Smoking story revisited

It looks as if it really is possible to write a really short story or RSS that is about the length of a blog post, as I surmised in a previous post.

The story  satisfies this criteria and it also satisfies a couple of other criterias; it has a storyline and a conclusion, for example.
But it doesn’t satisfy the criteria of having `sharply defined characters’ and `description.’ A couple of the characters are defined, but not very sharply, and there is hardly any description. The question is, is it worth sacrificing sharply defined characters and description in order to keep a story as short as possible. Wouldn’t it be better to forget about keeping the story as short as possible and have a longer story with sharply defined characters and plenty of description instead.
Another advantage of writing a longer story is that it’s possible to include other aspects of story telling. The story can have more ideas, more themes. It can also give the writer more scope to demonstrate his writing style more scope to inject some of his attitudes into it.
This re-write of the opening paragraphs of the story (see below) still doesn’t have very sharply defined characters or much desciption. But it does show how a longer story can have more ideas and themes and how it can also give the writer more scope to demonstrate his writing style and reveal some of his attitudes.
`The smoking shelter. A transparent structure without a door and gaps at the top and bottom of the walls. Overhead an electric heater warms the air as it gusts through the gaps and almost as an afterthought warms the smokers below it. On a wall a flat screen TV is screening a football game. The shelter is just a few yards from the pub and because it’s near a window people in the pub can see the people in the shelter and vice versa.
The shelter’s futuristic design doesn’t harmonise with the pub, which is called `The Redcoat’ and was built in 1751, mostly to serve the needs of the British Redcoats who were based in a nearby army barracks. Their needs mostly centered around drunkenness, gambling, fighting and whoring but in their rare contemplative moments some of them smoked clay pipes.
Nobody knows this but about three feet under the smoking shelter lies a broken clay pipe which was owned by a Private Thomas Alsop. He forgot to take it out of his mouth when he got into a fight over a girl and near the pipe are the decaying remains of a couple of his front teeth which were clenched to it at the time.
So really, if places retain a certain presence over time the smoking shelter already has a presence, a history, of smoking. It also has a history, a presence of romance, because the girl the Redcoats were fighting over was the pub landlord’s daughter, a decent girl, rather than a whore.’