Whether it’s your character or your setting, most readers don’t appreciate being inundated with paragraphs of exhaustive details and descriptions. The purpose of description and its specific details is to immerse readers in your world, allowing them to experience what your protagonist experiences.

The Where:

As part of the action. Exploring or battling, protagonists experience their world through the scene’s activity and emotions.  

Your level of detail and description should match pacing the scene.

Scenes with faster pacing will use less detail, but more strategic placed description and details.

Slower scenes allow for more details and description as seen through the character’s eyes as they interact with their world.

The purpose of description is to immerse us into the story and enhance the images our imagination creates. Different authors and different readers appreciate different levels of detail. For those who like more fast pace stories, detail bogs down the story. Here, the author must work harder to weave the right amount of description into their stories while keeping the scenes moving.

For those who appreciate intricately detailed description to help immerse them into the story, tend to not mind a slower pace.

Pacing is usually scene and genre specific. Action, Adventure, Thriller, Horror are a few examples of genres that usually require a faster pacing. Literary fiction and Fantasy are two examples of genres that can lean into a slower pace. Fantasy, especially is more description heavy as the author is introducing the reader to a never-before-seen world.

 As for scene that require a faster pace, most novels are structured with an action scene followed by a reaction scene.

Clearly the action scene would be a little sparser with details and description, whereas in the reaction scene, the pacing slows as your protagonist can slow down and process the action from the previous scene. Feel free to sprinkle a bit more description in these scenes.

Best rule: less more. Rely on your readers to imagine for themselves.

*Side note: Some rooms or objects are common and don’t need much description.