Let the reader have an imagination

One of the usual mistakes beginners make is to explain too much.

How much is too much? You need to learn what is necessary for the story. These come with experience, but a beginner can start developing them by recognizing the problem.

The problem is love. You love your story. You love your characters. You love the world you've invented. You want your readers to see them, appreciate them, and understand them just as you do yourself. And since you don't want your readers to start with the wrong impression, you pile up descriptive scenes as soon as the story opens. Or you drop in a big lump of description right after that 'grabber' first line you know you're supposed to have, in order to steer the reader into your vision.

For instance:

    The car plunged through the barrier and over the cliff.
    Nadine prayed the airbag would save her, her generous mouth opened in a scream, her periwinkle blue eyes fixed in horror on the ocean below, her auburn hair, thick and luxuriant, streaming behind her, her elegant, long legs braced for the crash.
    Nadine had always been strikingly beautiful, even as a child. Her hair, less golden then, was always held back by a blue ribbon. In summer a few delicious freckles dusted her nose. Wide shoulders had led, in adolescence, to a bosom of graceful proportions. Her hands were elegant and beauticians often commented on her healthy nails, nails that were now digging into the car's upholstery....

and so on.

How can we avoid this mistake? Rewrite your work, excluding every scrap of description. Now how does the story read? If a detail was not necessary, its absence will not be noticed. You'll be surprised how little description you actually need.

Use action to describe.

From Careless in Red by Elizabeth George

Use dialog to describe. (In the example below, we know their are trees, a fence, markers and in clear view of a house.)

From One Last Breath by Stephen Booth

A basic rule of writing: don't add anything that does not propel the story. Two people rushing through the night to the hospital is action, two people arguing in the car as they rush to the hospital is character development within action. The fact that one of them is six foot tall with blue eyes is neither action nor illumination.

Advice for beginners: cut. And keep cutting until you think you have reduced your story to a skeleton. The skeleton is your story. The rest is blubber.

Source: here 

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Check out Corra's blog about characters today!

TMI, my friend, TMI

TMI = Too much information...

I have edited books where all of the history of mankind have been recorded and the book is about submarines. I don't need that much information!

Use the details you have gleaned from your research judiciously. Just because you have all the detail doesn’t mean you will write it all. The goal is to enhance the reader’s experience of the story and to help him/her imagine the world in which he/she will be traveling, not to teach a history course. Strike a delicate balance between too little description of the world and too much description because either extreme will alienate your reader.

Too much detail or backstory. Many writers fall into the trap of adding too much detail or description. "Describing the color and length of a protagonist's hair is great if it's relevant; otherwise it's fluff you can cut," says Don Muchow of Would That It Were. Diane Walton of ON SPEC deplores "long exposition 'lumps' that stop the action dead in its tracks, so one character can explain to another that their society has been operating in a certain way for centuries, or the long speech where the bad guy explains why he has to kill the good guy."

Sources: here