Any tips or advice on how to make description more interactive/immediate to much the pace of the rest of the book?

[Guest]

Hello, I just started writing my new book which is supposed to be very fast paced, with scenes filled with dialogue. (To help you understand, each chapter is a scene in the life of a couple). Usually, I use a lot of description in my books so now, in this project I'm struggling to incorporate description in my scenes.

The dialogue is flowy and direct but when I try to set the scene with the surroundings and the area I fall back into my pattern of writing long sequence of romantisizing the lighting and the landscape as if I was Jane Austen (I'm not).

Do you have any tips or advice on how to make description more interactive/immediate to much the pace of the rest of the book?

[Matthew]

What Carmen said. Integrate description into the dialog. For example: "We're going to be late," she said, stepping over a crack in the crumbling sidewalk. "Walk faster." They turned down a dim alley.

See how the description of their surroundings is embedded in the dialog?

[Carmen]

I incorporate description into the action taken by the characters, even during dialogue. I don’t separate description from characterization much at all.

[Rebekah]

You can always try limiting yourself to two, or three senses per scene. You don't usually need Sight, Sound, Smell, Taste and Touch for every single scene. One other thing I have tried is temporarily changing the page setup from 8 1/2 by 11", to 5" by 8" with a 12 point font and standard novel line spacing and margins. Basically changing what's on the screen to match average novel sized pages helps me determine when a paragraph is getting too long. If my scene description is a paragraph that takes more than one novel sized pages then I trim it down.