Writers, brace yourself: lots of readers, especially genre readers, skip descriptive passages in novels. Yes, I know you spent hours, if not days, getting that loving word-painting down. I know it develops mood, reflects character or theme, creates foreshadowing and sets, literally, the scene. That doesn’t mean readers don’t yawn and skip, or at best skim, it.

Writers like Robert Jordan have taught genre readers not to bother wading through long passages of description which turns out to be not relevant to the plot. No-one cares what colour, style and material the women’s dresses are, Jordan!

It does, of course, depend on your target readership: some people love the full immersion of knowing every last detail about every last thing, so they do, in fact, care about the women’s dresses. These readers are both brilliant – you can show off the immense amounts of research you did – and kind of annoying – they will pick up on every bit of research you got lazy about (…thought you already knew and forgot to confirm). And tell you about it. With references and a full bibliography.

Personally, I’m not a big fan of very long passages, or passages that don’t seem to advance plot or establish character (but I never skip). On the other hand, if the writer gets it right (I am thinking of Michael Chabon and Susanna Clarke here; you will have your own favourites in mind), the descriptive bits can be some of my favourite bits, because of the atmosphere they create, because of the tone they set.

Hard to please, ain’t I? I can’t tell you how to ‘get it right’ because what’s ‘right’ differs for every reader. Here follows some general tips.

Generally, you’re better off integrating descriptions – of the landscape, of people’s clothing, of food at a feast, of character traits, of worldbuilding aspects – into the plot, dialogue tags and action sequences. There’s no need for a couple of dumped-in paragraphs describing the physical characteristics of your hero if you can casually slip in things like ‘He brushed his silky golden locks from his smouldering dark eyes and gazed manfully down at the wench pressed gasping against his broad, tanned, heavily-muscled chest’.

Ahem. Got a little lost there. Don’t try to fit the entire couple of paragraphs in: use what’s natural and relevant (keep it short and light on adjectives) and spread it over the book, but close to the first introduction of whoever or whatever – earlier is better, so your readers don’t get an idea of what your characters or landscape look like which is rudely dashed a few pages from the end.

Key word: relevant. Just as you hold most of your character’s backstory out of the book, you keep the physical descriptions down to what helps the reader connect to what is happening to the characters (action-wise or development-wise) and how events relate to each other. Balance pure description with action and dialogue (and integrate, integrate, integrate). Descriptions should support the characters and the plot, not drown them in welter of unnecessary detail…

…or in badly-written prose. Because that’s another thing: getting it ‘right’ means doing it well. Be accurate and precise in your descriptions, choose strong verbs and specific nouns, don’t waffle unless that waffle is spectacularly entertaining. Try for originality but be careful of twee-ness (don’t describe a grey sky as the colour of a sad wedding, please).

As with all other aspects of writing, be conscious of what purpose a descriptive passage fills: Are we just getting the reader from one place to the next? Unless that journey’s character-building, does it need to be described in anything more than a few lines at most? Is the landscape bleak but the character chirpy? Is that a deliberate mis-match or a jarring accident? Does a character’s appearance reinforce their backstory and personality? If not, why bother mentioning it in any detail?

Use description the way movies use backdrops and music: if it’s noticable, it should be because it’s good, not because it’s bad.