When I write, I focus on dialogue because of the way I function in the world. I listen. I believe it’s a survival skill honed from years of teaching junior high. If something is going on, I want to know about it. Kids seem to believe that if your head is down or your back is turned, that your ears shut down. So, I sit and grade, head down, collecting data. Every now and then I may look up and say, “Watch your language,” to a kid in the far corner, which always causes looks of alarm to ripple around the room. The funny thing is, I can say this without having heard any language, but the kids automatically assume that someone must have said something and my teacher radar picked up on it. This generally silences them for almost ten or fifteen seconds.

When I’m in a learning situation, I often close my eyes to focus on the speaker, or I stare at my paper. My kids do the same thing and often got in trouble for not listening in class during their younger years, when in fact, they were probably listening more than the average student. I don’t generally watch TV. I listen to it while doing other things. I love books on tape. The only listening device I don’t like is the telephone. I really freeze up on phones, but other than that I’m a verbal girl.

On the other hand, I am very bad with faces. My husband, who sucks at recognizing voices, is great with faces. We’ll watch a movie and he’ll spot some character actor in full drag, whom he hasn’t seen in a movie in twenty years , and instantly recognize the guy and name all the other movies he’s been in. Sometimes I make a desperate stab at identification, usually by saying something along the lines of “Hey, isn't Will Ferrell doing a great job in this part?” And then my husband will give me the look and say, “No, that’s Paul Newman.” And then I’ll pretend that I knew that all along and was just testing him.

Okay, so I have trouble recognizing faces, not being a watcher, but let them speak and I have them. For example, I was sitting in the living room writing last fall and I heard a voice on the television in the other room. It couldn’t be…not my teenybopper crush, the man I was going to marry someday…I rushed into the TV room. Yes. It was Joe Namath! Whom I hadn’t heard speak in probably fifteen years. He was older, but I did recognize him, having stared at his photos for so long at the age of thirteen that his bone structure is engraved on my memory circuits. And I still thought he looked great. Maybe not quite at hot as my husband, but close. And I also felt great knowing that I could proudly identify him without my husband telling me, “No, that’s Elliot Gould.”

So, are you a watcher or a listener, or a combination of the two? And what do you like when you read? Lots of dialogue or lots of description? (I think it’s a no-brainer as to what I like, lol.)