Every scene a story

I sometimes have the illusion that I can write short stories, but ultimately, readers recognize that they are, could be, or should be part of a novel or a series, a larger world than a short story. The illusion, I think comes from noel scene writing. The ideal scene is a story in itself: characters, setting, emotions, a change. A short story doesn't really require any more than that, although to be a really good scene or an adequate short story, all of those have to be really well developed. Where they differ is that the scene must carry the greater story arc of the novel, take it forward a step. I suspect that where I go wrong with short stories is that I have in mind more of the world, what came before, what will come after, and it leaks into the story even when I want it as a story rather than a scene.

Similarly, where I find myself less satisfied with my science fiction scenes than my quest fantasies, is that there are always new scene settings for the quest fantasies, whereas my space SF tend to be rather contained in a ship or two, a city or two, or as one I am working on, air-base prisons that are much the same from one to the next. That means that many scenes might share the same setting, and I don't have to, shouldn't spend as much of the scene describing that setting. Even if I include a few words and phrases to remeind the reader where they are at, add a different detail as some prop becomes more pat of the scene instead of an unspecified background element, I still end up with less richly described scenes. It's appropriate, but leaves me feeling like something is missing as I work on my revisions.

What do you look for when you revise your scenes?

alien versions of English

Okay, right off, I know the ast scene in E-ships has problems, for one, valley hillbilly doesn't really make sense, and certainly isn't the sort of phrase these people would use. On the other hand, is it something my readers will understand? Think amusing? Hillbilly has all kinds of implicatinos, mostly what I intend here, including the mountain base (though outsiders think of them as coming from the valleys, they themsleves think of themselves as living on the mountains) but are there other words that would provide the meaning without the apparent contradiction? And is the contradiction absurd, or clever? Sometimes, I just don't know.

And then there is the "witty reparte" between the two. Does it come off right? Endeavor is probably too high end a word for the hillbilly. I enjoy writing the word play and rarely have the characters who would participate. I suspect half of it is a stretch of my imagination to see a connection between the words at all, and that the other half is too blatent to seem anything but trite, but that, too, is hard to tell from the writer side of the equation. How does it come across to the reader?