: Re: Tips and tricks to describe more I'm careful with the phrasing of this question as it is dangerously close to be opinion based. Everyone has their preference regarding the amount of description

@Cody1607638

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While I'm not the OP, I struggle with this, too. I've written a 500 line story with four or five lines that were not exclusively dialog or blank. I'm autistic and I imagine visual elements visually, rather than in words. It took me decades to realize that isn't something that most people do. I've been working on writing up this very question for a few days, so thank you, Nyakouai, for beating me to it.

I have some rules I try to stick to and I try some techniques as well. I don't know how well these are overall, but it seems to work better for me than nothing. I am excluding some of my dialog limiting rules from this, as this question doesn't state that the issue is excessive dialog. I would of course welcome constructive criticism on these points. There are probably issues here. But this is what I have, so I'm using it as a starting point.

Never leave a multi-line quote stand unadorned. Someone is saying it. Who are they? What tone of voice are they using? (This is particularly difficult for me, because I often miss tones.) Are they doing anything as they are talking?
Never pass dialog back and forth between two characters without mentioning who is saying what for more than half a page. It may be helpful to limit your screen size to better be able to judge this distance.
Periodically look back at what has been written so far, especially whenever I've gotten to the point of a scene change. Has it been explained why the scene change has happened? Have the characters performed any actions that haven't been stated? Most of the time, semi-involuntary actions like breathing and swallowing go without mention, but if there is a significant change to them, that's important to mention.
There must be action before dialog. This action doesn't need to be a lot; it could just be somebody preparing to speak. But before the first double quote of the section, the identity of the first speaker must be firmly established. Since you've only said you need to describe more, you may not need this rule, but my characters talk a lot. I tend to be frustrated in conversations, especially if there's more than one other person in the conversation, and it tends to come out in my characters.
When actions happen during dialog, sentence boundaries are a good place to break to describe it. Longer descriptions can often wait until the current speaker finishes speaking. If someone is speaking when an object comes out that might need to be described, it may make sense for them to have a pause in speech to examine it. You can describe as much as you want between conversations or action scenes, and should at least consider whether there is anything that could bear describing that hasn't been described.
Fight scenes or other high action do not need to describe as much if the characters in the scene would be distracted from the things you might describe. This is ok, they're busy. However, next rule:
Main characters are not allowed to run into the void. You must describe where they are going before the characters actually arrive, unless they're teleporting. (Teleporting is something that happens in a small portion of my stories.) However, even when teleporting, they either need to be going to a previously described place, or they must not be aware of where they're teleporting to. If a character teleports to an unknown location, describing their new location must happen next if they have any senses active (that is, if they're unconscious, you get a freebie here.)
Similarly, the main character in a scene can't interact with anything non-standard in that scene without having at least some minimal description of it. (Why/how is it non-standard?)
Use an editor that autosaves files to a temporary name. You're not allowed to save the file to its proper name without reviewing to make sure there's enough description, or there are at least tags to remind you to put descriptions in places later. On writing this one down, I realize I haven't been following it enough lately. Sigh.

There's a book called The Wind in the Willows. It was written to be a children's bedtime story book. Unlike most books in this genre, it doesn't have a lot of pictures, instead it tries to describe with words. It was adapted into a TV series that ran from 1984 to 1990 which started off each episode with a paragraph or two of descriptive narration. For those episodes which were directly adapted from Kenneth Grahame's written works, this narration was at least sometimes directly from the books.

The technique I've tried that seems to work best for me is to start each chapter with one to two full paragraphs establishing the scene, and imagine that text being spoken aloud by Ian Carmichael (the narrator from that series). In that opening, there's no action or dialog allowed. If there's a significant change of scene within a chapter (this is rare for my stories, as I tend to make significant scene changes be chapter breaks), there may be another one to two paragraphs of required description.

I'm not recommending that one goes to the extent of this book. I'm figuring, if you're like me, there's no risk of that happening. I am instead more trying to push you to taking note of books which do describe things. I'm also not necessarily saying that you would have to use this book as a reference. You can take any book that you think is described really well and use it instead, and you can use any narrator's voice that works for you.

I think Reading Rainbow is probably another good source for examples of well read stories that describe things well, although I'm not as familiar with it as I'd like. I was just over the target demographic age when I first heard about it, and I don't have kids. I do think LeVar Burton has an excellent reading voice.

There are undoubtedly fine narrators in any language; I'm just sticking with people who narrate in English because I'm unfortunately monolinguistic.

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Another technique is to imagine you're telling the story to a three year old. Like many three year olds, this child's favorite question is, "Why?" You're not allowed to just say "because". The child's next favorite question is, "What does that look like?"

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My final technique is to imagine that after you finish writing this, somebody is going to turn it into a film. And they're going to depict everything that you haven't described in the worst way imaginable. This technique never works for me; the thought of my work actually getting that level of recognition is just too funny to me. I'm just including it because I remember someone having suggested it to me at one point.

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