I’ve noticed that essay writing teaches clarity, structure, and argument, while fiction often relies on emotion, character, and subtext. For those who write both, do you think essay writing improves your storytelling, or can it sometimes make fiction feel too structured?
In my experience, all writing helps.
There’s plenty of structure in fiction, plenty of emotion and character in non-fiction.
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Usually exclusive bicyclists or exclusive motorists are worse road users than those who experience both roles. The same is true for pedestrians, equestrians, truckers, bikers, carriage drivers, wheelchair users… All of them share the same road, but not the same experience.
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Over 20 years as a magazine editor, our best fiction writers also tended to be our best essayists. The converse, however, wasn’t always true. As one brilliant essayist explained, while sitting out a thunderstorm in what we hoped was an electrically inconspicuous patch of spruce, “making a story out of stuff that more or less happened is easy; making a story out of stuff that never happened, but ought to have, ain’t.”
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This surprises me not. “Storytelling” is more obviously honed in fiction writing, but is an incredibly powerful and useful skill for all communication, be it essays, papers, journalistic writing or just plain ol’ influencing peeps in meetings.
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I like this analogy. Essays and fiction are different lanes, but experiencing both usually makes you a better writer overall. The trick is knowing when to use structure and when to let the story breathe.
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Agreed. Good writing is good writing. The skills transfer more than people think clarity helps fiction, and storytelling helps non-fiction.
That’s a great distinction. Essay writing can teach craft, but fiction asks for a different kind of imagination, creating something that feels true, even when it never happened.
Exactly. Storytelling is one of those skills that quietly improves almost every form of writing. People remember stories long after they’ve forgotten arguments or facts.
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Proof that storytelling is just persuasion with better marketing. 
I think essay writing can definitely help fiction by improving clarity, pacing, and overall structure. The downside is that if you lean too heavily on essay habits, fiction can start feeling overly explained instead of lived. For me, the best storytelling borrows the discipline of essays while still leaving room for emotion, mystery, and subtext.
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On the other hand, essay writing can definitely help pay for groceries and mortgages and new tires for the asthmatic old auto while you search for your niche in what fiction market still exists in These Trouble Times, when the production of new writers outnumbers the production of new readers, and bright young acquisitions editors are more interested in quantifying your social-media followers than in following the thread of your life’s work past the first four paragraphs.
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I agree. Essay writing helps with clarity and structure, but fiction works best when you don’t explain everything. The trick is using the discipline from essays without losing the emotion and subtext that make stories feel real.
Fair point. The creative side matters, but being able to pay the bills while you keep writing is a pretty important skill too.
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I think the whole point of the thread is that essays are “creative.”
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While I agree that essay writing involves creativity, I disagree that this was the “whole point of the thread.”
Indeed, a couple of us were inferring that the craft of fiction writing can greatly assist in essay writing, but that — while essay writing can help improve some of the skills of fiction writing — there’s not as impactful a development link the other way found.
To put it another way, a little bit of fiction writing and storytelling can go a long way to improve your essay writing (although as with all things, there is a point of marginal utility)… but to improve your fiction writing, I’d suggest you’re better off practising more fiction writing.
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