On another note, I want to get a lot better at dialogue because when I read light novels, the lines feel so "alive" for lack of better term. The flow feels so good and show personality.
Whereas I feel half of my dialogue mostly exists to just move the plot forward and sound generic most of the time. I think I'll eventually get the hang of it though.
I suggest watching movies or anime and observe how they talk. Light novels mostly imitate the anime’s storytelling style. So the story moves rather quickly and have more dialogues than the conventional novels.
And you can also, as opposed to the general belief, write dialogues that don’t contribute much to the plot. It can just be the character discussing about the pop cultures or just having a witty-banter with each other, which make It feels like a real life when reading such interactions.
But one thing in mind—whatever you do, it shouldn’t be boring.
It's a rhetorical question. As in, "Even if people watch a lot of movies, that doesn't mean you have to turn books into movies."
Sadly, a lot of people do ignore description and just write a ton of dialogue. And that's just not right. It's fine to start that way as a rough draft, but you need to add description to create the scene. If you don't describe it, it literally doesn't exist.
The reader can fill in the blanks, and most definitely will. But they won't create the same world you wanted them to see. And that's why dialogue usually needs to take a backseat when writing.
The best way to describe the scene for me is not by adding lots and lots of details, but rather, be precise about the details you want the reader to know, and leave the basic things to the readers’ imagination.
Like a character’s description as an example. Instead of telling the readers about their hair and eyes color, it’s better to tell the readers the character’s unique aspects and the impression they give off.
Another example, let’s say for the setting. A castle for an example, you can just tell the reader, it’s the castle, and they’ll instantly having the image of a castle in their mind.
But as you said, this way, the readers won’t have the image the writer want them to have, so instead of that, I’ll just be more specific.
“It’s a castle made entirely of ice and has the shape of a dragon.“
See what I mean? I can just add a few more simple but beautiful lines to create the atmosphere and then move on to the story.
The point is, I don’t want to stop for long to read the beautiful descriptions of the castle when a few simple words will do.
Though, in the revising process, when I reread my story, I usually add more details afterward if things start to feel rush. But the description is still just a few simple words for me.
I write more prose, so personal bias has to go with it.
I just like describing how things look, how people look, their changing facial expressions, their reactions and actions, etc to make it easier to visualize things as if they were an anime, movie, etc. Kind of like a play-by-play which I do trim down to try to not bog the flow up too much.
I know there's the rule about not doing that because a webnovel is not a visual medium, but I can't help it
Not only are we the same kind of reader, it seems like we’re also the same kind of writer, huh?