An experienced slush-pile reader doesn't need more than a few seconds to see if a story has potential. You don't need to eat all of a rotten egg to determine that it's rotten.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Good stories flow like honey. Bad stories stick in the craw. A bad story? One that cannot be absorbed on the first time of reading.
I think it's much more natural as a writer to want to tell one story rather than lots of small stories that are half an hour long.
I confess that I am a messy, disorganized and impatient reader: if the book doesn't grab me in the first 40 pages, I abandon it. I have piles of half-read books waiting for me to get acute hepatitis or some other serious condition that would force me to rest so that I could read more.
The reader really has to step up to the plate and read a short story.
As a reader, I tend not to get too much from tales of unrelenting grimness.
You run the risk, whenever you build your story around a central mystery, of either letting it go too long, or revealing it too soon and then taking the wind out of the sails of the narrative.
It can be dismaying, all the same, for a novelist to compare the slowness of the writing with the speed of the reading. Novels are read in a matter of days, even hours. A writer may labor for weeks over a particular passage that will have its effect on a reader for an instant - and that effect may be subliminal or barely noticed.
I would imagine that anyone picking up a book written by me would expect a fast-paced story that requires minimal effort to turn the pages. The reader would also be looking for some out-of-the-ordinary revelations along the way. At the end of the day, I'm a writer who simply loves revealing stuff that is out-of-the-ordinary.
I find that most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one.
I think a story should take as long to tell as it is appropriate to that particular story.