Setting: Are You Saying Enough? Or Too Much?

Outside of my window sits a green bush.

Outside of my window sits a round, green bush.

Outside of my window sits a round, green bush with the evening sunlight hitting its leaves and the remnants of half-eaten sunflower seed beneath its shadows.

Ok...so I started this blog post with three random sentences. About a bush. Outside my window. Exciting, right?

But it was really an exercise for myself to see how I can better describe setting. Because I find that I'm out of practice (ok maybe I just plain suck at it) and that I often just don't say enough about place.

Being a technical writer for so many years means my first inclination is to write something like the first sentence. It's concise and to the point, using the least amount of words possible.

But then that sentence doesn't really tell you anything does it? There's a bush outside the window, but I don't know anything about said bush (except that it's green) or why I even care about it.

So then I said well ok, it's round. Which is true, sure. I've got a better picture of the bush now - it's not some gigantic bush that splats along the side of the house and completely covers the window. But beyond that, can I really see the bush in my mind's eye? And again, why do I care?

So then I took some time and wrote sentence number three. And I re-wrote it about five times, adding more information to it until I not only had a bush, but I had a time of day (evening), I had an indication of the weather (sunny, not cloudy), and I had a hint at life (from birds eating the sunflower seeds beneath the branches).

I could have added even more description about the bush...perhaps the breeze blowing the leaves, or the slight variations in color from light to dark green, or the thin branches that seem to come from no main trunk in particular. But that's where you stop and say to yourself, does it really matter?

So I guess the point of this post, for me, is to learn how to say enough about setting to convey what matters, but to also be conscious of not dribbling on and on about a bush. Especially when I have more important things to say.

Do you have any tricks for writing about setting? How do you find that balance between not saying enough, and saying too much?