Many times when writing, I get a very specific image in my head of the way I want something to look, or the way I want something to move. Particularly with actions where objects are moving in a very specific way, I want to describe them accurately so that most readers would see the same thing that I’m seeing in my head. The problem is, I don’t want to come off as sounding too technical (the object slid along its Z axis and suddenly stopped and rotated 45 degrees on its Y axis), and I also don’t want to be so vague that a later sentence contradicts what they were seeing in their head.
Is this just a psychological thing that I need to get over and stop worrying about, and just write to the best of my ability and edit when I hear critiques/comments from readers, or is it a skill that I need to improve?
I just generally describe it as well as I can then accept that every reader will envision it completely differently.
That’s the best thing about reading, in my opinion.
Outside of combat, I have very little that needs to be described in that much detail. I do have one specific mechanism in my Living Dungeon story that I felt needed that level of detail, and the description went through a few edits to fine-tune it to communicate the idea accurately but keep the writing clean enough to not be jarring to the reader. I am fortunate enough to be able to get some feedback to help me in that process. I felt that this mechanism needed to be accurate because it is relevant at several points in the story.
The less relevant it is to story beats, the less I am worried about specific details. I have a second mechanism involving large colored, glowing crystals in a ceiling. I described the basic layout and the colors, because they were relevant to events in that room, I did not describe the shape of the crystals, because it doesn’t matter.
In combat, how much detail I go into depends on the fight. Less important/low-stakes fights get more of an overview. A duel or spar with setup and some emotional charge? I am getting down to blow-by-blow, especially if I want to show the progression of a character’s skill or power, and when getting that detailed I often need to specify which hand a person is using to do what, so that I can line up the action properly.
A right-handed person has a shield in her left hand, and therefore deflects a creature’s charge to her left, and is thus spinning left to slash her axe across the back of its leg. I could have described it as her spinning counter-clockwise, which would be more technically accurate but would pull the reader out of the story more to think about. ‘spinning left’ suffices.
So, I would mostly just try to be sure that it needs to be described in detail.
