I'm just curious about everyone's approach to this issue. I didn't even know it was an issue until someone brought it up to me, so I thought I would bring it up. When it was brought to my attention, I suddenly started noticing how different authors either had a focus on description or a focus on action. (By the way, I only put "Action" first in the Subject Title because of alphabetical order).

Question number one: Do you tend to write more action or more description into your stories?
In other words, do you spend more words telling how something or someone looks (even if it is how they look while they do something), or do you tend to use more words to tell what is going on in your story? Personally, I tend to use action more. I love describing action packed scenes like a ride down a raging river filled with piranhas, and how the guy (who cares what he looks like) screams as he rips one of the little fish off of his arm; he has to keep rowing through the pain and bleeding just to get his wife and infant child to safety, and all he has to do is paddle around the next bend but his paddle breaks on a rock while, at the same time, throws him into the water where the fish are leaping all over him, biting at his flesh, so the wife has to beat them all off with a sick while she holds her screaming child in the other arm...whoa...that got way out of hand, not to mention it was violent. Sometimes I scare myself.... Anyway, I have a hard time describing someone's face or even their bodily features and even landscapes come as a bit of a challenge for me.

So then comes question number two: Do you think that your emphasis on either area is a problem?
For me, it is a bit of a problem, and I have to constantly keep in mind that my audience will not have the same mental images in their heads for a given character or scene. They aren't going to automatically assume that a character has dark skin or that the trees are in bloom unless I tell them, unless I describe it to them.

(!)Bonus Questions(!): What do you take to be the perfect balance of action and description?
(Or): What authors have you read which either strike a perfect balance between these two topics, or they do just one of them (action or description) really well?

Mostly I go with action, though sometimes, depending on what POV I take from, I do much more descriptive.

My impression of how this has been throughout literature is that literature used to be more focused on description until it shifted toward an action-focus in the past century. As a result, I feel that writers like Lewis and Tolkien that were caught in between the focus-shift are good at balancing both.

I tend to write more action in my stories, but I try to work in some more description to try to balance myself out. I think that the best track is one that picks some route of moderation between the two of them, but I don't think I can really describe what that route looks like, since writing is more of an art than a science.

I've leaned more toward description in the past, but that's something I'm working to change, so that there is a better balance between description and action. I think if you can drop descriptions into what would be considered action scenes without slowing down what's happening, that would be the best of both worlds.

As I pay more attention to such things in the books I read, I'm finding that I prefer the parts that keep the story moving. I don't mind description (and am probably more tolerant than most), but if it's dropped into the middle of an exciting or suspenseful scene, I tend to speed through it to reach the action.

Another thing to consider is the type of world your story takes place in. I think fantasy writers can get away with, and probably need, more description, simply because they're revealing a foreign world that has differences from ours that need to be described. Particularly with elements that differ from those on earth. It's necessary to bring the reader into the world of the story, whereas in other genres, the world is already familiar because we experience it every day.

I use description more just because I'm better at it. XD