“Behind every exquisite thing that ever existed, there was something tragic.” ~ Oscar Wilde
I am a visual person. When it comes to structure, I like paragraphs that look good on a page. I don’t want them to be too long, or too short. I despise too little dialogue, or too much. I want a delicate balance between action and dialogue, between setting and character. I want my writing to be aesthetically pleasing upon the page.
I find that big blocky paragraphs are unpleasant to read, and that page upon page of dialogue seems lazy outside of a screenplay. Mixing dialogue with description keeps me showing rather than telling, which is, of course, important in writing.
If I feel that a page seems too dialogue or description heavy, I will try to fix it during the re-write. Ultimately, though, what works is always more important than how it looks, and if the paragraph works the way I wrote it, then I leave it alone. As with everything in writing, the visual aesthetic is more a guideline than a rule.
Most of my scenes themselves are set up like a screenplay, which is the first medium of writing I really took seriously. Many times, I join a scene in mid-action, or as close to the conflict of the scene as I possibly can. The rest is written based on feel and instinct.