Good style in prose is always hostage to the precision, speed, and laconic intensity of poetic diction.
A good rule for writers: do not explain overmuch.
I often say flippantly that the short story is... shorter; you can be done with it more easily. It's much less of a commitment of time and energy than a big project like a novel or long nonfiction book.
You know what writers say about their long books: If I had another year, the book would be half as long.
Writing long books is a laborious and impoverishing act of foolishness: expanding in five hundred pages an idea that could be perfectly explained in a few minutes. A better procedure is to pretend that those books already exist and to offer a summary, a commentary.
As a reader, I have a very short attention span and a low tolerance for boredom, and I find that comes in handy with my writing. If I get bored writing something, I pity the people who will then try to read it.
Column writing is like gas - it fills the available space.
Nearly all interested parties think I write too shortly on the subjects that interest them most.
Long fiction is wonderful and you can lose yourself in it as a reader and as a writer, but short stories don't allow the same kind of immersion. Often the best stories hold you back and make you witness them. This may be one of the reasons some people reject the form. That and the fact that they are harder work to read. A story will not let you get comfortable and settle in. It is like a stool that is so small that you must always be aware of sitting.
I have the exact opposite problem of every writer I've ever met: Every writer I've ever met writes things that are too long, and they have to edit them down.
There are writers who can express in as little as twenty pages what I occasionally need as many as two for.
