"It wasn't my idea!" Fletcher said.
"It wasn't my idea!" Fletcher shot one arm in the air.
"It wasn't my idea!" Fletcher hunched his shoulders.
Depending on the tense you're writing in, following a character's train of thought can give you a bit more girth to your posts, while also letting the reader know about them. If a character catches a particular smell, it could trigger fragmented memories of a past situation. I mean, bringing it back around to the present in a timely way is in order, but having your characters draw conclusions from one thing to another is something we as humans do all the time.
Another thing I've seen people do, especially in introductory posts, is use the sort of shrinking scope approach. Again, you kinda did this in the sample post. It's like a funnel to description, but more like a camera pulling focus, in that you start "wide" and grow more narrow on the subject that your post is about.
I read someone's post recently. They started describing a vast sky in approaching night. The sky threw tall buildings into sharp contrast, the buildings are within a walled city, the walls are dark - there is a dark figure scaling the walls. The poster went into crisp detail about the specific steps leading up to the introduction of our protagonist, the figure scaling the wall. This let us get a look not only at the time of day, but the size of the city, and the type of city he was in from the description of the construction of the scene.
Where are your characters in relation to each other, in the scene? Do they have to cross the room to be within earshot? Is one angry, one meek, the latter shuffling away? Action/visual cues are nearly as important as sprawling prose.
I'm (finally) getting around to reading more books lately. I jot down some things I find that I like, an interesting way to describe a particular emotion, or noting a neat way that an author did x thing. Depending on how much reading and free time you have, you could try and do that to get an idea of what other folks are doing.
Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/RolePlayGateway/~3/aQt9mEfhidc/viewtopic.php
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