Useful Tips Improve Your Narrative and Descriptive Writing

Mike Carney
3 min readOct 21, 2020

Narrative and descriptive essays train your creative writing skills. These essays, as a part of your academics, allowing you to use every tool available to you, and come up with a styled creative essay. These essays test your writing ability and your command over describing objects and scenes. You can use these creative techniques in other academic essays such as persuasive and expository, as it embellishes the writing that otherwise is straightforward and formal. You should embrace these essay tasks, completing them on your own without an essay writing service to assist you.

With the content of the essay you also need to make sure that you optimize your composition by taking care of each building block, dividing the different topics into subtopics, and making the writing presentable.

Know the projection of your writing

Writing should be the process of jotting down thoughts as they form in your head. Instead, you should have an outline to follow and give your thoughts a direction. It becomes easy for the writer to wander off from the topic in creative writing processes. Having an outline, rather than constricting your creative output, boosts it.

For narrative essays, this outline can come in the form of an order of narration, while in descriptive essays this can come out of the classification of subjects.

Use a new paragraph to communicate a new subject or thought

Each different thought or topic should be presented in a separate paragraph. Doing this helps the reader grasp ideas and navigate them easily. In narrative writings, you shouldn’t worry too much about keeping each paragraph to a certain thought, as in such essays some writers use short paragraphs to accentuate the pace of the action or the narration. In descriptive writing, however, it is easier for the reader to picture your description better if you group it into related objects and their descriptions.

Dialogues and speech should be presented in separate lines

The dialogues are usually presented in separate lines no matter how small the length of the text. This helps the reader differentiate between separate speakers and also allows for the reader to play the dialogue reel in their head visually. Whenever you think its time to write my essay simply follow these steps.

The various roles of the first sentence of a paragraph

The first sentence in the traditional sense is the topic sentence. The topic sentence tells the reader what the paragraph is about. However, there are several variations to the role of the first sentence:

  • It allows the writer to connect it to the previous thought or the wider idea that is presented in the essay. Placing the paragraph in relation to the other aforementioned ideas gives the readers the right orientation to digest the material. Transitioning words such as despite, consequently, although, etc are frequently used for such purpose.
  • Though the paragraphs in descriptive and narrative writing won’t have the traditional layers and subparts, they are coherent in the sense that each paragraph talks about a specific subject, scene, or time. Many writers, therefore, introduce the subject of the paragraph and hint at the paragraph content in the starting sentence.

Fast-paced narratives don’t need a topic sentence

It is hard to contain narrative techniques into a traditional essay structure. Even if each paragraph takes on a different material or content, each paragraph is designed to serve the pace and flow of the story. You should, therefore, take the liberty of dividing your writing into several paragraphs to speed up the action, especially when you are following a traditional story arc, which has a pronounced rising action that leads to a climax.

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Mike Carney

Professional writer with 6 years of experience in essay writing.