The thing that flitted by my mind when I said that was of course the reference to Tennyson, and a side-nod to Blake’s “minute particularity of things” (connection via Tennyson’s “flower in a crannied wall” and blake’s “To see a World in a Grain of Sand And a Heaven in a Wild Flower, Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand And Eternity in an hour”). But re. GRRM per se it was mainly a bit in Dunk & Egg, perhaps one of the earlier fights, where everything is sort of magnified and hyper-real to Dunk (the water or mud or something that they’re fighting in, the weight of the armor) and then later on, at the tourney, similarly (e.g. feeling the weight and claustrophobia of the helmet, IIRC).
It’s actually a bit like that when you have those moments in life, time slows down, and you actually notice the world in a way that you don’t normally - normally we’re preoccupied with listening to our own thoughts. But life or death reality, like, as Boswell said, the prospect of hanging, concentrates the mind wonderfully. This is also referenced in one of the famous Zen koans - something about a guy being chased by a tiger, sequence of dire events, ending with him hanging off the edge of a cliff, and suddenly he notices - well, something like a flower in the crannied wall of the cliff, oddly enough :)
GRRM really gets that, and he also gets that actually you don’t need that many words to give a strong sense of immersion. Vance used to do it too - depict vast landscapes with just a few words that put you right there if you’ve experienced similar things yourself (e.g. on holiday). GRRM also has the other Vancian trope of subtly, just by describing the food people eat in a locale, or the clothes they wear, or their manner or habit, nailing their psychology.
It all goes back to the thing of, when you’re a child, your mind is on fire and you’re constantly creating context around everything you experience (“does it mean this, or this, or this?”). You don’t actually need much explained to you because what your mind is doing all the time is making connections and cross-connections, so fast you hardly notice it sometimes. Great writers are able to re-awaken the same faculty. Things don’t need to be explained in laborious detail, but just by describing the circumstances, the environment, the setting, a gesture, a look, your brain fills in the context, fills in the reality, or at least, guesses at it. (In real life, of course one’s guess would have to be tested, but in a story, the author’s letting you run with the guess that comes naturally first time.)
However, some writers don’t do any of that at all, it’s just “x did A, y says yadda yadda”. If there’s any description it’s spartan in a way that’s not evocative, just sets the scene in a basic way. What’s important to such authors is tracking what happens (story) and who does or says what. Not much interest in evoking. And some people prefer that style.
