Sometimes authors are afraid that too much description will delay the action, so they avoid it. That is a mistake.
Once you have the reader hooked, you can slow down, you can move to another storyline, you can do a flashback, or you can add description. The reader won’t mind waiting if she is already dying to know what will happen next. She might even relish the wait if you have her properly hooked.
And good description doesn’t have to be flat and uninspired. It can actually help to tell the story.
Here’s an example. It’s a description of Huck Finn’s father.
I had shut the door to. Then I turned around, and there he was. I used to be scared of him all the time, he tanned me so much. I reckoned I was scared now, too; but in a minute I see why I was mistaken—that is, after the first jolt, as you may say, when my breath sort of hitched, he being so unexpected; but right away after, I see I warn’t scared of him worth bothring about.
He was most fifty, and he looked it. His hair was long and tangled and greasy and hung down, and you could see his eyes shining through like he was behind vines. It was all black, no gray; so was his long, mixed-up whiskers. There warn’t no color in his face, where his face showed; it was white, not like another man’s white but a white to make a body sick, a white to make a body’s flesh crawl—a tree-toad white, a fish-belly white. As for his clothes—just rags, that was all.
This tells you what the man looks like, but it tells you so much more. He pops up where he is not expected, and he is never welcome. He is cruel. He doesn’t live like a decent human being. This is Huck’s father. It tells us a boatload about Huck, and Huck’s need to be resourceful. He has been living on his own for a long time and he is only 13. He used to be afraid of his father, but now he is not. This is not just a description of the father, but of Huck himself. And it grounds us deeply into the story. The language, the references, the vivacity all add up to placing us where Mark Twain wants us. We are now in Huck’s world and inside his way of thinking.
The secret to description is to make it part of the story, rather than a static piece of information.