Narrative Essays

You could think of a narrative essay as a short story. It’s called an essay, but many narrative essays are really just short stories. If you are using narration as the primary strategy in writing a paper, you will use some semblance of the following format:

Opening

Your opening in a narrative essay does not need to be a description of the event you will be discussing or an explicit outline of the reason(s) you’re examining it. Instead, try to hook your readers and think about why they should be interested.

Narrative Paragraphs

You will divide the event into smaller events and give each of these smaller incidents a paragraph. These will be simple explanations of what happened when, though in a more complex essay, you might include reasons for each event and comparisons to another, more current circumstance. Accounts by historians, witnesses, or thought leaders can be woven into the narrative to strengthen the perspective you’re offering or to offer the possibility of another perspective, in an effort to provide an objective report.

You’ll want to make each portion of the narrative interesting to the reader, so use literary devices like suspense, imagery, verisimilitude, and surprise, perhaps along with a little humor, if appropriate, to keep your audience engaged.

Closing

You don’t need to hit your reader over the head a summary of the event and the reason(s) for examining it. You may or may not decide to end with some explicit ideas about how this event is relevant to the reader and to the world at this time.

The checklist for a narrative essay:

• Have a clear purpose.
• Tell the story clearly.
• Make the narrative interesting.
• Relate it to something larger than itself, either overtly, or covertly.

narratives

What are the main ingredients of a narrative? A narrative: 

• contains a plot, characters, conflict, and a theme.
• can be either factual or fictional.
• follows a timeline, but does not need to be written in chronological order.
• has a strong opening to engage the reader.
• resolves the conflict and reiterates the theme with the conclusion.
• has an implied thesis.

Start With the Story

Sometimes, it’s easier for students to write the story and then go back and make sure that the essay follows the proper essay format.

After you have completed your story, read it to yourself. Is there any particular moral or idea that the story is demonstrating?  If so, you may decide to use that idea in your thesis statement.

For example, consider the topic of going back to school. You may approach it in this way:

1. Write the story (this will become your body paragraphs)
2. Read aloud and see if there is a moral or underlying idea
3. Write your thesis statement based on that idea or moral
4. Continue to write your introduction

Once you have the story down, you read your paragraphs about going back to school, and then you realize how much having a college education will improve your financial situation. This allows you to create your thesis and go back to form the introduction. In this case, you decide that your thesis is “After careful consideration, I have decided that returning to school is an important step toward improving my financial outlook.”

Whether or not you include that explicit thesis in your narrative will depend on the requirements of the assignment and your skill as a writer. Often, in narrative writing, our goal is to show, not tell, the reader the point of the story!

Here you can see a traditional or typical sample narration essay from a beginning writing class. In this assignment, the student was asked to write a brief literacy narrative, a narrative essay that focuses on the author’s experiences with reading and/or writing. In this narration essay, the author focuses on reading books and follows MLA guidelines.