My daily advice to aspiring authors: If it doesn’t need to be said, please, don’t say it.

Imagine yourself sitting at a gathering for a friend who just got back from some exotic place, and all they want to talk about is the style of their hat, every rivet in it and the metal they were made from, the colour of the metal, the spacing between them and the banding beneath them, what the banding was made from, the colour of the banding, the tensile structure of the banding, the netting attached to the banding, the colour of the netting, the shape of the holes in the mesh the netting is made out of, and the rigidity of the mesh, the shirt that it rubbed against, the fabric of the shirt…

Are you still reading, or did you skip? I wouldn’t hold it against you if you did, because the previous paragraph is an example of how horrible it is to read a story that is excessively detailed. There’s a fine line between enough and SHUT UP! That is a line that, as a writer, you ought not cross.

“But Azy,” you say, “details flesh out a story and set the scene so readers can see the picture in my mind.”

Look, I know you’re in love with yourself and your brilliantly creative mind; writers are typically narcissistic to one degree or another. But as hard as it is for you to accept, the fact is that readers couldn’t care less about what’s in your mind! They care about what’s in their minds. They love their incredibly brilliant imaginations, and they don’t need you interfering with it, thank you very much!

My point is obvious: allow the imagination to do its job. While detailing the lace and burbles on a wedding dress may be necessary in a book like Great Expectations, since it’s not something one might imagine on her own, it isn’t necessary to be overly detailed when there is nothing extraordinary about it; a short, concise description of the dress is all the imagination requires to conjure it up. Going beyond style, colours, a few brief details, and the over all role of the garment (such as delineating cost, class, or lack there of) intrudes upon the imagination and opens the door for reader-initiated skipping.

Summation: If you share too much, STOP. You’re not making a more detailed book, you’re making a more boring book.