I am a spare writer in any case, but working on today's chapter of Steam made me realize --- as I re-read it and also looked at some of the preceding chapters --- how very little I sometimes put into a scene. I aim to give the reader just enough to collaboratively imagine the scene without making mistakes. That is, I don't want the reader to think of a particular locomotive as painted black if I'm later going to mention its red and green livery. But if color doesn't matter one way or the other, I'm probably going to leave it out.

When I was working on Ashes of the Sun, the editors asked me to put in more descriptions. It felt to me like adding an unnecessary barrier between the reader and the experience. If the reader wants more detail, let the reader imagine it. That's what I thought.

As I write Steam, I'm concentrating on presenting the story and getting it, as much as possible, right. (Yes, I know the hazards of trying to be right the first time. There are hazards, too, though, to writing with the assumption that everything can be fixed later. I'll write to get it right so that my readers, reading as I go, get as good and complete a story as I can possibly tell. Later, I will almost certainly revise, but the discipline of this particular first draft is to be readable from beginning to end without backtracking.) I do wonder if, eventually, one of the things I'll add to the story is more incidental detail.

Then again, the result of doing that might be only to add words to what will already be a long novel without adding any new story. Put like that, it sounds like a bad idea.