Let the readers use their imagination. It's OK if everyone doesn't envision the same thing, just so they envision something. I'd greatly prefer "It was a bright, bitter cold Minnesota morning" to 500 words describing the size and shapes of snow drifts, how the sun made the ice-covered trees sparkle, red-faced passersby, the expected high and low for the day, etc. Let the readers fill in the blanks. They're usually pretty good at it.
It actually gives readers more "ownership" of the story to have them fill in the blanks, gets them more committed to continuing to read.
Moreover, in many cases the pictures they paint in their imaginations is far more vivid, and meaningful to them, than anything you can come up with to force feed them. Coax the reader's imagination, don't try to bury it in yours. Unless the details are important, leave them as much as possible to the reader. The exception is when you need to set a mood congruent with a place. But it really is not an exception, because the details that deviate from what the reader's imagination would come up with are important to align the story. For example, your character is stranded in a third world country. The details of half naked children wandering the streets with protruding ribs and empty eyes, shooing flies and birds away from dirty scraps of food, can bring home the mood of desperation in a very concrete way. The reader, with a sack of fast food burgers in easy reach, may not be able to visualize the scene adequately on his own.
Personally i find a book with too much discription a hard slog and stalls the story. Tolkien and lord of the rings was mentioned before and i agree. All the discription slowed things down and my interest waned a bit. For example in a key moment you want to keep the plot going not spend a paragraph going on about things. If the MC goes into a car and you spend ages telling me about the car in such detail then i forget or lose interest as to why the MC got in the car in the first place! It there's a tree say its a tree, maybe expand and say its an oak tree in winter with bare branches. As a reader i dont need to know the tree has rough bark, lots of branches and an owl living in it . . .
I say write what you enjoy reading. Do you like to read little world/setting details? I know I personally love it. I tend to skim through stories that are just 'this happened, he said, then that happened' to see what happens at the end so I can move on to my next book. I love (love. Not like. Not enjoy. Love.) being immersed in little details of a new world. But it is important to not just essay. The details shouldn't be inconsequential to the story, use them to provide insight into characters or social patterns or clues to the outcome of the plot. I'm not sure I'm explaining this well... but yes! Details good!
Haha thanks. I also think that you can lose your readers attention by being too verbose when the reader may not actually understand terms you're using to describe things. Not everyone knows what various things in the world are called or what a name of something means.
Sorry to revive this semi-dead thread but I was away for a few days. I'd just like to say thanks again for all of the helpful suggestions / comments. I sort of discovered what people have been saying since my last comment; about how it is often better to inspire the reader to use his/her imagination to paint a scene through suggestions rather than forcibly take hold of the brush and paint each line myself. Which also makes me realize why films based on books often fail. If each person reading develops their own unique vision of the world then how a can a film not disappoint? I sort of ran into this issue with a short story I just read: The Dunwich Horror by Lovecraft. I had extreme trouble getting through the story. I found the first half to be very slow and uninteresting. The first 2 pages are entirely devoted to simply describing the surrounding scenery which made getting into the story a chore. Anyway thanks again. Now I just need to apply what I've learned.
Example: Nathaniel Hawthorne is an amazing writer, but his details are just annoying sometimes. If you created like...an entirely new planet, yes! What interesting details! But we all have an idea of futuristic environments, so we don't need like a whole BUNCH of details on something. We don't need to know EXACTLY what your picturing, but the main idea, because you have to leave a wee bit to the reader to do, to their imagination. Example, when you describe a character's looks, you may be picturing this red head as Rupert Grint, while I'm picturing him as the guitarist from A Skylight Drive. When you talk about a futuristic gadget, you may be talking about this silver tool contraption, well, I'm thinking of Doctor Who's sonic screw driver. What I'm saying is, the reader does a bit of thinking & imaging themselves. It's what makes books so great. You can be the director of your own movie! =D That's kind of why movies-from-books frequently tend to fail. What you're picturing is probably gonna be different than what I'm picturing when I'm reading your book, just like it'll be different to the set-director when he creates the set to the movie based off of your book. =)
