personal narrative essay

personal narrative essay

Exploring the Power of Personal Narrative: Crafting Compelling Stories from Life Experiences

1. Introduction to Personal Narrative Essays

In providing models, instructors can illustrate that for essays to be truly effective, they must speak to the reader as much as possible. That said, personal narrative essays can be fun and students often choose to work together to help edit each other’s work or to share reactions to individual essay topics. Mindful that writing personal essays, particularly when the topic is defined by the nature of the writer, can be sensitive work for those students, instructors can provide the tools and structure students need to write well, while consistently framing the work as a positive, can-do experience.

There is a level of difficulty in writing personal narrative essays that many students find compelling; writing about issues or experiences that are meaningful to them can often lead to a sense of satisfaction and increased effort that writing to meet a less defined assignment might lack. The challenge of telling a personal story effectively without being so self-focused that the intended audience loses interest is an important priority in personal narrative essays.

Personal narrative essays are an incredibly powerful way to work with students in many circumstances, but especially at the start of the school year. Writing about personal topics allows students to communicate their interests, experiences, and personality to their instructor in the first paper. In return, the instructor gets to know more about the writers they are working with, which in turn helps them identify areas where they can provide individual assistance.

2. Choosing and Developing a Significant Life Experience

Write a narrative about a specific manner in which the self can be defined: life experience. The difficulties of this task are recognized, for life experiences do not provide easy access solely upon direct wake up. And, once you recall these experiences, the decision concerning their significance remains. Only from a lifetime of them, you must truly select some experiences which illustrate the values which you claim as your governing ones, surrounding them into an appropriate vehicle to best illustrate that which you feel represents is significant.

“Your task for your large project is to produce and tell a story, using a personal event or events from your life experience,” the teacher announced to the group of juniors in the literature/creative writing class. As students protested, asked questions, began to discuss possibilities with their classmates, and wrote what they hurriedly jotted down from the minds already scurrying down remembered lanes, the teacher excitedly distributed maps of the imaginative highways they would soon travel. Initially unsure, some skeptically considered the reasons for this assignment. Why should they investigate, rehash, think about, discuss, and finally write about their life experiences? Surprise, a tinge of excitement among the confusion and fear, entered in—it was fun to chat about the shared common ground of funny but serious stuff happening through thirteen, going on fourteen, years. Then, some began inventing that definition of self as a written narrative for the first time and already (for the teacher) engaging with that form, that essay, which usually tries to elude awareness.

3. Crafting a Strong Narrative Structure

We can best achieve this strong, clear structure by adhering to traditional creative writing techniques, making use of lines and phrases from the Bible that weave through all great Western literature through intertextuality, and by following excellent examples of both fiction and nonfiction personal narrative authors. In general, personal narratives usually draw on some aspect of the author’s life experiences rather than being works of fiction. The narratives usually mine events from life in the form of a first-person essay that waxes poetic about an episode in a life. In responding, the reader might share that it was a great story or essay, or that it was very moving or entertaining to read. This is the typical kind of response that personal narrative authors expect from writing a personal narrative. These authors want their writing to engage readers. Personal narratives also often make use of such writing principles as sensory detail, action, and structure in order to engage readers’ senses. However, when craft level expectations are high, the response to a personal narrative becomes much more complex than an appreciation of the essay or story.

To shape experiences into compelling life stories, personal narrative writers must create stories that are told with clear structure. Traditional creative writing technique emphasizes the importance of structure in any good story. Stories work because they contain literary elements such as characters, setting, narration, plot, and vocabulary. When teaching traditional creative writing, teachers often spend weeks discussing and dissecting these elements, using mentor texts and other tools to show students many different ways in which a story can be “put together.” These creative writing techniques focus on the “how to” of writing, giving writers of all levels a more solid grasp on some basic rules of good storytelling.

4. Using Descriptive Language and Detail to Enhance the Narrative

Your unique perspective is an essential component of your story. Using descriptive language and storytelling techniques to show, and not just tell, helps you lead your readers through your experience. There is a difference between relaying key points and sharing the emotions, thoughts, and difficulties you encountered and overcame throughout your journey. When people can feel like they are sharing in someone else’s experience, they are more likely to retain what they have been taught and more likely to act on the message. Narratives that reveal a person’s inner thoughts and descriptions of environmental settings are even more effective when tackling sensitive issues, such as the unnecessary suffering caused by a person’s farmed-animal speciesism. Accompanying emotional statements with analysis that provides perspective can bolster the overall effectiveness of personal narratives.

Often, some of the most powerful and engaging stories express their message powerfully because they make readers feel like they are experiencing it alongside the writer. Many readers of Holocaust memoirs say that they cannot put themselves in that situation and that they could never hope to understand. Their experiences seem so far away from the common thread of emotions that readers will never “get it.” You may not be writing about such extreme conditions, but you are, nonetheless, writing a powerful story that can have great impact. Writing with the details makes readers feel like they are there witnessing your progress through your story.

5. Reflecting and Conveying Meaning in Personal Narratives

In many ways, striving to pinpoint the more abstract, overarching meanings or implications can be the most challenging aspect of personal narrative. Reflection is the defining characteristic that makes personal narrative personal. Indeed, one of the primary functions of reflection is to develop a writer’s overarching claim – the big idea or most important point conveyed. As I sketched and shaped this collection, I discovered just how difficult my initial answer to the question “Why is this story worth telling?” was to form. Prompting and provoking reflection acts as the yolk to carry forward the other elements of a story’s plot, characters, and descriptive details.

Part of what draws readers and listeners to personal narratives are the moments of reflection found in them. Reflecting helps address questions like “What does the experience mean?” The doing of this helps show significance and bring together understanding. Why is it important or interesting enough that readers (or audience members) would want to take this journey? The imparting of meaning serves as the spine that provides structure in the personal story and across the essays when a number of stories are coming together in a collection. What personal insights can others or those who know the writer from this genre gain? This genre of reaching within to glean insights is a form of experiential writing, a taking stock or weighing of both experiences in life and writing. Personal narratives rely at least partially on introspection.