: Re: I have too much dialogue, how do I add more description? I was looking at the last book I wrote. In it, I failed to meet the word count I had set for myself by a big margin, like 40,000

@Sarah872

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Think about your non-dialogue as painting a picture of everything that is going in the scene. You want your reader to have a clear picture of where your characters are, how they are positioned in their environment, what objects are in the environment, etc... This only applies to what is important to the story. You don't want to be overly descriptive--that's boring.

Try going through your draft and taking notes. For every scene, make a list of what you know about the scene based only on what you have written on the page. That will help you determine if something is missing that needs to be added. Whenever an action occurs that causes a change in the scene, make sure there is description of that action and the results of it.

To keep it interesting, the description needs to be active. Give "life" to inanimate objects in the environment by describing them with action verbs. If your character is holding a knife, instead of writing:

He held the glistening knife in his hand.

Try:

The knife glistened in his hand.

Eh, maybe not the best example, but hopefully it gives you an idea. In the first, "glisten" is an adjective; in the second, it is a verb.

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