A Step by Step Approach to Writing a Narrative Essay
Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009
Writing a narrative essay is one of the most creative of essay writing assignments. Students might often find a narrative essay as an English coursework, as it best delineates one’s ability to recreate past experiences and present them in a mode of narration, keeping the features of story telling. Narrative essay, unlike a descriptive or reflective essay, focuses on the overall development of an event or a situation. While a descriptive essay will focus on the factual and sensual description, a narrative essay will incorporate similar features on a smaller scale, taking into its fold other components of story telling: Plot, characterization, Setting, Conflict, and Denouement.
The components of a story and a narrative essay might be the same, but writing one from the other is a very different experience. The features of story writing are to be subtly used in a narrative essay, on a much smaller scale. Here are the steps to writing a narrative essay using the skills of story telling.
A step by step approach to writing a narrative essay
- Find an incident to narrate: From the plethora of incidents that you have had, you have to identify the one which is best suited to become the topic of a narrative essay. The question then surfaces is, what makes an incident worthy of narration? It need not necessarily have to be a life changing moment, your skill lies in making a common incident worth a narration. Yet there are a few features that you must keep in mind when choosing a topic of your essay: The incident should have an impact on you, You must be able to draw significance out of it, it should be fresh in your memory.
- Make a template in accordance to the story telling features: A good narration will have the following components in it. It will have a plot, a representation of action or story line; Characters, the characters will have certain traits which makes them distinct from the others, they could be round or flat characters; Setting, description of the surroundings will add effects to the narrative; Conflict, a narrative will have a conflict which will decide the turn of events; and a Denouement, it is the resolution of all conflicts leading to a satisfying ending.
- Rem incise, recollect and fill the template: Your next step is to recollect your memories and fill in the template in accordance to the required fields. Find out similar features in your own story and make a rough draft.
- Explore the modes of narration and point of view: Once you have undergone the above steps, your next step is to find the appropriate mode of narration for your situation. Decide the perspective from which you will narrate the event. There are many kinds of narration that are employed by writers: omniscient narration, first person, second person, third person limited narration or multiple narration.
- Experiment essay formats: When writing a narrative essay, you can experiment with various essay formats. The way you structure your narration should be in tune with your writing style and point of view. You may choose to write in plain structure with a definite beginning, middle and end; or you may disrupt the chronology by breaking time sequences and trying out techniques like flashbacks and stream of consciousness.
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