Henry David Thoreau, author of Walden and Civil Disobedience, once wrote the following: "As to adjective: when in doubt, strike it out." The same goes for adverbs.

In other words, forget what they told you in the eighth grade. NOUNS and VERBS (people and things in motion – sounds intriguing, doesn’t it?) should drive your writing. If you don’t believe this, read Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, Raymond Chandler, James Salter, Ross MacDonald, Ann Beattie, Raymond Carver, Richard Ford, Frederick Barthelme, Amy Hemple, Tobias Wolff, Mary Gaitskill, and James Ellroy. The best writing -- including the best descriptive writing -- of these storytellers and many, many others relies not on twelve-car pileups of adjectives and adverbs but on carefully chosen nouns and verbs.

English has the largest vocabulary of any language on earth, so whatever thing or action you have in mind, there's probably a word for it. Or ten.

And it’s a little known fact that nouns and verbs can actually contain description within them. “He ambled down the boulevard,” for instance: We know that the protagonist of this sentence is relatively happy, and that his setting is an urban one. (You can’t amble if you’re depressed, and they don’t have boulevards in the countryside.) And yet the sentence contains no adjectives and but a single adverbial phrase (“down the boulevard”).

The four “be”s of good descriptive writing:

I. BE CONCRETE
Avoid the abstract.

Write "That dog was the size of a shetland pony" rather than "That dog was enormous." The former is concrete – it’s tangible, actual. The latter is relative and thus nearly meaningless.

While you’re at it, appeal to the senses, especially those other than sight:

"Caddy smelled like trees."
(William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury)

Daisy's voice was "full of money."
(F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby)

By doing so you pull your readers into the scene itself. How? When readers read about the appearance of a character's sweater, they may be 20 to 30 feet away from that character. If you describe the scent of wet wool, on the other hand, they're right next to him.

II. BE SPECIFIC
Avoid generalization; favor specific nouns over general ones. It's not merely a bird on that tree limb, but a bluejay -- not a car, but a "coffee-colored Cadillac" (Chuck Berry, "Nadine").

The following is from Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried":

Until he was shot, Ted Lavender carried six or seven ounces of premium dope, which for him was a necessity. Mitchell Sanders, the RTO, carried condoms. Norman Bowker carried a diary. Pat Kiley carried comic books. Kiowa, a devout Baptist, carried an illustrated New Testament that had been presented to him by his father who taught Sunday school in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma... [W]hen Ted Lavender was shot, they used his poncho to wrap him up, then to carry him across the paddy, then to lift him into the chopper that took him away.

Notice how much (including characterization, and even plot) is achieved through a simple (concrete, specific) list. Notice, also, how few modifiers (adjectives and adverbs) O’Brien uses in describing his characters.

Learn the names of things, and you will earn the trust of your readers -- and their respect. Legwork is just as important to creative writers as it is to journalists. It's part of your job as a storyteller to get on the phone, get online, get out into the world and learn.

Of course, you can't name everything, or your stories will become vast catalogues of undifferentiated detail. Therefore...

Avoid ordinary details and pick the telling ones. A telling detail is one that provides crucial information about a character or situation -- or is so striking, so bizarre or entertaining, that leaving it out would cheat your readers of potential enjoyment. Be very discriminating about your use of this latter category, however.

Note how Hemingway describes the appearance of Lady Ashley, the love interest of The Sun Also Rises:

Brett was damned good-looking. She wore a slipover jersey sweater and a tweed skirt, and her hair was brushed back like a boy's.... She was built with curves like the hull of a racing yacht, and you missed none of it with that wool jersey.

That's it. We do learn about Brett's androgynous appeal to the story's narrator. We don't get a head-to-toe catalogue of Brett's physical attributes. (Nothing here about eye-color, for instance, or even hair-color.)

III. BE CREATIVE
Avoid cliches, once-concrete phrases that have become abstract through overuse and sometimes misuse. Examples:

his heart skipped a beat
strong, silent type
to the last drop

Beware new cliches, for they are coined daily.

"Chiseled jaw" once invoked a very specific image; now it's just another way to say "handsome" (an abstraction). The same goes for "cutting edge," "state of the art," "...from hell."

You must be extra-vigilant here. Even "her stomach rumbled" is a cliche: You didn't write it, did you?

Alternatives: Avoid a cliche altogether, or make it new. Change "heart of stone" to "heart of concrete."

I know you like the back of my hand
With a stamp that says I paid to get in.
-- Joan Osborne, “Let’s Just Get Naked”

Avoid lazy writing that leans on Hollywood: "Susan was a Demi Moore lookalike," e.g. Did Susan look so much like Demi Moore that she was stopped on the street and pestered in restaurants? Was Susan eventually lured to Hollywood with a stand-in gig that never panned out? As a result, is Susan now panhandling outside Mann's Chinese Theater?

If not, then you're just being lazy. Do your job, as a writer: Tell us what Susan really looked like.

IV. BE CAREFUL
Beware inaccurate and imprecise words, phrases, and sentences: "She tossed her head at me," e.g. We know what the writer intends to say here. But he hasn't said it -- he's said something else.

The inevitable result of writerly carelessness is that the oh-so-tentative contract between writer and reader will be torn asunder. Like a sleeper awakened from dreaming, the reader will be pulled from the story, reminded that it is in fact a story s/he's reading.

Raymond Carver wrote that anyone can express himself, but it takes a writer to truly communicate with others. The "creative" in creative writing isn't a license permitting imprecision and inaccuracy.

In his story "A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings," Gabriel Garcia Marquez describes a fallen angel:

There were only a few faded hairs left on his bald skull and very few teeth in his mouth... His huge buzzard wings, dirty and half-plucked, were forever entangled in the mud... He was lying in a corner drying his open wings in the sunlight among the fruit peels and breakfast leftovers that the early risers had thrown him... The back side of his wings were strewn with parasites.

A single carerfully rendered detail (the parasites) -- concrete, specific, and creative -- brings the angel, and the story, to life.