How descriptive is too descriptive?

It's very easy as a writer to go overboard in describing a scene. I've read novels where you get the impression the writer is giving a report to a police sketch artist, they're so thorough in their description. It's not hard to find character descriptions where you know the age, height, weight, skin color, hair color, eye color, hair style, makeup details, nail polish color, length of nails, every detail of every layer of clothing and more. I tend to lean more towards vagueness when describing characters/scenes. I try to tell what's important and leave the rest up to the reader's imagination.

I think this makes it easier for the reader to plug themselves into a character and assume that role while keeping the story moving. If your lead character is a four foot, two inch, heavily tattooed South Korean woman with a British accent, and you repeat that description endlessly, it's hard for anyone who isn't that person to slide themselves into that role. If you keep the description more vague, then it's easier for someone to plug themselves into that role.

In the first novel I wrote (currently unpublished) I knew Frederick Madden's kitchen so well, I could have easily used five hundred pages to describe it in detail. Would that have helped the reader understand the character more? Not really, so I kept the description short. I told the reader what they needed to know and nothing more.

J.K. Rowling recently found herself dealing with this issue when Noma Dumezweni (a black actress) was cast to play Hermione in the new Harry Potter play being staged in London. As J.K. Rowling pointed out, at no time in describing Hermione had she described her skin color, so there was no reason Hermione couldn't be black. There was the slight issue of having cast a white actress to play her in the movies which helped to set the image of a white Hermione in the eyes of the fans, but in the books, Hermione was described vaguely enough that she could have been of any nationality.

It's very easy to go overboard in a description. I remember reading a first paragraph of another writer's book that used thirteen colors describing surf crashing into a shoreline. It read like a Technicolor mess. None of the colors were different from what one would expect. Nearly everyone reading the book should know what waves crashing into a shoreline would look like and already have a mental image of that scene, so going overboard in describing the scene merely served to take the reader out of the story.

Over my writing lifetime I've had a lot of feedback and the feedback I get most often involves descriptions and oddly enough I tend to get split feedback on this issue. About half of those commenting say, "Thank God you didn't bury the story in descriptions." And then the opposite, "Where are the descriptions? How did the lead feel when he lost his job? What does Sara look like in detail?"

I tend to find lengthy descriptions take me, as a reader, out of the story. I'm more of a storyteller than an eyewitness, so I try to keep descriptions vague enough to keep the reader in the story, but still give the reader a good feel who the character is and the scene. Finding that middle ground is a challenge and you're going to alienate some readers who want more description, or less description.

As a writer you live the story you're writing. You inhabit the world you've created. You know how everything looks, how everyone looks, you know the sights, sounds, smells, and sensations. You're living in this world and there's a natural temptation to try and convey everything you see and feel to the reader. The problem is that it's easy to lose the story when you go into detail on the descriptions.

Look around the room you're in as you read this and imagine how many words it would take to fully describe that room in detail. The wall color, the ceiling color, the floor, the furniture, the trim, the fixtures, how the light hits the room at various times of the day, etc. Would anyone reading a story taking place in that room need to know every detail? Which details are important to the story? If you try to tell too much, you can take the reader out of the story and the story is why the reader is there.

One of the big challenges of writing is learning how much to tell and how to do so in a manner that keeps the reader in the story. It's a lesson that I'm not sure is ever fully learned as different readers want/expect different levels of description.

Finally, just a quick reminded that my novel "Sara X" is still up for nomination in the Kindle Scout program. You can head over, give the excerpt a quick read, and if you like what you read, give me a nomination. I appreciate it! Here's a link to my Scout page. "Sara X"