Characters come alive and places feel realistic when a writer describes them perfectly. With excellent descriptions, you pull your readers closer to your characters, their surrounding universe, and the actions that are unfolding. This skill is essential to efficient storytelling, and you need to hone it if you want to create compelling stories. So, to improve your descriptive writing skills, you must be familiar with the seven rules explained below.

1. Appeal to the Five Senses: To make your description come alive in the mind of your readers, you need to appeal to their five senses: smell, taste, touch, sight and hearing. Like, when your character gets a hug, what fragrance is their perfume? In a dark alley, what can your character hear? How does their skin react to the weather outside? What was the color of the sky on that fateful day when the story began? And what does the coffee taste like in your character's favorite cafe?

2. Don't Ignore the Little Details: What makes your characters real is how many details you can present about their appearance; the color of their eyes, the shape of their nose, thin or thick lips, the shape of their jawline, clean shave or full beard or a week-old three o'clock shadow. Describe their mannerism. Like, how they like to walk. Do they talk with food still stuffed in their mouth? Do they have an accent? How do they prefer to dress?

3. Describe the World through your Character's Eyes: Readers' interests are always in the characters; they want to see what your characters see, hear what they hear, smell what they smell and feel what they feel. When your character walks into the room, what captures their attention? When they meet other characters, what physical features do they quickly notice? These questions not only tell us about the universe of your story, but how your characters view that universe.

4. Make Description a Part of the Action: This practice is helpful in fast-paced thrillers as well as in every other genre of prose fiction. There is no need to stop an unfolding action for a vivid description when that vivid description can be a part of the action. Like, instead of stating the weight of an object, describe how difficult it is for your character to carry. Or rather that describe the weather, narrate how your character reacts to it; does he rub his palms for warmth or take off his jacket for comfort?

5. Let your Readers Fill in the Blanks: If your setting is somewhere your readers are familiar with, there may not be a need to describe in detail the sight and atmosphere of the environment. For instance, when it's Christmas in New York, everyone knows there will be snow outside, so it wouldn't hurt if your description assumes the reader already knows something this obvious.

6. Let your Imagination Lead you: Try to visualize the environment and characters you are creating, and from your imagination, craft the details of your characters and the environment they are living in. A good imagination is the key to writing a beautiful description; if you can envision the streets, the houses, the faces, the colors and the objects you are about to describe, then you many steps closer to giving a splendid description.

7. Be Selective and Specific: It is not ideal to devote pages to describing every single thing. Some aspects of your description should be told not shown, and this might seem to run contrary to the famous "show, don't tell" golden rule, but it doesn't. You have to pick descriptions necessary for the story you're telling and magnify those, while the rest can be glossed over, inferred or even ignored. And when you choose to tell, be specific. “A red 2022 Mercedes AMG E 53” is more specific than “a red saloon car.”