It depends on my protagonist's mood and context. Sometimes he waxes lyrical and lets me get my Tolkien out, sometimes he has his work head on and it's accurate but to the point. There's a subject about which he's rather a nerd and can get carried away with excessive detail, but manages to rein himself in before it becomes a problem in real life.
I often have more description in a first draft. It’s easy to edit down in subsequent drafts. The end product may have more or less description depending on the overall tone or style of story I want.
In the words of a friend who critiqued a piece of my writing. "You over describe everything." I laughed because I knew it was true. I've since started working on my fifth book, and I'm purposely focusing on not over describing.
You might be better off writing naturally and editing later. There's a well-known school of editing that says it's better to overwrite and edit down later than the opposite. I've done both, and find it goes much smoother to chop down sentences or remove some without destroying the flow of the paragraph. But when I try to add material it's hard to fit it in without disrupting that flow. I think it's because when writing you naturally create a certain flow, and sentences fit together in complex ways. For some reason removing something doesn't seem to do as much damage to that flow as adding does. You might at least want to test both and see how it goes. It could also be that you're a visual thinker and he's more verbal. They tend not to like visual description, but visual readers will miss it if it isn't there.
I'm a visual reader and writer. Reactions to my work vary from "waaaay too much description" to "I love the way you drew me right into the scene- I felt like I was there." Shrug. Smile. I shall continue to suit myself and at least some of the people some of the time.
Stephen King in "on Writing" says he plans on cutting about 10% of the story in the second draft. If you know you over describe, then you have that 10% easily indentified.
In my experience as a reader we don't want to know much about the beautiful character ('yeah, yeah, high cheek bones, fantastic figure, I get it'), except maybe a stand out detail (the famous, 'piercing blue/grey/chestnut eyes'), just as @Louanne Learning points out. But an ugly character, we want detail. Not sure why. Maybe its fascination. Maybe its harder to visualise because we don't have mental go-to stock images of 'ugly'. Maybe its to justify the description because we think the author might be being unfair. My personal view, to bowlderise someone or other: "Beautiful people are all alike; every ugly person is ugly in their own way."
Some times I think authors write detective fiction just for an excuse to do this for every other character gets introduced.
The other day I was reading two books - Night Film by Pessl, and Reckless Girls by Hawkins. One was very much like my own story I'm writing - movies, directors, etc. the other was a thriller with a beach backdrop. Pessl's novel had terrific lush prose and really evoked an atmosphere of obsession and unease but Hawkins prose was so airy and dimwitted that I never quite got the sensation that they were on a deserted island. I'd like to write like Pessl but unfortunately I sometimes I find myself writing too quickly and it comes out like Hawkins. Readers get a cardboard signal you're on a deserted beach but you don't really gain any real insight into being there. Sometimes I think part of it is the lack of research. Pessl lived in NY and probably knew and traveled her locations giving them vibrancy. I haven't set foot in any of my locations with the exception of the occasional easy ones so I think I need to double down on my research. Also there's a dance of when to describe and how much is needed. And how the description is going to effect the mood and evoke character. As I'm on my third draft I've noticed oh darn moments in which I'll have my mc describe a new restaurant but later on I don't describe McDonalds forgetting that Kavado could comment on the contrast considering he hasn't been in one since he was a child. Here's my description of the restaurant which pretty much sums up how I describe - building towards an impression & punchline and sometimes using contrast. Kavado is as equally unimpressed by the phony macho franchise as Finlay's lack of 'show manners.' It definitely needs work but ...
I have not focused on giving descriptions of characters, except for some minimum things for a main character. Maybe I will consider changing that approach. I already am giving descriptions to some of the scenery in settings, and there is necessary description to what will become relevant.
I've become more descriptive over the years, but it doesn't always appear in the first draft, and what does is often sporadic. It's something I struggle with and concentrate on quite a bit in subsequent drafts. That being said, the first compliment I was usually paid on my earlier (always unfinished) work was that it was very visual, even though my descriptions were concise and minimal. This is still feedback I receive frequently, but what I discovered early on, or theorized, at least, was that mentioning colors seems to go a long way in a reader's mind's eye. I've always used a lot of color naturally, and apparently people can picture things I don't describe with much detail otherwise. An early example with a lot of color: (Just so this makes sense, she's a shapeshifter, and the names don't mean anything.) Lucifer watched as Athena’s faded purple tank and baggie black camos shrank and recessed beneath her skin, revealing the trim but well-curved body of a five-foot-three, twenty-year-old Thai in blue Keds and ponytail. His eyes drew like magnets to the small, green starfish tattoo just below her belly where a scar the size of a bullet should have been. These days, I try to incorporate other sensations and character's impressions which also seems to go a long way. From my WIP: The barren, semi-arid landscape of West Texas stretched for miles in every direction without a hill in sight. The endless, yellow grassland spotted with mesquite and yucca was hypnotic in its hours-long consistency down Highway 114. It reminded Maggie, who’d traversed the southland several times, just how vast Texas was. Comparatively speaking, they're both minimal, but I think that's fine. I prefer action and dialog to lengthy descriptions when I read, so why not emulate that when I write? Neither of these books is going to win me the Pulitzer, but I'm fairly happy with my descriptions these days. Hopefully they'll continue to improve. Maybe I'll really figure out the secret someday.
Oh, I think that's plenty of detail. Only very occasionally does something call for more than that. To add any more would break the flow of the story, if you try to do it all at once. You're right on the borderline here between what could be called running description (that gives enough detail without stopping forward momentum) and show-stopping detail, which takes an entire paragraph or more. I don't think I even use those blockbusters anymore. It's coming back to me—my tendency is to slow down and write in full detail in the beginning (assuming it occurs to me that way) so as to set the tone and flow of the story properly, and then I usually fall into first draft mode where I skip the detail, with the understanding that it can be added in on a second or third pass. But for me it's important to get the beginning right, to try to find the writing approach that kicks things off and establishes the atmosphere and tone of the story. Once I've done that I can drop into speed-writing mode and leave descriptions out, aside from single words here and there. But it's probably ok to leave it that way for the most part too—there are certain places where description is more important (like a beginning) and where things need to be established. For the rest single-word descriptors usually do the trick. I suppose it's just when something impressive is introduced you need more, or wherever you need a vivid dreamlike moment. The main thing I would have done differently is remove the numbers (her height and age) and instead say something like 'a small compact Thai just out of her teens.' For me numbers break immersion because they're abstractions.
I prefer that amount of detail, maybe even as a max, but I would still call it minimal in comparison to a lot of writers. Any time I catch myself stalling the story with description, I remember how intensely I hate Charles Dickens for filling two entire pages with a description of the front of a house. Some people love that crap. It's why they read books, which is fine. I'm just bored by it personally. I don't use measurements often, but I like numbers, depending on the situation. It's an old, and for several reasons, flawed passage, but I think height, and especially age, sound perfectly natural in descriptions. I definitely wouldn't refer to her as "compact." And this may be neither here nor there, but wouldn't precise numbers be the opposite of abstractions? Unless I'm misunderstanding your usage, I would contend that numbers are pretty concrete.
For description, I would suggest watching the shower scene from Psycho. Think about what is shown, and what is implied in the scene, that make it effective. Give the reader enough to create the general picture, and let them fill in the blanks.
I refer you to my blog thread about visual thinking. Visual thinkers generally don't do well at math because numbers are mathematical abstractions, not visual abstractions. Words are abstractions too, but certain kinds of words conjure imagery. Numbers don't activate the visual cortex in any way. People who are good at math are what she refers to as Spatial/Pattern visualizers, rather than Object visualizers. If I see several numbers close together in reading my eyes glaze over and often I just skip past it, I don't want to go through the effort of switching to spacial pattern thinking for that part of the text, which is something I'm not good at. I get that same twist in the gut I used to get when I'd see a word problem about how many apples Johnnie and Jennie have.
David Weber did this in the Honor Harrington series and made it work. There were several places in the series where he stepped into some fairly complex physics of delta v. But he did it in a way you could skim over it with out it distracting from the story, and even skimming it left you feeling the space combat scene was well thought out and would work in the real world. After the blender Johnnie and Jennie would have enough apple sauce to share.
