part of the product.

On e-ink screens the rules change. Hairline and thin weights break apart on low-grayscale panels, so body text should be Regular (400) at minimum, and CJK serifs read better bumped to Medium (500). Another habit that does not transfer: italic emphasis. Browsers synthesize fake italics for CJK badly, and the typographic tradition uses quotation marks or underdot emphasis instead. If you write LitRPG, this matters doubly: status screens want structure from brackets and spacing, not slanted text (see LitRPG formatting conventions).

Line length and leading

The Japanese requirements give the cleanest numbers in the field: the optimal line is "around 52 characters, maximum, in vertical writing mode, and 40 characters, maximum, in horizontal writing mode", with the inter-line gap set "between half-em spacing and the one em spacing" of the character size, and the larger end preferred when lines run long. Since every character occupies the same em square, you can design a page with arithmetic: a 40-character line at a given size fixes the text block width, and the leading budget follows the same multiplication. That regularity is the quiet gift of CJK composition.

Honest per-script differences

• Japanese mixes kanji with two kana syllabaries, and print fiction leans on ruby, small reading glosses above characters. The web serial ecosystem has little of that machinery, so furigana-heavy style costs you online.
• Chinese splits simplified against traditional, and that is an audience and font decision (mainland readers read simplified; Taiwan and Hong Kong traditional), better made at chapter one than at volume two. Print convention indents paragraphs by two characters; on the web a blank-line paragraph style is common and accepted.
• Korean spaces its words, uses different punctuation marks in vertical and horizontal setting, and is nearly always horizontal online. Of the three, it sits closest to English in tooling assumptions.

Whichever script you write, the software bar from how to choose novel-writing software gains one filter: the tool must count, break and render your script natively, not as an afterthought.