Incorporate descriptive details throughout your story.

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Look over the details you’ve generated, your organizational plan, and any sections you’ve already drafted, and weave the descriptive details into your action sequences. Because readers often skip lengthy descriptions, spreading the details out over the whole story may work best.

Ways In

How Can I Work Descriptions Into My Action Sequences?

  1. Begin with a simple sentence—an independent clause consisting of a subject (noun or pronoun) and a verb, for example:

    Amalia and Sophie ran.

  2. To describe people, add descriptive naming and detailing as well as narrative actions to show what the people said and did, as in this example:

    Yelling “Grandma!” at the top of their lungs, the curly-headed five-year-old twins, Amalia and Sophie, ran to their laughing curly-headed grandmother, who was getting out of a silver hybrid sedan .

Narrative actions

Independent clause

Descriptive naming and detailing

Here’s an example from Jean Brandt’s essay (par. 6):

I whirled around to find a middle-aged man, dressed in street clothes, flashing some type of badge and politely asking me to empty my pockets.

Independent clause

Descriptive naming and detailing

Narrative actions

  1. To describe the place, add descriptive naming, detailing, and comparing along with narrative actions, including prepositional phrases to show where each object is located in the scene, as in this example (with only the new information marked):
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    Yelling “Grandma!” at the top of their lungs, Amalia and Sophie ran to their laughing grandmother, a tall, thin woman getting out of a silver hybrid sedan she had just parked at the yellow loading-only zone in front of the old-fashioned yellow-clapboard elementary school.

Narrative actions

Descriptive naming and detailing

Here’s an example from Annie Dillard’s essay (par. 12):

He chased Mikey and me around the yellow house and up a backyard path we knew by heart: under a low tree, up a bank, through a hedge, down some snowy steps, and across the grocery store’s delivery driveway.

Descriptive naming and detailing

Narrative actions