"[Hunter S. Thompson] chose, rather than writing original copy, to re-type books like The Great Gatsby and a lot of Norman Mailer, the Naked and the Dead, a lot of Hemingway. He would sit down there on an old type-writer and type every word of those books and he said, 'I just wanna feel what it feels like to write that we'll.'" HST: "If you type out somebody's work, you learn a lot about it. Amazingly it's like music…
Writing (and reading) short disconnected bits is fairly easy: nothing interrelates strongly, composition is simple and forgiving. Longer works are complex: they have structure, arcs, need to retain interest, jumps and connections need to be plausible, the whole be consistent (unless inconsistency is used for effect), etc., etc.
And you don't get this knowledge simply by copying out great works.
I see a similar failure-to-grasp in some proposals for hypertext or advanced publishing systems. Reading is inherently serial, in that we follow lines of text on a page. Interactivity --- usually defined by the ability to skip between previously-written segments --- just offers more serial paths.
The value of hypertext and related tools may be far more on the writing process, where vastly more sources can be referenced and cited with greater ease. Some might be incorporated into the final work, but an excess of interconnections and quotations is itself distracting.
I see this as a particular blindness of Ted Nelson's Xanadu project, despite many fascinating and original elements to it.