Do you think that it is better to give the reader a vast amount of detail, or leave it to their imagination? Especially with regards to settings and the appearance of characters.

What I try to do when describing a character is to pick out the most salient features first. Too often, people think the eyes and the hair are the most important. But these are too general to me-I'd rather hear about the way a character's nose crinkles or his nostrils flair than the fact that his eyes are blue and his hair is brown or whatever. So I try to answer, what features best characterize this person, or what is most noticeable/ unique about them? Same question with setting descriptions. I try to let the descriptions come out through the character's actions.

I have always been rather a minimalist, my writing a bit on the "terse" side. Mind you, I've sold like that, but lately I've been trying to put at least a little more description in and reach a balanced and kind of in-between point. I'm not sure that either is right or wrong. It's a style thing.

There is a difference -- to me -- between describing a character, landscape, situation and evoking it in the reader's mind.

For me -- using specific details rather than general ones is one of the most critical parts of desciption. General details don't evoke clear images nearly as well as specific ones.

You could say -- he went cautiously into the scrapheap. Metal balanced on metal teetered over his head. The place stank.

Or, he walked along a narrow path putting one foot down in front of the other. At times he had to bend his body into contortionist shapes to avoid projecting shards of cerro-steel, some possibly radioactive. His shirt was ripped before he reached the first turn in the path and he had all manner of small cuts on both arms. The stink of dead bodies increased as he entered the site of the most recent wrecks.

Yeah, I didn't give a lot of general detail in the first example, but did the second, despite having a lot of detail, bring the place to light? You could go on for quite a while detailing his path through the metal wrecks, but the reader can only sit still for a little of even this sort of specific information before he starts looking for story stuff to start happening again. At least I find that true when I'm reading.

Douglas Preston and Lincoln Childs have a series of books (Relic, Reliquary and 3-4 more after) that revolve around a very fussy and proper FBI agent named Pendergast. In scenes dealing with Pendergast or his brother Diogenes they are very meticulate in pointing out small details, types of furniture, food, clothing quality etc. This bolsters the feeling of propriety and reinforces several aspects of the personalities of the characters. When they are centering on other characters the tone changes slightly and the focus of detail shifts, for Detective D'Agosta, they are put far less emphasis on these things and reveal the world in a more mundane manner.

In a more general setting, I like a few key details and then I fill in the rest, this can also be used to exploit a readers pre-conceived notions.

That's a bit extreme, but it gets the point across.

I have found two disadvantages to excess detail.
1. It's boring. It isn't like a photograph or a movie where your breath can be taken away by a beautiful snapshot with infinite detail. No, it's words that are read and processed into thought and it takes time. It slows down the pace of your story and often doesn't mean half as much to the reader as it does to you--because a lot of the time it just doesn't come through well, (the reader will still not see what you see even after 1000 words, henc ethe expression)

2. It isn't how the reader wants to imagine it. Sometimes it's enriching or even necessary to explain that our hero has black hair and is six feet tall. But until you say that, any given reader who happens to be four feet tall and blond might be able to imagine the character as someone much more like themselves. Detail can distract from that illusion, which is an important illusion, I think. I want my readers to connect with my characters in every way they possibly can, even if it means being a bit more vague and leaving more to their imagination. I think that is, generally, what readers like.

But then again, I thought Tolkein was overly elaborate and boring. So I guess you just have to play to the style that you like.

The recommendation I heard back in the late 80s was to have calm periods in the story between the action, to give the reader a moment to rest before the next action takes place.
My understanding of the recommendation was to have just enough discription during the action period to let the reader know what is going on. Then, during the calm periods, one provides more detailed discription to set the world in place, and to fill in background information.

Also, the type of information makes a difference. In my Waxy story, the reader does not have to know how the portal works other than it is run by the mainframe computer. I don't discribe what it feels like to "transmit" between worlds. It is not neccessary. I just show how it works.

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I had the pleasure of attending a Toastmasters speech given by a fellow named Randy Harvey who won Toastmasters International's prestigious "World Championship of Public Speaking." The day I heard Randy speak he told his audience how he WROTE the award winning grand prize speech. I listened avidly because everything he said about award-winning speeches applies to writing.

The specifics that stick with me were how important it is to leave some space for the listener (in your case, the reader) to customize the imagery. Randy's award-winning speech was called "Fat Dad", and was about himself and his father during Randy's years as a teenager. He talked about his favorite old car... a Volkswagon. He never said a COLOR. He didn't want to shut down the listener's involvement with the story, to push them away because they start disengaging. ("Oh, your car was yellow? That's not like mine. I had green.") We all had old cars we loved, and he wanted us to feel the love of the old car, not get tripped up on whether our imagery fit his or not. He spoke about his dad wrapping him in a hug, and feeling his dad's old flannel shirt against his skin. But he never specified the color, because while his dad may have worn a red flannel shirt, maybe your dad wore a blue one. The color is unimportant... the texture and feel of comfort of being in your father's arms is all the description that really mattered to making an emotional connection with his story.

He let us build our own mental imagery and populate it with the things near and dearest to our OWN hearts. In short, he gave the audience enough space to allow them to co-create the speech with him.

I learned a lot about describing a scene from him. No one wants to read a laundry list of attributes. Instead, they want to connect emotionally and in a tactile way with the action.

It's not that I never describe appearance at all. But I no longer feel forced to make the reader see something through my eyes. Instead I try to leave a little space for them to paint the imagery themselves.

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