Scenic and sequel - moving the story on smoothly

I've bee rewriting some of my stock of short stories yet again this week.  I've been reading and researching other published stories, and I've seen that a lot of them hare far more detail in them than mine.

We're always told that a good way to start a story is to drop the characters slap-bang into the middle of the action.  To get the story moving.  It is indeed a good way to start, but I think I've taken the advice a little too much to heart.  For once we've got the story moving we need to look around.  The reader needs to know where these characters are, to put them into context.  Where are they? What's at that location?

And here's where my impatience with detailed description becomes a handicap again.  I know that the character is weaving his way through a very dense grove of navvviv trees to reach the lake.  But the reader is left asking "what the hell are navvviv trees?"  (For the record, they're big forest trees that grow by water.  They have glossy dark green leaves and they're evergreens.  I think that's about all you need to know about them.)

And sometimes I'm so busy setting my scenes up that I ignore their sequels.  The sequel is the link between scenes, a place where the frenetic pace can pause for a moment and give the reader time to breathe.  They can be slower-paced than scenes.  And they can be a place to introduce devices like internal dialogue.

If something really important/shocking/dangerous has just happened to a character in the scene we've just left, the sequel is the place where the character can process the information he or she has just received.  And sometimes there's a need for the character to reflect on the action he or she has just been involved with.  There might be a "why the hell am I here doing this?" moment.

Sequels can also link locations.  I have a bad habit of telling a big scene in great detail, then jump-cutting to the start of the next scene.  The effect is often jarring and disorientating.  And now I'm revisiting my old stories I'm seeing just how jarring that can be.

I'm training myself to curb my impatience.  I'm forcing myself to write the details I'd usually ignore.

Like how the characters get from A to B.  I'm learning to add sequels to my scenes.