Short is equivalent to an elevator pitch—no more than approximately 150 words or about 75 seconds. (Research indicates that, when you tell a short, informative story to an executive online, their attention span maxes out at 75 seconds.181)

One of the tacit promises of a short story, because it is so short, is that there’s no waste in it. Everything in it is there for a reason (for the story to make use of)—even a brief description of a road.