Thank you, Lisa - I'm glad you find the approach helpful. Stories can be a bit like bread dough: Knead. Let rise. Knock back. Bake. Break off bits to enjoy.
I think we underestimate the potential that any story has to generate microfiction, poetry, haikus, cameo pieces, reflective essays, and so much more. All of these involve either expanding a tiny moment and looking at it from different angles, or condensing a longer story into a key moment, distilling its essence down to a smaller form. Yeast promotes expansion. Gluten provides tension.
Stories are the bread of life.

Thank you for your comment, Alicia, which made me think about the reading practices you brought up: skipping over things, filling in gaps imaginatively. And then there's the 'just right' - where we are immersed in a story, where we can lose ourselves in it, where we can just follow the flow of events as they are told, or revisit a well-told story and enjoy discovering the unfamiliar familiarity in it. Isn't this why we engage with story in the first place?

Because anything less than the right length will feel WRONG to the reader.

It requires the self-discipline to lose beloved - if too long - lovely pieces of writing, and to worry about the effect of a piece that is somehow NOT enough.

The pace, the balance - each writer's special take.

And something readers can manage a little (skipping and skimming the boring stuff, thinking along fan fiction lines for things originally too terse), but that's all.

Best served by finding authors where you instinctively feel at home. Like the story of the three bears: just right.

The one sentence story by Hemingway that you included always makes me sad. It's amazing how much power is contained in such few words.

Thank you for this thought provoking article, Leon.