I think mine are like badly-rolled joints, kind of lumpy in the middle, and the more subplots they have the more spikes there are, only then it's more like a nerve ganglion than a spiky thing - there are other stories leading off it and you have to be careful not to follow them and just hack them away to get the, the root, the tuber, the story you were after.

Sometimes in longer fic there are missing scenes, missing because I imagined them but didn't write them. Team B has some. Sometimes I just can't be arsed to write a linking section or a sex scene so just leap over it and it never happens, but as my approach to writing stories shorter than a novel tends to be the "DEATH TO THE PIÑATA" approach (flail wildly while swearing until something explodes overhead and rains down more story than you know what to do with) I suppose that's inevitable.