Lesson 18: Writing II — Narrative & Descriptive Writing

Narrative writing tells a story; descriptive writing builds a world. Both fail in the same beginner's way — by *telling* the reader what to feel instead of *showing* the evidence and letting the feeling happen. This lesson converts telling into showing, and gives you the craft toolkit of scene, detail, pacing and dialogue that top-band narrative and descriptive marks are made of.

Show, don't tell: the master rule

Showing works because readers trust conclusions they reach themselves. Notice the ingredients: specific nouns (ring, kettle, puddles — not "things"), active verbs (leaned, cracked — not "was"), and sensory detail selected, not dumped. Two or three precise details outperform ten general ones, because precision is what makes a reader see.

Scene, summary and pacing

Narrative alternates scene (events dramatised in real time, with dialogue and action) and summary (time compressed: "Three uneventful years passed"). Novices write all summary, or all scene; skilled writers spend scene-time on turning points and summarise the connective tissue. Within scenes, pacing is controlled by sentence length: short sentences and fragments for speed and impact; longer, clause-rich sentences to slow a moment down and load it with detail. Dialogue does triple duty — it advances plot, reveals character (Lesson 9's STEAL) and breaks up narration — but it must be trimmed: real speech is mostly filler, while written dialogue keeps only the lines that change something, each ideally carrying a small action or reaction with it.

Descriptive architecture

Description needs an organising eye. Give the piece a dominant impression (the one feeling the whole description serves — menace, peace, decay), then order the details: spatially (near to far, top to bottom, outside to in), or by a moving observer, or from general view to telling detail. Open with the wide shot or the striking detail, never with a list of everything present. Figurative language belongs here under strict rationing: one strong metaphor extended is worth five similes scattered. Personification and synaesthesia (mixing senses — "a loud colour") are descriptive specials; use them where the dominant impression justifies the strangeness.

Worked example: revising a telling paragraph, move by move

Draft: "Grandad's workshop was untidy and smelled funny. He was always losing things. I liked visiting because it was interesting." Move 1 — replace the judgement with evidence. "Untidy" becomes specific: "Saws hung from nails in no order anyone could name; three hammers lived in a biscuit tin." Move 2 — convert "smelled funny" into senses. "The air tasted of sawdust and paraffin." Move 3 — show the losing. "Grandad patted his aprons — all four pockets — for a pencil that was behind his ear." Move 4 — show the narrator's liking instead of reporting it. Replace "I liked visiting" with behaviour: "I invented errands to be sent there." Finished paragraph: "Saws hung from nails in no order anyone could name, and three hammers lived in a biscuit tin. The air tasted of sawdust and paraffin. Grandad patted his aprons — all four pockets — for a pencil that was behind his ear. I invented errands to be sent there." Every sentence now enacts; the affection arrives unannounced and therefore believed.

Model answer

Task: Write the opening paragraph of a narrative that begins at a moment of tension, introducing character and setting through showing. Model: "The envelope was the wrong colour. Aisha turned it over twice, as if the back might apologise for the front, while the letterbox ticked its metal tongue and the hall clock gathered itself to strike. On the mat below lay the others — white, ordinary, forgiven — but this one was cream, thick, official. She picked it up by one corner, the way you carry something that might stain." Commentary: tension is enacted through behaviour (turning the envelope, the corner-pick) and one personified detail (the letterbox's tongue), not announced ("Aisha was anxious"). The dominant impression — dread of official news — organises every choice, and the paragraph ends mid-gesture, pulling the reader forward.

Common errors

• Adjective pile-ups. "The big, old, dark, scary, creepy house" weakens with every adjective. Choose the one precise detail that implies the rest.
• Purple patches. Overwritten description that stops the story to admire itself. Test: does this sentence move the scene or the feeling forward? If it only sparkles, cut it.
• Dialogue without bodies. Pages of floating speech ("he said / she said") leave characters disembodied. Insert action beats: what hands, eyes and posture are doing while words fly.
• The waking-up opening and the dream ending. Both are structural clichés examiners penalise; begin in the middle of something that matters.
• Summary creep in climaxes. The most important moment gets the *most* scene-time, never the least. If your climax takes three lines and your journey to it takes thirty, the proportions are inverted.

Exam Experience

Reading task. Read this composed narrative extract: "The market was closing as Ruth arrived. Stallholders were folding their awnings with the practised speed of people who have done it ten thousand times, and a boy swept melon rinds towards the gutter in long, unhurried strokes. Ruth walked faster. In her bag, wrapped in a tea towel, was her grandmother's clock — stopped at twenty past four since March — and the repair shop, she could now see, had its shutters half down."

• Q1. Identify two details that create pace and explain the contrast between them. Answer: The stallholders' "practised speed" and the boy's "long, unhurried strokes" move at different tempos; against this slowing, closing world, "Ruth walked faster" — the contrast isolates her urgency and makes it visible. Marking note: 1 mark for the contrast spotted, 1 for linking it to Ruth's urgency.
• Q2. What does the detail of the stopped clock suggest, and why is it carried in a tea towel? Answer: The clock stopped "since March" suggests an old grief or a household suspended since spring — time halted at a loss. The tea towel signals the clock is treasured like something fragile and domestic — an heirloom being handled with ritual care, not an appliance. Marking note: 1 mark per inference anchored to the wording; wild biography (specific deaths) goes uncredited, the reasoning earns the marks.

Writing task. Rewrite this telling passage as showing (60–80 words): "Tom was angry when he saw the result. He had worked hard and the low mark felt unfair. He left the classroom quickly." Model response: "Tom read the mark twice. Then he folded the paper in half, and in half again, pressing each crease flat with his thumbnail until the sheet was a hard white square. 'Well done, everyone,' the teacher said. Tom pushed his chair back — it shrieked on the floor — and was at the door before she had finished smiling." Marking notes: 1 mark for removing all direct emotion labels (angry, unfair), 1 for at least two enactments (the folding, the chair) that let the reader infer the anger, 1 for overall control of sentences and punctuation. Word count within 50–90 accepted without penalty.

Dialogue that earns its place

Dialogue is narrative's accelerant, and its rules are strict. Each speech should do at least two jobs: reveal character and move the plot, or create conflict and plant information. Tags need only *said* and *asked* most of the time — exotic tags ("he ejaculated", "she opined") draw attention to the author instead of the speaker — and adverbs after tags ("he said angrily") usually confess that the line itself failed to show the anger. Break long speeches with action beats placed where a listener would pause. Finally, read dialogue aloud: written speech that cannot be spoken in one breath per sentence is not speech yet. The test scene for any draft is simple — cover the tags and check whether you can still tell who is speaking. If you cannot, the voices are not yet distinct, and distinctness comes from vocabulary, rhythm and what each character notices, not from dialect spelling.

Openings and endings: the two contracts

An opening makes a contract with the reader: this is the kind of pleasure ahead. Four reliable opening types exist. In medias res — mid-action: "The rope held, barely, and Marta did not look down." Dialogue — a voice before a face: "'You are not,' said her mother, 'wearing that.'" Confession or direct address — an intimacy offered: "Call me Ishmael" works because it withholds as much as it gives. Aphorism — a general truth the story will test: Austen's "It is a truth universally acknowledged..." promises irony at society's expense, and the novel pays the debt for three hundred pages. Choose the opening to match the story's real strength; the commonest failure is a slow scenic opening on a story whose power is a voice, or a dramatic explosion on a story that has nowhere louder to go.

Endings must settle the contract the opening signed. Four shapes: resolution (the knot untied — most satisfying for plot-driven pieces), echo (the opening image or line returns, transformed — the strongest choice for descriptive and reflective work), twist (a late fact re-reads everything — powerful but risky, and it must be planted, not parachuted), and the open ending (action stops, meaning continues — examiners reward it when the openness is designed, penalise it when it is merely unfinished). The echo deserves practice: draft your final line first by copying your first line and changing exactly the words the story has changed. "The envelope was the wrong colour" might close as "The envelope had only ever been paper, after all" — the object identical, the meaning educated. Practise that transformation on any draft and your endings will stop trailing off.