Fun notes about description I've recently crossed in my exploratory travels:

GingerCoffee · Jul 31, 2014

http://www.writing-world.com/fiction/description.shtml

The advice:

To make your stories more interesting, you must find ways to blend the description into the story. Descriptions that just sit there are generally known as "narrative lumps." Like lumps on proverbial logs, they sit there and do little to your story. Send those lumps to the gym and make them work out. They can set the scene, move the plot, set the mood, foreshadow events, give us a sense of character, whatever they have to do to get the ball (or log) rolling.
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The example:

"Zara grabbed her mug and gulped it down, shivering when a few drops the ale trickled under her leather top." I made my words work for me. I didn't have to say "The ale was cold. She wore a leather top." Instead, I used action to fit that description into the story in tiny bits.
How did I come up with that line? It came from imagining Zara and what she might experience when she drank that ale.
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Hopefully you've already heard to include all the senses:

Taste is harder to include as humans don't tend to go around tasting things unless they're eating, but be sure to include it during love scenes.
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http://www.writing-world.com/fiction/settings.shtml
The advice:

Let your description unfold as a character moves through the scene. Consider which details your character would notice immediately, and which might register more slowly. Let your character encounter those details interactively.
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The examples:

Suppose, for example, that your heroine, an "Orphan Annie" of humble origins, has entered a millionaire's mansion. ... Let her observe how soft the rich Persian carpet feels underfoot, how it muffles her footfalls, how she's tempted to remove her shoes. Don't tell us the sofa is soft until she actually sinks into it. Let her smell the fragrance of hothouse flowers filling a cut-crystal vase.
Use active verbs to set the scene. Instead of saying "a heavy marble table dominated the room," force your character to detour around it. Instead of explaining that "light glittered and danced from the crystal chandelier," let your character blink at the prismatic display.
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The advice:

What we see is profoundly influenced by what we feel. The same should be true for our characters. Filtering a scene through a character's feelings can profoundly influence what the reader "sees."
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The examples were better relayed by going to the link to read. Is you character having an incredible time exploring the wilderness she is hiking across, or is she seeing that same landscape as grey and distressing because she is lost and tired and wants to go home?

http://www.writing-world.com/fiction/location.shtml
The problem:

I wrote about settings I knew and invented details for the ones I didn't.
After a few dozen rejections, I wound up in the hospital with diabetes. I stayed there for three days, and when I got out, I returned to my computer to work on a story I had started a few months before -- a story which happened to be set in a hospital.
This story had earned a number of rejections, and as I reread, I began to understand why. My made-up hospital was simply wrong. Beds and curtains and bustling nurses do not a hospital make.
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The solution that cracked me up:

I added details that had stood out when I was a patient and used them to spice up the story. I talked about the over-moist pineapple cake I got at dinner and the cramped space around my bed where visitors barely had room to sit down. I described the IV tube that snaked around the rails of the bed and the smell of urine that wafted through the room every time my cathetered roommate opened the bathroom door. By the time I finished, that hospital was real. I printed it out, mailed it off, and voila -- it was rejected by an editor who didn't like vampire stories.
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The advice:

Rather than following the "kitchen sink" approach, pick out a few details that exemplify the setting.
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The examples:

There's a local bar where one spot of carpet is a brighter green than the rest, marking the spot where the manager used spray paint to hide a vomit stain. That one detail not only captures the atmosphere of the place, it also gives us a bit of insight into the manager.
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And more advice:

... In general, readers do about ninety-five percent of the work when it comes to description. If you provide those key details, the reader will do the rest.
... What makes your setting different? What detail makes this [place] distinct from every other [place like it] in the world?
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The advice:

... Think about difference in terms of your story. What makes your spaceship/castle/dark alley/bookstore/portable bathroom different?
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The examples:

... find a way to make this place interesting. How does my cubicle stand out from the rest? Maybe it's the Mexican radio station playing on my supervisor's computer in the next cubicle. The array of Lego Star Wars models scattered around my work station is another possibility, one that gives a bit of insight into me as well. Or it could be the tiny black gnats who colonized the plants by the fax machine and like to crawl across the computer screens, looking like rogue pixels. ... describe the fact that your space explorers are constantly tripping over rabbits scurrying through the halls of the ship, a result of defective DNA freezers back when it used to be a colony ship.
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Don't hate the editing:

Discovering the setting can be one of the joys of revision.
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I have more but I'll stop here and post for now.

GingerCoffee · Aug 2, 2014

Here is another helpful bit continuing on the theme of treating your setting like a character:

http://www.writing-world.com/sf/setting.shtml

Thus just as you might give a character long blond hair, a manic desire for revenge, a tendency to be deluded about his/her own importance, and a fear of snakes, you might give your setting automated walkways, a manic desire for consumption, an autocratic social structure, and an indifference to its ecological impact on the world around it. And just as a character might evolve and change as your story progresses, so can your environment....
If you view your environment as a character, as having a kind of sentience that you create, if you bring it to life for yourself in the course of creating it, there's a good chance it will come to life for your reader and greatly enhance whatever story you are telling. ...
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Taking that concept a little further:

... setting in science fiction is akin to character, give your setting a temporary sentience and pretend that sentience is your own, just as you would with a character. Take on the values of the society you are portraying, the physical characteristics of the world you are portraying. How does this world feel about your characters, about itself? This can lead to some interesting insights, not only in terms of the setting but with regard to your narrative and the story as a whole.
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GingerCoffee Web Surfer Girl Contributor

Fun notes about description I've recently crossed in my exploratory travels:

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Fun notes about description I've recently crossed in my exploratory travels:

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