Most of the time, narrative essays will involve no outside research or references. Instead, you’ll be using your personal story to provide the evidence of some point that you’re trying to make. [3] X Trustworthy Source Purdue Online Writing Lab Trusted resource for writing and citation guidelines Go to source However, in some cases using research may enhance your story because it will allow you to provide additional detail. Narrative essays are a common school assignment used to test your creative story-telling skills, as well as your ability to connect some element of your personal life to a topic you might be discussing in class.
You experienced adversity and had to overcome You failed and had to deal with the consequences of that failure Your personality or character was transformed
Bad narrative essays are generally too broad. “My senior year of high school” or “This summer” are examples of stories that would be far too big to tell in the amount of specific detail that a good narrative essay requires. Pick a single event from the summer, or a single week of your senior year, not something that takes months to unfold. It’s also good to limit the number of characters you introduce. Only include other characters who are absolutely essential. Every single friend from your fifth grade class will be too many names to keep track of. Pick one.
Let your imagination fill in the gaps. When you’re describing your grandmother’s house and a specific weekend you remember spending there, it’s not important to remember exactly what was cooked for dinner on Friday night, unless that’s an important part of the story. What did your grandmother typically cook? What did it usually smell like? Those are the details we need. Typically, narrative essays are “non-fiction,” which means that you can’t just make up a story. It needs to have really happened. Force yourself to stay as true as possible to the straight story.
It helps to limit things as much as possible. While it might seem like we need to know a bunch of specific details from your senior year, try to think of a particularly tumultuous day from that year and tell us that story. Where does that story start? Not the first day of school that year. Find a better starting point. If you want to tell the story of your prom night, does it start when you get dressed? Maybe. Does it start when you spill spaghetti sauce all down your dress before the dance? While that might seem like the climax of a story you want to tell, it might make a better starting place. Go straight to the drama. You don’t need to write up a formal outline for a narrative essay unless it’s part of the assignment or it really helps you write. Listing the major scenes that need to be a part of the story will help you get organized and find a good place to start.
Don’t switch perspectives throughout the story. This is a difficult and advanced technique to try to pull off, and it usually has the effect of being too complicated. There should only be one “I” in the story. In general, narrative essays (and short stories for that matter) should also be told in past tense. So, you would write “Johnny and I walked to the store every Thursday” not “Johnny and I are walking to the store, like we do every Thursday. " You may be instructed to write in the 3rd person (such as he, she, it, they, them, their). If so, be consistent with your pronouns throughout the story.
Particular details are specific and only particular to the character being described. While it may be specific to say that your friend has brown hair, green eyes, is 5 feet tall with an athletic build, these things don’t tell us much about the character. The fact that he only wears silk dragon shirts? Now that gives us something interesting. Try writing up a brief sketch of each principal character in your narrative essay, along with the specific details you remember about them. Pick a few essentials.
Who or what is the antagonist in your story? To answer this question, you also need to find out what the protagonist wants. What is the goal? What’s the best case scenario for the protagonist? What stands in the protagonist’s way? The antagonist isn’t “the bad guy” of the story, necessarily, and not every story has a clear antagonist. Also keep in mind that for some good personal narratives, you might be the antagonist yourself.
Do a freewrite about the location that your story takes place. What do you know about the place? What can you remember? What can you find out? If you do any research for your narrative essay, it will probably be here. Try to find out extra details about the setting of your story, or double-check your memory to make sure it’s right.
A popular creative writing phrase tells writers to “show” not to “tell. " What this means is that you should give us details whenever possible, rather than telling us facts. You might tell us something like, “My dad was always sad that year,” but if you wrote “Dad never spoke when he got home from work. We heard his truck, then heard as he laid his battered hardhat on the kitchen table. Then we heard him sigh deeply and take off his work clothes, which were stained with grease. "
Get the theme into the very beginning of the essay. Just as a researched argument essay needs to have a thesis statement somewhere in the first few paragraphs of the essay, a narrative essay needs a topic statement or a thesis statement to explain the main idea of the story. This isn’t “ruining the surprise” of the story, this is foreshadowing the important themes and details to notice over the course of the story as you tell it. A good writer doesn’t need suspense in a narrative essay. The ending should seem inevitable.
Scene: “On our walk to the store, Jared and I stopped at the empty grass lot to talk. ‘What’s your problem lately?’ he asked, his eyes welling with tears. I didn’t know what to tell him. I fidgeted, kicked an empty paint bucket that was rusted over at the edge of the lot. ‘Remember when we used to play baseball here?’ I asked him. " Analysis: “We finished walking to the store and bought all the stuff for the big holiday dinner. We got a turkey, cornbread, cranberries. The works. The store was crazy-packed with happy holiday shoppers, but we walked through them all, not saying a word to each other. It took forever to lug it all home. "
Anything spoken by a character out loud needs to be included in quotation marks and attributed to the character speaking it: “I’ve never been to Paris,” said James. Each time a new character speaks, you need to make a new paragraph. If the same character speaks, multiple instances of dialog can exist in the same paragraph.
Revise for clarity first. Are your main points clear? If not, make them clear by including more details or narration in the writing. Hammer home your points. Was the decision you made about the starting place of the story correct? Or, now that you’ve written, might it be better to start the story later? Ask the tough questions. Proofreading is one part of revision, but it’s a very minor part and it should be done last. Checking punctuation and spelling is the last thing you should be worried about in your narrative essay.
Revise for clarity first. Are your main points clear? If not, make them clear by including more details or narration in the writing. Hammer home your points. Was the decision you made about the starting place of the story correct? Or, now that you’ve written, might it be better to start the story later? Ask the tough questions. Proofreading is one part of revision, but it’s a very minor part and it should be done last. Checking punctuation and spelling is the last thing you should be worried about in your narrative essay.
