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Description " . . . is more than the amassing of details; it is bringing something to life by carefully choosing and arranging words and phrases to produce the desired effect," according to Writing from A to Z, edited by Kirk Polking.

Todd A. Stone, in Novelist's Boot Camp, observes that "Good description has a purpose (or purposes) other than description. Description is not an end in itself; you don't write a sentence, paragraph, or passage with the single goal of providing description. The purpose of fiction is to cause the reader to have an emotional experience. Description is just one more tool for achieving that purpose . . . ."

When broadly defined, description encompasses almost all written fiction. But even when description is narrowly defined so as not to overlap other fiction-writing modes, writers face numerous issues:

* Word choice

* Quantity vs. brevity

* Selection of details

* Concrete vs. abstract nouns

* Verbs: active voice vs. passive voice

* Modifiers

* Comparative description

* Transmorphic description

* Cliches vs. fresh language

* Obtrusiveness vs. transparency

* Disguised description

* Narrative vs. point-of-view description

WORD CHOICE

Rather than having to settle for a word that will merely do, authors who write in English are fortunate to have a vast reservoir from which to draw just the right word.

In Spunk & Bite, Arthur Plotnik notes that " . . . perhaps the most intriguing quality of certain [words] is aptness-an exact, right-seeming match between word and thing."

"Selecting the right word that conveys just the right shade of meaning and can't easily slip over into some other meaning entirely-that is a writer's job," according to Michael Kurland, in The Writer (March 2008).

QUANITY VS. BREVITY

How much description is enough? How much is too much?

Les Edgerton, in Hooked, provides some insight: "In fiction's days of yore, it was perfectly acceptable (and even encouraged) to craft great blocks of passive description, also referred to as windowpane description. But today's description is short and sweet . . . ."

David Morrell, in Lessons from a Lifetime of Writing, notes that less is more. Economy of description may produce clearer effects than description with detail piled upon detail.

"Details may be many or few, but best not to shovel them in wholesale," observes Susan Bell, in The Artful Edit. And "Many writing mishaps could be avoided if a writer thought harder about the notion of necessity-in other words, about language that is, or isn't, necessary."

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