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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/8602
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

A couple of pointers I've picked up (apologies if one of them is pulled from another post I wrote):

- **3-5 good descriptors are way better than 10 mediocre ones.** If you're describing an employee breakroom, for instance, you might want to mention the stale glow of the flourescent lights, the constant smell of microwaved burrito, and the mismatched carpeting. And that's it. Does it have cupboards as well? Don't worry, your audience will draw them in themselves. Or they'll draw in their own accoutrements based on what they think a breakroom looks like.

- **Lingering on any one item for a long period of time tells the audience as much about the person doing the describing as the description itself.** You don't even have to call a woman "pretty", for instance, if your main character (via first person or third person limited) notices her hair or her eyes. You don't even need to be particularly poetic in this case, although if you describe them in unflattering terms the audience will think the POV notices her because she's unattractive. 

- **Invoke more senses than sight.** Our primary sense is sight, of course, but it's far from our only sense and it's my experience that your readers will experience much more verisimilitude if you engage sound and (especially) taste (which often invokes some very basic, animalistic responses from humans), smell (likewise), and feel.

- **Dropping descriptive bits in later on in a scene than the beginning is a good thing to try, but it means something as well.** Primarily it means that for the first time in the scene your character noticed some aspect of the room or a character. Sometimes this works well; for instance, if the light catches your POV character's hair in a certain way, this would work really well. I don't know that it just works to say "she ran her hand through her soft auburn hair" though.

- **Try different things out in your drafts.** If you're writing something that's of any length greater than a short story, you're going to probably have to go back and rewrite a few times just for clarity and consistency. For that matter, if you're writing a short story you want to eventually have published, you're expected to re-write it into near-perfection. You may as well try something out (hey, would it kill the scene if I mention that the whole factory smells of rotting fish?) and then leave it for yourself to go back in and figure out later. It's my experience that my judgment of something right after I've written it can be flawed. Sometimes I'll think something is iffy but I'll leave it in and in a later go-around I find that it actually worked really well. Other times... well, that's what rewriting is for.

- **There are no real wrong answers here.** There's just what works for you and what doesn't. If you intend for your work to be published to a larger audience I would entreat you to be very critical in your rewrites, but ultimately it's your judgment. I am sure that I've read people break any if not all of the "rules" I noted above and write effectively in spite of that (or perhaps because they were breaking the tropes). Just try stuff, see what fits, and eventually you'll have a good feel for this sort of thing.

Original score: 7