Organize your thoughts before writing your essay. This might include making lists of things that have happened in your life, courses you have taken or points that you want to hit in your essay. Make general notes about what you want to bring out in your personal essay and what you want to say.
Explore yourself by asking in-depth questions regarding your life goals, your career choices and your skills. Create a self-exploration journal in which you specifically write about your life and the things that have happened to you. Study your motivations and personal stories to include them in the self-descriptive essay. Ask yourself how you have arrived at where you are in life, where you want to be in the future and how you want to get there.
Focus on the question being asked, if this is an essay for a school or scholarship application. You do not want to stray from what is being asked in the main question. Concentrate on fully answering the question about yourself.
Create a strong opening line and paragraph. This is to engage your reader from the start and pull them in to your essay. It can be something that is a surprise or a little known fact about you. It should introduce a hook or an angle -- something that sparks an immediate interest.
Organize your essay as a story. Think of the essay as having a beginning, middle and ending. Build tension by creating a sense of suspense or drama. Do not lie, but try to find ways of making your life follow the cause-and-effect pattern of a story.
Follow the rules of good writing. Go through multiple drafts of your essay. When you have finished your first draft, put it away for a few days and come back to it later with fresh eyes. You can often see things to fix that you could not see before. Have a teacher or trusted friend read over the essay to help catch errors.