I think this sort of refusal and second guessing is blocking you from understanding the spirit.
Writers habitually overestimate how boring descriptions are and underestimate how helpful the specific grounding is. Personally, I’m pretty often wishing for more specification when I read amateur writing.
And this feeling you have that it isn’t accomplishing anything is self-fulfilling — if underwriting is a problem you have, then you probably aren’t spending a lot of time on detailed descriptions, and because you’re not spending a lot of time on detailed descriptions, you have less practice writing them.
You have to add the right details; but of course, adding the wrong details is how you refine your understanding of what the right ones are.
It’s fashionable these days to dismiss “show, don’t tell” as bad advice, but one of benefits of strict adherence is that if you truly believe you must show instead of telling, then you’re always motivated to find the most effective way to show instead of shrugging and saying this telling is good enough, blinding you to non-obvious yet more effective approaches — no, to survive like that you’re forced to get good at writing in a more detailed yet still effective way. This is the asylum I was raised in.
I do find it strange and telling that your first thought when tempted to add more detail is to worry it’ll be useless bloat — to me, it’s obvious that detail is everything. Deeper characterization, stronger setup, more exciting climaxes.
I assume you’ve seen my essays discussing why scenes are long and what detail accomplishes, so I guess what I’ll try to do is turn those principles into practical diagnostics.
Examine every element. Which characters are described and how? How is the location of the scene described? What props are there, and how are they described? Even if you can’t describe everything, be aware where and how you would if, gun to your head, you needed to.
Notice your exposition. At what points do you state what characters are feeling and thinking? Where do you explain backstory or context or worldbuilding? Become aware of how, if you could only use sensory details, you could still indicate these things.
Notice summary and compression. In a sense, everything has parts, you can always get more detailed, but there’s a big difference between “she punched the wall” and “she walked across the battlefield”, or between “there was a soccer ball” and “there was a mansion.” Maintain an awareness of which actions and images are standing in for dozens of steps or parts.
Notice your assumptions. Sometimes, in my writing, I’ll say things like “held in raptorial foreleg,” expecting readers to already know the shape of a mantis’s spiny limb and the way it can close like a vise. It’s worth being aware of where you’re expecting readers to fill in the blanks themselves, where you think the specifics are too obvious to belabor, and what it actually takes for a reader to follow along. The inverse of useless bloat is being pointlessly cryptic; you are saving yourself the tedious work of precision by making the reader do all the work — and given that readers outnumber you, that can easily be an unbalanced trade!
Find meaning in images. This is complex enough it could be dissected into multiple points. How a character dresses and moves will characterize them. Whether a confrontation takes place in a derelict shack or a upclass hotel indicates presages what’s to come. So it may seem like padding to describe posture or attire, lighting and weather, etc. until you get a sense of how this impacts the tone and atmosphere and vibe. And these are important things to render and care for; it imparts and weight and richness.
Look for unique imagery. Your descriptions are only useless bloat if you dont have anything worth describing. After all, this isn’t just an exercise in assigning arbitrary colors to objects or categorizing every facial expression — you’re looking for the images that pop. Interesting, unusual features. Fluff it up with a metaphor if you must.
Track your flow. One of the qualities of underwritten prose isn’t just that it lacks detail, but that it lacks connective tissue. Read closely and pay attention to how the narrator moves between ideas between sentences and paragraphs. Look for ‘jumps’, where an idea or conclusion is reached without enough lead-in, or there’s a sudden pivot from one topic to another. Think about how you could stitch together a bridge to segue if you had to. Sometimes, these jumps add liveliness and cut to the chase, but smooth and digestible prose will prime and lead the reader.
Look for foreshadowing and consequence. This is likely self-explanatory. Think about which elements can assert their presence repeatedly throughout the scene. If a character is going to grab an object the bash someone with it, it can suffice to simply say there’s a lot of scattered trash when you set the scene. But what if you sneak in a mention of it beforehand? You could have the character getting angrier and eyeing the room for a weapon even before they finally lose it. Likewise, getting hit hard is gonna leave a bruise and you can describe how that distracting ache lingers with them, interferes with their escape, etc. This is actually a huge point, because when you’re coming back to rewrite something, then you can also foreshadow things from much farther in the story.
Add requisites and complications. Look at what you have, and ask “does it need to be that simple?” Instead of a character agreeing, what happens if they argue or demand a concession or straight up misunderstand? Look at what conclusion the scene is driving toward, and look at whether you can make the costs higher, force the characters to do more to earn it. Look at what’s achieved in the scene, and think about what caveats or nuances could be added, or comb back over the action and see if there could be side effects, an unexpected detail snowballing into something bigger
(Oh, and Make sure the reader knows who is speaking. This joke means nothing to you right now but it’ll be funny in a few months.)
The first several points on this list are for punching up individual lines, but the last two or three are more structural considerations.
Foreshadowing could mean that you add a single line mentioning the gun on the wall, or it could mean adding a whole page of back and forth dialogue setting up a confrontation later on.
In the essay linked at the start, I have this concept of throughlines. Characters talking to each other is one throughline, but it’s also how one character relates to the environment, or their running interal commentary and emotional reactions.
You can graft a new throughline into a scene — dig into what deliberations run through a character’s head, or give them some activity to engage with while they converse (the infamous walk and talk :^). And of course these throughlines should interact and interfere…
To try and wrap this all up: one of things I’ve settled on as the core of storytelling is anticipation. And through that lens, every line you add to a scene should either serve to create or increase the readers’ anticipation for what’s to come, or to satisfy them and fulfill that promise.
And everything I’ve suggested really comes back to that. You have to look at what you’ve written and figure out: what is the reader supposed to get out of this? How can you make it clearer what they’re supposed to anticipate? How can you compel them to want to see it? And how do you ensure they feel it in all its glory?
You look at one line and go, this line was added to set up that. You look at another and go, that line was added to pay off this.
And that, I would say, is the spirit you’re looking for — tying everything together.