Thanks for your thoughts. The biggest problem I seem to have is not to create scenes, but to connect those scenes into one coherent story, without me feeling that I'm just trying to make the story longer.
The second biggest problem is that I often get to a point where I'm thinking:
"I need this character to go to... <a city>... to meet <some character> in an inn called <something>..."
Then I have to think up names, before I feel that the story can continue. When writing short stories, placing them all about the world, I can focus on one main character that visits a few places, and have the world build itself.
For example, I can have Katharina visit the Faerie Lake in one story, have something happen to her and then make her flee to a village called Crossroad Point. This village can be 5 miles away of the Faerie Lake. In another story, I can have Moredhel fall into the River of Dread to be washed ashore, close to the Haunted Keep.
At these points in time, there doesn't have to be a connection between Katharina and Moredhel. The stories don't even need to be in the same timeframe; if no time frame is stated, they could actually be shifted back and forth, or become situated hundreds of years apart on the timeline, depending on references made in other stories.
The same is true for the locations; when writing these short stories, I don't have to define the length of the River of Dread, or how it runs, and I don't need to define how far Crossing Point is from the Haunted Keep.
In later stories, all the locations could be connected up, and, if situated within the same time frame (or if the character is immortal/has a very long life span), characters from different stories could actually meet. Even later, all the short stories might become prequels to a novel, in which one or more of the characters return.
If done right, one would also be able to read the novel first, in which the characters make references to short stories (already written or not), so, if there is a story about the referenced event, a reader could find out more about the histories of the characters by reading these stories after the novel.
This way, the world would grow organically, as opposed to being completely designed from the get-go. Maybe this is a much better plan than doing a systematic world design, because it allows me to just "write something", using a general idea, and see where it ends.
(Yeah, right. I suck a name such as Moredhel out of my thumb, and who used it before? Raymond E. Feist. @DamnYouFeist. It seems I even didn't read ENOUGH Fantasy yet, or I would have known.)