Visuals

It's incredibly difficult to convey visuals through text. I think anyone who has ever attempted to write can understand this, and anyone who has ever read a story has probably scratched their head at least once while trying to understand what it was the author was attempting to convey. We're highly visual creatures, and that can't be helped. But sometimes it simply isn't enough to say that a person was punched or kicked. We have to describe how, and where, and what effect it had, all of which would easily be able to be seen, by describing such through words is another matter entirely. Not to mention such details as what a person was wearing, where they were, and what they saw.

Sometimes we can get away without these details, and there's nothing wrong with that. I do it myself all the time. I'd like to think that a person would be able to decipher in their heads what things look like through context clues, rather than having to be told outright what it is that they're supposed to be visualizing. However, it can be vitally important to have such exact descriptors, such as in the case that they change dramatically and somewhat suddenly. Knowing precisely what is wrong with these changes and what they mean adds an amount of depth to the situation that can't be otherwise discerned.

In these cases, it may be tempting to simply put those details in moments before they are relevant, or in the very moment that they are. This ensures that the details are fresh in the reader's mind, so that they can quickly understand what is happening, without having to think back on something that may have left their minds long ago. And while that can be okay, you have to be careful. Waiting too long into the story to drop such details can create a division in the reader's mind. If a person's clothing is changed abruptly late into the story, and only in that moment is their normal attire explained, this can potentially be very different from what the reader had previously imagined their appearance to have been. This creates problems in their perception of the character, and potentially the rest of the world that you have tried to build.

So if you're going to attempt to include vivid descriptions of appearance, it's important to make sure you do so at an early enough point. You don't, however, want to cram it all too tightly together early on. This can make the descriptions drag on, boring the reader, and if such descriptions don't continue on for the rest of the piece, then there is a distinct shift in style from the opening to the main story.

And of course, on top of all of these things, if you're not any good at descriptive writing, then it's all for naught. Fortunately, that is probably the easiest thing to fix. Like all other writing, that comes down to a matter of practice. The more you write descriptively, the better you get at it. You have to think about it more in the beginning, but as you go on further and further, it becomes easier and easier to continue writing at high levels without having to think as much about it. That way you can save your brain muscles for deciding what goes where and why and how and what significance there is to every decision. Which is all a lot more subjective to each individual piece and therefore significantly more complicated.