October Novel Prep Challenge

Oh, this is such good food for thought! It's definitely dependent on reader expectations and genre conventions! An author can get away with more description in hard sci-fi or high fantasy than in low sci-fi or cozy fantasy, and with much less in some other genres, where taut, to-the-point descriptions are more prized. (It is, of course, dependent on time period, too. Melville and Tolkien would not get away today with what they got away with before.)

Fans of certain flavors of military science fiction would be furious if the author didn't lovingly describe the new weapons/transports and their specs. Romance readers might not love a two-page description of a forest, but they might be furious not to know how the love interest smells.

My personal metric for figuring out how much description to use is to make sure the POV character notices things that would interest them (and, ideally, if the reader is compelled by the character, these things will be things that interest readers, as well).

Description can also be used to set the tone or create microtension. "The brutal, glaring eye of the sun", while a bit overwrought as a descriptor, will automatically set readers on edge in a regular scene description and prepare them for tension. (It's so easy to go overboard on that, though! I guess there's a reason why sad scenes during rainstorms have become cliché. )

Ideally, every element of the story is serving more than one purpose. Description can paint a picture for readers, sure, but it can also reveal character, set the tone for a scene, or create tension. I like trying to make sure it's doing at least two of those things.

That said, I still have a bad habit of describing too little and get told to bulk up descriptions sometimes. But I guess that's what other pairs of eyes exist for. We can't catch everything by ourselves.