A little on writing

Lately I've been digging into my short fiction writing and I find that, while the ideas I have seem solid enough to be short stories, I often start to blow them up. To counter this tendency of mine at a particular point in my story I re-anchor myself with a few questions: What is the overall focus of my piece? Why is this event occurring now? And is this vital for the reader to understand the decisions and actions in the story?

These questions help me to trim excess world-building and give me the ability to change certain scenes (or even whole stories) to better relate my main theme of a given piece. From this I seem to use my main theme as a structure for my story, the main point I try to get across, and use world building as flavor to add to the main point. I find I tend to see characters as part of my main theme, but the details around them are what give them depth and more story than I could write in a hundred pages.

These questions also help me to come up with ideas for my stories. To go back to my difficulty with over expanding on my ideas I guess part of the issue is how I view short fiction and full novels as stories. I like to think that all short stories an be manifested/expanded into novels and that all novels can (with a lot of work and a large amount of interpretation) can be cut down to short pieces. So I tend to feel conflicted when writing short stories in particular because I know I could easily write books about the characters and events that my 'short' stories are about. Every so often I'll find that my short stories have info-dump sections with very little happening and I feel that in part this is unacceptable because I don't have to give the reader everything, only enough to create the story I am writing. Thus the questions I put across in the beginning here to help me cut the excess world building or at least reinstate it with meaningful details.