Description or Dialogue: you don’t have to make a choice

As an avid reader in my teens and early twenties, I couldn’t wait to experience different writing styles. Among the first, of course, were John Steinbeck and Ernest Hemingway. I am sorry, Ernest, I really tried, but you always left me feeling angry and then somewhere over the years, I finally came to realize that this was, in fact, what made you the exceptional writer that you were. As for John Steinbeck it was love at first paragraph with his poetic descriptions of the California countryside near Salinas and his ability to bore right in to the soul of his characters, no matter how colloquial they seemed. Later, when I began to write, I knew, neglecting Hemingway with his ability to tell almost the whole story in all dialogue, was why my descriptions were skillfully written, but the dialogue in my stories, just did not ring true. Finally, the solution came to me. It was not, Steinbeck vs Hemingway, but Steinbeck and Hemingway, two masters of both description and dialogue, and so, I set out, like both of my mentors to incorporate description into the dialogue.