short scenes and problem detection

I am always concerned about short scenes, especially when I have several in a row as in my last posting for E-ships. For one, I usually suspect that they are not complete scenes in themselves. For another, I like them to be more clearly stand-alone. The number symbols help, but when they are published, it's often just a line space separation and it has to be clear with the words that the reader has gone from one scene to another, one time to another, one place to another. Otherwise, the bit of dialog should probably be part of a more substantial scene, to incorporate that clarity. It is possible to get all the elements of a scene into a short space, but on rewrite, I will exam short scenes especially closely, and often find that they are missing a key element, such as clarity of character, mood, setting, or change/story progress. In many cases, they hardly achieve one much less all of the needed elements, though the rest were clear in my mind. Getting the writer's image to the reader though... always the ultimate challenge.

The reader may also have noticed that I'm missing some character and place names. I have a name for the chief of the ground crew, but have to look it up and forgot to put it in my list of characters, so that looking it up means scanning a lot of text to find it. The place name I don't have yet, and haven't decided even whether I need a place name or a better topic of discussion. Places that have no role in the story... usually that means the whole reference to them adds nothing to the story and needs to be replaced or dropped. Enough topics within the story are worthy of expansion that every single sentence and every phrase in a dialog can and should add depth, not irrelevancies, even if the reason for using it in a given scene is separate from the content, a means of conveying the nature of the relationship between characters, the nature of the business they are in, or some other element of the culture.