Give everything a but

If I had to single out the single best piece of advice on story telling, it would be D. Vincent Baker's dictum Give everything a but. You can find it in

is probably the single best piece of story telling advice I have ever found. In Unframed: The Art of Improvisation for Game Masters from Engine Publishing, D. Vincent Baker writes in the chapter Coherence and Contradictions:

“Deliberate Paradoxes”
It’s the cracks, the seams, the tensions between things that make them interesting. When the players rely on you to improvise things for them to be curious about, to explore and seize upon, you can use inbuilt contradictions, Moorcock’s “deliberate paradoxes,” to provide the appealing texture.
Moorcock’s example, the City of Screaming Statues, is fun and over the top (“Screaming statues? How would a statue scream?”), but more modest paradoxes will do just as well. Even utterly down-to-earth features of a place, a thing, or a character can contradict one another.
I like to say it, simply, as “give everything a but.” The spaceship is hard-worn but lovingly maintained. The island sky is blindingly blue but today the clouds race in. The hocus of the desert cult loves his family with all his heart, but he knows that in the desert you have to choose who will have water and who will not.

You wish your players would perk up when you describe a scene or an NPC and maybe ask a follow-up question or react directly to what you have described? Throw in some buts and see what happens!