Narrative essays allow writers to explore meaningful events or people from their lives. They help the writer gain perspective and remember important details while also improving writing skills. When writing a narrative essay, authors should choose a subject that truly impacted them and use specific details to help readers understand their experience. Narratives are usually written in first person and include a conflict or change. Details like locations, dialogue, and sensory descriptions help bring the story to life for readers who did not share the experience. Writers can use journaling, brainstorming, clustering and freewriting to help discover a topic and remember important details for their narrative.

1. Narrative Essays

2. Narrative Essays Can..
• Help you gain perspective on a
meaningful time or person in your life
• Help you explore the importance of the
person or event and how it affected you
• Help you remember other people or
events
• Also, helps your writing skills as you’ll
need to use details and support to
effectively communicate to the audience

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Details about a Narrative
Choose a subject that truly affected you in some way
and matters to you
What you learned from and/or how the subject
affected will serve as your primary claim
Capture the meaningfulness of this event or person
and convey this same idea to the audience
Remember your audience: they did not share the
same experience, so you need use plenty of details
to help them “envision” your subject.

4. Aspects of a Narrative
• Usually is written in first-person point of view (“I,”
“me,” “we”)
• There is some type of conflict or change in
circumstances in your story
• Often, dialogue can help move the story along
and include certain information about people-lets
the audience better learn about them
• Includes details! For example, instead of saying
“We went to the mountains,” you could say “We
went to the Smokey Mountains in NC.” The
audience may not understand where you’re
talking about if you only say mountains or beach.

5. Techniques to Use to Get
Started
• Journaling
• Pre-writing techniques: brainstorming,
freewriting, clustering
• Observing
• Remembering

6. Journaling
• To help you discover what you want to focus on
in your Narrative try…
• Brainstorming: list important events or persons
in your life
• Clustering: circle at least 3-4 of the most
relevant or interesting ones on the list
• Freewriting: Spend 5-10 minutes writing about
each of those 3-4 selections; don’t stop, just
write everything about them you can remember
or whatever else comes to mind as you think
about this person or event
• Take a look at these exercises and you should
find one topic that you want to write about in
your Narrative

7. Observing
• Try to find picture or object that relates to this
person or event (even if it’s not one of your own
such as a pic of a place)
• In your journal, write every detail you can think
of or notice from this pic or object
• Even if you don’t have an object or picture,
spend some time trying to remember as many
details as possible and write these down
• Details listed in your journal can help you add
more to your narrative

8. Other Techniques w/ Observing
• Notice and write about sensory details (sight, sound,
smell, touch, taste)
– Example: A trip to the beach where you learned how to swim.
How did the ocean smell? Did you learn to swim in the ocean or
pool-how this water look to you? Did you swallow some watertaste salty, chlorinated?
• Describe what is NOT there
– Example: Who did not go on the trip and you wished would have
been there to see you swim?
• Note interesting, surprising, unusual, etc aspects about
the subject
– Did someone help you swim or were you just thrown into the
water? How did you react? Was there some interesting way your
swim teacher taught you?
• Focus on a dominant idea
– What did you mainly get out of this experience in addition to
learning how to swim? Did you feel more confident, older, or
complete opposite liked it scared you even more to be in the
water?

9. Remembering
• Writing about memories not only involves using
observation but also includes carefully selecting
memories relevant to your narrative
• Use detailed observations mentioned in previous slide
• Focus on either the occasion/person itself and how it
directly impacted you
• Make connections between past events, people, or
places and the present. (Like swimming and you building
the confidence to try new things now)
• Discover and focus on main idea: Have a clear main
point (thesis statement) and make sure everything in the
essay supports this main idea/thesis.
– Example: Main idea (I discovered more about myself and my
abilities one summer when I finally took the plunge and learned
how to swim). The rest of the essay will explore how this event
changed you and give specifics about how it did.

10. Remembering
• Writing about memories not only involves using
observation but also includes carefully selecting
memories relevant to your narrative
• Use detailed observations mentioned in previous slide
• Focus on either the occasion/person itself and how it
directly impacted you
• Make connections between past events, people, or
places and the present. (Like swimming and you building
the confidence to try new things now)
• Discover and focus on main idea: Have a clear main
point (thesis statement) and make sure everything in the
essay supports this main idea/thesis.
– Example: Main idea (I discovered more about myself and my
abilities one summer when I finally took the plunge and learned
how to swim). The rest of the essay will explore how this event
changed you and give specifics about how it did.