Jayne here, still out on the lanai

Still here in Hawaii, still doing a lot of reading out on the lanai. There is something so special about Hawaii. It's in the air. You feel it the instant you step off the plane. It is soothing to the soul and stimulating to the senses...and the palm trees are so, I dunno. Whatever.

And that is about as much of a description as you are going to get from me because, as a writer, description is my weak point.

When I hit a section of dialogue, I fly. The conversation on the page opens up the characters and the story and I can't wait to see what will happen next. But when I hit a passage wherein I have to actually slow down and describe something, I feel as though I am writing through molasses. Can't wait to get through it to get back to the fun stuff, the dialogue

I just finished Barry Eisler's THE LAST ASSASSIN. Eisler's story takes place in exotic locales like Tokyo and Barcelona. One of his skills is that he can make those locations come alive on the page; make you see them in dark and different ways. When he describes the hardware that his assassin character uses, I find myself actually reading those passages. Normally I skip over any paragraph in a book in which the word "gun" is accompanied by some numbers and dots as in .38 or .22. I generally find descriptions of weapons and cities boring. But I will read Eisler's descriptions because he is so very good at them.

I have come to the conclusion that writers -- at least the ones I know personally and the ones I read -- tend to fall into two camps: those who have a natural inclination and a talent for description and those who have a natural inclination and a talent for dialogue. Of course, to be successful, you have to pick up at least some skill in the thing you're not so good at. Still, I've got a hunch that the instinct for many if not most of us is to tell the story to ourselves first either through description or dialogue. We then share that story with the reader, filling in with the missing ingredient -- dialogue or description -- as needed.

Therefore, I would really appreciate it if those of you who read me would make it a point to slow down and read every word when you get to a descriptive passage in one of my books because you now know that I had to work very hard on that bit.

Who do you read for description and who do you read for dialogue? Or do you even think in those terms? Maybe it's just me.