A little goes a long way

Description begins in the writer's imagination, but should finish in the reader's

Stephen King, On Writing

I hate it when an author tells me a character has dark hair after I have already imagined her as a blonde. That is not the author's fault, or mine, but it does illustrate the power of a reader's imagination to fill in details.

Like me, Stephen King has little patience with writers who go overboard with their descriptions of characters and scenes. Not only does it slow down the story, but it can bore the reader. Do we really need to know every detail of a person's face or every detail about a room. Sometimes a little bit of description is all we readers need. Our own fertile minds can fill in the rest.

"I think locale and texture are much more important to the reader's sense of actually being in the story than any physical description of the players," King writes in On Writing. "Nor do I think that physical description should be a shortcut to character. So spare me, if you please, the hero's sharply intelligent blue eyes and outthrust determined chin; likewise the heroine's arrogant cheekbones. This sort of thing is bad technique and lazy writing ..." If characters are intelligent, determined or arrogant, their words and actions should tell that tale, not their eyes, chins and cheekbones.

King goes on to say, "For me, good description usually consists of a few well-chosen details that will be the first ones that come to mind." If a writer has to labor over a description, he seems to be saying, perhaps  it's more description than is necessary.