Ken Liu (incorrectly referred to by the OP below as “Lee”) is a prolific short story writer and, as of recently, also a novelist. He uses an apt metaphor to point out what those of us who write in both forms generally discover: they’re structurally different, and the skills involved in writing them are not all the same.

Originally shared by Kantuck Nadie Nata-Akon

Two interesting writing articles.

The one from Mr. Lee sums it up best for me. I posted this to an IM to a writing friend.

(10:06:16 AM) Kantuck: Mr Lee writes: “When I write short stories, I generally don’t outline at all. I can  proceed by instinct and experimentation, feeling my way and sculpting  the story piece by piece while the shape of the whole is held in my  head.”

(10:06:47 AM) Kantuck: I’ve said before I can write a short story or micro fiction because I can see it all in my mind. But a novel? almost impossible.

(10:07:09 AM) Kantuck: although I /do tend to get a bit wordy, once a story starts going./ Case in point my last one 🙂

http://www.space.com/32384-writing-scifi-requires-a-sense-of-scale.html

and

from TV tropes:

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ScifiWritersHaveNoSenseOfScale

I think I can scale this down to help get more of a scale. Imagine me, living in Kentucky USA and want to walk to Juno, Alaska. According to Google maps that’s 3,315 miles. At 15 miles a day, that’d take me around 8 months.

Now scale that up to just the size of the solar system and go to Pluto. 7.5 billion km; uh…jezz…12,962,962.96 years.

Looks like I’ll need a couple more hiking boots now.

http://www.space.com/32384-writing-scifi-requires-a-sense-of-scale.html