Many a good story is short. A few hundred words are enough. Take the Vedas and the Upanishads. Or the Bible and the Koran. But a good storyteller in any traditional society can go on for hours telling a story. If written down, the story told would end up quite long. How to explain this difference? Here goes. Those who wrote down the stories were not the same as those who had told them already. Besides, those who wrote the stories down did it from memory of stories they had already heard. Perhaps most important, those who had heard a good story-teller tell a long story never noticed it was any different when written down short. This is why many a good story is short. And ever shorter, too.