narrative essay example

narrative essay example

The Power of Personal Narratives: A Guide to Crafting Compelling Narrative Essays

1. Introduction to Narrative Essays

When you write a narrative essay, you are telling a story about something that happened to you. As the writer, you have the authority to tell the reader what happened to you. But in reality, what you are doing is sharing an experience with your reader. This is written in a manner that is vital for the reader to identify a problem. To be successful, the writer must be sure to include just the ideas necessary to bring the story ahead. This aspect of the story sets narrative essays apart from other essays; a narrative has a specific measure to it and must be present in every item provided. For narrative essays, the particular information is the message to the story. It must be told in a way that is understandable and understood by the reader. It can be told chronologically or in the mirror to illustrate what happened.

Telling a great story can have a powerful and lasting effect. Our memories are story-shaped, with both future actions and past choices determined by that shared narrative. When we are toddlers, the first skill we learn is the ability to tell a familiar story – bedtime tales are requested for both comfort and routine. As adults, business experts advise us to develop a personal or professional story to sell ourselves. In other words, narrative is telling, showing, or demonstrating something to your readers and can be a true or fictional event made into an essay.

2. Choosing a Topic and Developing a Thesis Statement

After reading through the notes made during freewriting, they write down what they believe the underlying point or thesis of the topic will be. They then write down in one or two sentences the significance of the thesis. This thesis statement and its significance form two central documents in the process of structuring the ideas and story of the essay.

The hardest part of writing the narrative essay is putting it all together, ensuring that the components work well with each other to achieve clarity and cohesion. Many people find the following process helpful once they have completed their freewriting and know more about the topic they have chosen.

Freewriting can help you to decide which approach will work best for you.

Some people choose a topic before they actually decide what to write, while others find it difficult to determine what they are trying to communicate until they have actually written the narrative. Either method has advantages and disadvantages, but only by selecting a topic and exploring themes that might accompany the topic with various drafts will you be able to develop your ideas according to your material.

The first step in telling a personal narrative is identifying what message you want to communicate to your audience. In other words, you need to select a narrative to share, and it should not be random but rather about a particular moment of insight or a specific event that you can reflect upon and show its deeper meaning to your readers.

Choosing a topic and developing a thesis statement

3. Crafting a Strong Narrative Structure

The ABDCE Structure Read John Gardner’s On Becoming a Novelist. Essentially, A stands for Action, B leads to Background, D denotes Development, C brings about Conflict, and E indicates the Ending Events. Gardner’s ABDCE template provides a straightforward, five-step narrative model for “building a narrative swiftly and credibly” and concludes that “it is a common guide in the construction of narrative in a larger form. Personal Narratives are no exception.

A strong narrative structure is crucial to great storytelling. Often, students believe that great storytelling is accomplished through the use of flashy adjectives, advanced vocabulary, and complex sentence structure. Many of these students are disappointed – and even shocked – when they fail to receive a high grade on a narrative essay. The reason? Often, students substitute style for substance – and essays that focus more on “sounding good” than being good are typically characterized by a lack of strong, interesting thoughts. A good essay, regardless of the intent to describe a piece of literature or provide the reader with a personal insight, is one that tells a story. And a strong story begins with a strong structure.

4. Utilizing Descriptive Language and Vivid Details

Utilizing descriptive language in your essay is especially important in drawing the reader into your experiences and memories, and often it is what makes the writing memorable. However, it is essential that you carefully select the words and images you use, and that you always use vivid language. The right words will build the striking details that ultimately are the reason your story will be striking. Remember, these details are your means of both showing and telling; they are what promote creativity and guide the reader’s understanding.

5. Reflecting and Concluding with Impact

Earlier on, in considering openness to the subjective, we learned that personal narratives are most compelling when the writer looks deep inside, reflecting from a self-imposed distance at the most important implications of events and characters. Memory, of course, is selective. Time prioritizes. For this final stretch of essay-writing, we want to examine our internal lenses, understanding that they necessarily function as telescopes, microscopes, and mirrors. And we want to work toward two swirling pools of polished glass: whether playful or serious, upbeat or downbeat, let’s make them interesting. In the next sections, you will see precisely how expression and convention contribute to these crystalline portals, how we mine, build, and express what we’ve come up with to communicate most effectively.

After you have spent some time thinking about the characters in your stories and reflecting upon the details from your life that make these stories your own, by now you have seen that personal narratives that revolve around these events are profoundly intimate forms of essay writing. Indeed, connecting with the silent reader at the other end of your essay screen is one of the most important goals of personal narrative. No other form of academic writing is as personal. No other form has one person speaking openly, directly, as a complete individual, for thirty minutes or so to just one person. It is almost like a monologue in a play.