A BRIEF GUIDE TO WRITING A NARRATIVE

As you write a NARRATIVE, you need to say who or what the narrative is about, where it takes place, and what is happening. Mary Mebane makes these basic moves of narration in the following lines from her essay in this chapter:

On this Saturday morning Esther and I set out for town for our music lesson. We were going on our weekly big adventure, all the way across town. . . . We walked the two miles from Wildwood to the bus line.

—MARY MEBANE, “The Back of the Bus”

Mebane says who her story is about (“Esther and I”), where it takes place (on the bus line), and what is happening as the story opens (the two teenagers are heading for a “big adventure”).

The following guidelines will help you to make these basic moves as you draft a narrative—and to come up with a subject for your story, consider your purpose and audience, state your point, and organize the specific details and events of your story into a compelling plot by using chronology, transitions, verb tenses, and dialogue.

Coming Up with a Subject

When you enjoy a well-told story, it is often because the author presents an event in an interesting or even dramatic way. To come up with a subject for a story of your own, think of events, both big and small, that you have experienced. You might write a good story about a perfectly ordinary occurrence, such as riding a bus, applying for a job, arguing with a friend—or even just doing your homework.

Lynda Barry builds a narrative around the ordinary events of a school day (p. 154).

“No, no, no,” the writer Frank McCourt, author of Angela’s Ashes, used to say to his students when they complained that nothing had happened to them when they got home the night before. “What did you do when you walked in?” McCourt would ask. “You went through a door, didn’t you? Did you have anything in your hands? A book bag? You didn’t carry it with you all night, did you? Did you hang it on a hook? Did you throw it across the room and your mom yelled at you for it?” Even mundane details like these can provide the material for a good story if you use them to show what people said and did—and exactly where, why, and how they said and did it.

Considering Your Purpose and Audience

As you compose a narrative, think hard about the audience you want to reach and the PURPOSE your narrative is intended to serve. Suppose you are paid to tweet about a visit to an electronics store in order to convince your followers to take advantage of the great deals you found there. You might tell your story this way: “When I walked into Best Buy, I couldn’t believe my eyes. Smart speakers everywhere! And the cheap prices! I went home with a speaker under each arm.” Or suppose you are writing a column in a technology magazine, and the purpose of your story is to show readers how to shop for a smart speaker. You might write: “The first hurdle I encountered was the numbing variety of brands and models.”

Whatever your purpose, think about how much your audience is likely to know about your subject so you can judge how much background information you need to give, what terms you need to DEFINE, and so on. If you are writing an ANECDOTE, make sure it is appropriate for your audience and illustrates your larger point.

Generating Ideas: Asking What Happened—and Who, Where, When, How, and Why

How do you come up with the raw materials for a narrative? To get started, ask yourself the questions that journalists typically ask when developing a story: who, what, where, when, how, and why? Your immediate answers will give you the beginnings of a narrative, but keep asking the questions over and over again. Try to recall lots of particular details, both visual and auditory. As the writer John Steinbeck once advised, “Try to remember [the situation] so clearly that you can see things: what colors and how warm or cold and how you got there . . . what people looked like, how they walked, what they wore, what they ate.”

You will also want your readers to know why you’re telling this particular story, so it’s important to select details that support your point. For example, if you’re trying to show why your sister is the funniest person in your family, your story might include specific, vivid details about the sound of her voice, her amusing facial expressions, and a practical joke she once pulled.

Templates for Narrating

The following templates can help you generate ideas for a narrative and then start drafting. Don’t take these as formulas where you just have to fill in the blanks. There are no easy formulas for good writing. But these templates can help you plot out some of the key moves of narration and thus may serve as good starting points:

This is a story about ________.
My story takes place in ________ when ________.
As the narrative opens, X is in the act of ________.
What happened next was ________, followed by ________ and ________.
At this point, ________ happened.
The climax of these events was ________.
When X understood what had happened, he/she/they said, “________.”
The last thing that happened to X was ________.
My point in telling this story is to show that ________.

For more techniques to help you generate ideas and start writing a narrative essay, see Chapter 3.

Stating Your Point

If you are writing a personal story about your sister, you might reveal your point implicitly through the details of the story. However, in much of the narrative writing you do as a student, you will want to state your point explicitly. If you are writing about information technology for a communications class, for example, you might include a story about visiting an online retailer, and you would probably want to explain why in a THESIS STATEMENT like this: “Go to any online store today, and you will discover that information technology is the main product of American business.”

Developing a Plot Chronologically

As a general rule, arrange events in chronological order so your readers don’t have to figure out what happened when. Chronology alone, however, is insufficient for organizing a good narrative. Events need to be related in such a way that one leads directly to, or causes, another. Taken together, the events should have a beginning, middle, and end. Then your narrative will form a complete action: a PLOT.

One of the best ways to plot a narrative is to set up a situation; introduce a conflict; build up the dramatic tension until it reaches a high point, or CLIMAX; and then release the tension and resolve the conflict. Even the little horror story about Miss Muffet is satisfying because it’s tightly plotted with a clear sense of completion at the close.

Using Transitions and Verb Tenses

Ocean Vuong, p. 160, switches between present and past as he tells how he wrote one of his first poems.

When you write a narrative, you will often incorporate direct references to time: “first,” “last,” “immediately,” “not long after,” “next,” “while,” “then,” “once upon a time.” References like these can be boring in a narrative if they become too predictable, as in “first,” “second,” “third.” But used judiciously, such TRANSITIONS provide smooth links from one event to another, as do other connecting words and phrases like “thus,” “therefore,” “consequently,” “what happened next,” “before I knew it,” and so on.

In addition to clear transitions, your verb tenses can help you connect events in time. Remember that all actions that happen more or less at the same time in your narrative should be in the same tense: “I was three-quarters of the way up this hill when the van came over the crest. It wasn’t on the road; it was on the shoulder.” Don’t shift tenses needlessly; but when you do need to indicate that one action happened before another, be sure to change tenses accordingly and accurately. If you need to shift out of chronological order altogether—you might shift back in time in a FLASHBACK or shift forward in time in a FLASH-FORWARD—be sure to make the leap clear to your readers.

Maintaining a Consistent Point of View

As you construct a narrative, you need to maintain a logical and consistent POINT OF VIEW. In a narrative written in the FIRST PERSON (“I” or “we”), like Stephen King’s, the NARRATOR can be both an observer of the scene (“Most of the sight lines along the mile-long stretch of Route 5 that I walk are good”) and a participant in the action (“I had perhaps three-quarters of a second to register this”). In a narrative written in the THIRD PERSON (“he,” “she,” “it,” or “they”), as is the case in most articles and history books, the narrator is often merely an observer, though sometimes an all-knowing one.

Whether you write in the first or third person, don’t attribute perceptions to yourself or your narrator that are physically impossible. If you are narrating a story from the front seat of your car, don’t pretend to see what is going on three blocks away. If you claim to see (or know) more than you reasonably can from where you sit, your credibility with the reader will be strained.

Adding Dialogue

You can introduce the points of view of other people into a story by using DIALOGUE. In a story about her childhood, for example, Annie Dillard lets her mother speak for herself: “Lie on your back,” her mother tells young Dillard. “Look at the clouds and figure out what they look like.”

As a first-person narrator, Dillard might have written, “My mother told me to look at the clouds and figure out what they look like.” But these words would be a step removed from the person who said them and so would lack the immediacy of direct dialogue. If you let people in your narrative speak for themselves, your characters will come to life, and your whole narrative will have a greater dramatic impact.

Purpose: A writer’s goal, or reason for writing. For example, the purpose may be to inform readers by explaining an important subject, such as climate change; to persuade readers to act, such as to combat climate change by buying more fuel-efficient cars; to entertain readers, such as by telling them a heartwarming story of an animal that successfully adapted to the loss of its natural habitat; or simply to express the writer’s feelings, for example, his or her indignation about environmental damage or waste.
Anecdote: A brief NARRATIVE or humorous story, often told for the purpose of EXEMPLIFYING or explaining a larger point. Anecdotal evidence is proof based on such stories rather than on statistical or scientific inquiry.
Plot: The sequence of events in a story arranged in such a way as to have a beginning, middle, and end.
Climax: An aspect of PLOT in NARRATIVE writing. The climax is the moment when the action of a narrative is most intense—the culmination, after which the dramatic tension is released.
Transitions: Connecting words or phrases—such as next, by contrast, nevertheless, therefore, on the other hand—that link sentences, paragraphs, and ideas in a piece of writing.
Flashback: The NARRATIVE technique of interrupting the main PLOT of a story to show the reader an incident that occurred earlier in time.
Flash-forward: The NARRATIVE technique of interrupting the main PLOT of a story to show the reader an incident that occurs at some time in the future.
Point of view: The perspective from which a story is told or an account given. Point of view is often described according to the grammatical person of a NARRATIVE. An “I” narrative, for example, is told from the “first-person” point of view. A piece of writing that uses “you,” speaking to the reader directly, is “second-person” point of view. A narrative that refers to “he” or “she” is told from the “third-person” point of view. If the speaker of a third-person narrative seems to know everything about his or her subject, including people’s thoughts, the point of view is “omniscient”; if the speaker’s knowledge is incomplete, the point of view is third-person “limited.”
Narrator: In a NARRATIVE, the person who is telling the story. The narrator can participate directly in the events of the story—or serve mainly as an observer reporting on those events.
Third person: The perspective from which a story is told or an account given. Point of view is often described according to the grammatical person of a NARRATIVE. An “I” narrative, for example, is told from the “first-person” point of view. A piece of writing that uses “you,” speaking to the reader directly, is “second-person” point of view. A narrative that refers to “he” or “she” is told from the “third-person” point of view. If the speaker of a third-person narrative seems to know everything about his or her subject, including people’s thoughts, the point of view is “omniscient”; if the speaker’s knowledge is incomplete, the point of view is third-person “limited.”
Dialogue: Direct speech, especially between two or more speakers in a NARRATIVE, quoted word for word.
Narration: One of the four PATTERNS OF WRITING. An account of actions and events that happen to someone or something in a particular place and time. Because narration is essentially storytelling, it is often used in fiction; however, it is also an important element in almost all writing and speaking. The opening of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, for example, is in the narrative mode: “Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation . . .”
Definition: A basic strategy of EXPOSITORY writing. Definitions give the essential meaning of something. Extended definitions enlarge on that basic meaning by analyzing the qualities, recalling the history, explaining the purpose, or giving SYNONYMS of whatever is being defined. See the introduction to Chapter 11 for further discussion of this strategy.
Thesis: The main point that a paragraph or an essay is intended to make or prove. A thesis statement is a direct statement of that point.
Point of view: The perspective from which a story is told or an account given. Point of view is often described according to the grammatical person of a NARRATIVE. An “I” narrative, for example, is told from the “first-person” point of view. A piece of writing that uses “you,” speaking to the reader directly, is “second-person” point of view. A narrative that refers to “he” or “she” is told from the “third-person” point of view. If the speaker of a third-person narrative seems to know everything about his or her subject, including people’s thoughts, the point of view is “omniscient”; if the speaker’s knowledge is incomplete, the point of view is third-person “limited.”