A writing metaphor

On a walk near the village we passed some really impressive cactus covering a hillside.

The more I admired them, the more I realised that this was a metaphor for writing.

The little nubs are the words.

Each petal is the paragraph and the entire plant is the story.

And the collection of the plants is a novel.

OR

We could describe the nub as flash fiction, the petal as a short story, the plant as a novella and the cactus covered hillside as a novel.