Young Writers Society

I have a problem, I cant describe well.
Like normally I would just write.
She ran up the stiars.
Is there anyway or anything that I can do to help improve my descriptive skills?
Please help~Thanks

Try something like:

[MC Name] ran up the stairs, hopping from step to step quickly, trying not to trip in her haste.

Or that would be something I would write, because the moment I saw that she was running, I thought that she was being pursued.
Anyway, for general help on this, I suggest you just try and find description anyway you can in actions. Describe if she was running carefully, or at full bolt. Little things like that really add up.
I hope this helped!

The key to description is detail; you have nothing to describe if you don't have any idea of the details in your setting. Details like what the stairs look like, how fit your character is, how tired he/she when running up the stairs, if he/she has weak ankles or not, if there are various stuffed animals on the stairs, if the stairs are carpeted. Is the carpet dirty? Is the wooden railing scratched? etc. Not all of these details will be relevant, but envisioning your setting and really thinking about your character, what your character is doing and how your character is reacting will help with this. Just think of the real life things you do. When you run up the stairs, do you breathe heavily? Do you look back down when you run? Do you fix your eyes on your room? Tiny details are what make description and characterization so powerful, so keep them in mind when you try describing.

Hope that helped!

To take this in another direction, why describe things more than that? I'm a fan of simplistic descriptions: not describing anything more than necessary. If done wrong, it slows down the prose and can slip into "purple prose": overly lyrical and hard to understand. Slip in extra description when you see the need, but don't try to force your description into a work. There are plenty of books with simple descriptions, just as there are plenty of books with lots of description. But, to me, describing every little detail turns me off.

Rosey makes a good point. There’s one story in particular that I think of when this comes up, Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. I love the story but I’m not so fond of the way that it’s written because it’s a lot of bulk description. And it really weighs the story down. I remember one and a half pages that were also an entire paragraph about these silly little hobbies. It was complete, unnecessary bulk.

It takes a while but eventually, most writers can find a balance between too much and too little.

I loved the Picture of Dorian Gray, though I do agree that Dorian's huge collections of... everything were really long and droll.
A book that does this extremely well is American Psycho. It starts off with chapters and chapters of what I can only describe as sterile description-- laundry lists. And you're bored but intruiged at the same time and then you realize that these weird boughts of descriptions on every minute aspect of the narrator's life are a bumper between his mad killing sprees. One minute he's chopping someone into pieces and the next he's telling you about his draperies, his nine thousand dollar crystal cups and his state of the art stereo set. And as the killings become worse and worse, you need that strange, clinical prose to shelter you from the graphic violence of the rest of the book. It's masterfully excecuted and I would urge everyone to find a way to write like that, but I've never seen it done in such a way besides American Psycho.
I feel like I've just confused you more; I certainly confused myself. DId that help you understand descriptions?.... sorry.