By writeexpress staff writers there's nothing like reading a great narrative. Whether in novel or essay form, a narrative piece of writing transports readers into the time and space of the world portrayed by the writing. Through reflecting upon an event, and through recreating the experience for other readers, writing a narrative essay can enable you to develop new, subtle, and rewarding perspectives. A narrative essay is a piece of writing that recreates an experience through time. A narrative essay can be based on one of your own experiences, either past or present, or it can be based on the experiences of someone else.

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In addition to telling a story, a narrative essay also communicates a main idea or a lesson learned. Spend a good deal of time drafting your recollections about the details of the experience. Rather than telling your readers what happened, use vivid details and descriptions to actually recreate the experience for your readers. Try to remember that the information you present is the only information your readers have about the experiences.

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Always keep in mind that all of the small and seemingly unimportant details known to you are not necessarily known to your readers. It's often effective to begin your narrative with a paragraph that introduces the experience and communicates the significance. This technique guarantees that your readers will understand the significance of the experience as they progess through the narrative. Another effective technique is to begin the essay by jumping directly into the narrative and then ending the essay with a paragraph communicating the significance of the experience. This approach allows your readers to develop their own understanding of the experience through the body of the essay and then more deeply connect to your expression of the significance at the end.

You might also consider introducing the experience in the first paragraph but delaying your expression of the significance of the experience until the end of the essay. This approach heightens your readers' sensitivity to the significance of the narrative. After spending time away from the draft of your narrative essay, read through the essay and think about whether the writing effectively recreates the experience for your readers. Identify and consider removing any information that seems to distract from the focus and main narrative of the essay. If you're having trouble choosing an experience to write about, take a quick glance through these prompts. They might help you remember or identify a particularly interesting or significant experience to focus on.

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Think of an experience when you learned something for the first time, or when you realized how important someone was for you. This could be something as seemingly minor as achieving a good grade on a difficult assignment, or this could be something with more long lasting effects, like getting the job you desired or getting into the best school to which you applied. Focusing on an experience like this can result in rewarding reflections about the positive emerging from the negative. Think about a time when you did or did not stand up for yourself or someone else in the face of adversity or challenge. This could be anything from a move across town to a major change in a relationship to the birth or death of a loved one.

This could be anything from understanding a complicated math equation to gaining a deeper understanding of a philosophical issue or life situation. Personal narrative essays come in all shapes and sizes, but what they have in common is that they should be about you. In a nutshell, writing a personal narrative essays means sharing an experience from your life to create an emotional reaction in your reader reactions such as laughing out loud, tears, frustration, disappointment, etc. By drawing people in and making them relate to you as a character, your readers will invest their time more readily into your story. Most often, your instructor will give you a topic to work from, topics such as explain a time when you had to make a difficult decision or talk about an experience you had that was similar to what happened in the book we just read. Using the topic your instructor gives you, narrow down the personal experiences that fit. While you’re thinking, write your ideas down on paper, or tell the story out loud to get an idea of how it might come out on paper.

Once you have 5 to 10 ideas, think about which ones would

be fun for you to write make your audience interested in the story fit the topic best be meaningful to you have enough material to meet your word or page count not be too long of a story to write in detail after you rate the topics you came up with using those qualifications, you can choose from the narrowed down list and start thinking about the details you need to include. Writing an outline of what your experience entailed is a great way to keep you on track as you write the first draft. Need more help thinking of a topic? check out these personal narrative essay examples ! while you might be throwing the conventions for using personal pronouns in formal essays out the window this essay is about you. After all , that doesn’t mean that you should leave all your writing strategies by the wayside.

Give them something shiny to look at, and rope them into your devious plot maniacal laughter ensues . Imagine this is the opening sentence in a personal narrative essay: i typically eat olives in the afternoon and dislike peter pan. One time, i captured tinker bell, and she got pretty mad. do you think you would want to keep reading this story? pretty dry for a beginning of a story, even if it is from the perspective of captain hook. while eating olives in the middle of the afternoon, i thought i heard a sound. Looking up from the knots i had been studying in the wooden table, i glanced around, wary for signs of that dastardly peter pan. Having assured myself that the sound had been a trick of my mind, i reached for another olive only to find that someone had taken all of them. a bit more interesting, right? wouldn’t you want to know more? when writing your personal narrative essay, you’ll want to lead your readers on and get them interested in your story from the get go. You can do that by throwing them right into the middle of your story and giving the minute but relevant! details of the scene so they can imagine what’s going one.

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Make your story so involved and intriguing that they forget they are reading at all. You might be tired of hearing the age old advice, show, don’t tell, but that definitely applies to personal narrative essays. When you’re showing the reader, you give detail that makes them feel like a part of the story. telling the reader, on the other hand, means that you simply state the events that happened without engaging them in the story. This is what telling might look like: i broke my pen, and the ink went everywhere. I was sad. and, this is what showing might look like: as i wrote my apology on the lined paper, i did not realize how hard i was pressing on the pen.

I heard the pen crack, and ink gushed onto my fingers, the table, and the paper, ruining the halfhearted apology before i could even send it. in the second example, you get more information about the speaker’s surroundings, the mess of ink, and clues about what the speaker might be dealing with. Rather than reveal your emotions outright, flavor your story with actions using verbs, adjectives, and sometimes adverbs that give the reader a distinct idea of how the speaker feels. For instance, in the second example, the words halfhearted and apology give much more information about the scene and the speaker than the word sad does in the first example. Do you have one of those friends who starts telling a story and just assumes that you understand certain things they fail to mention? does she think you can read her mind? don’t be one of those people when you’re writing your personal essay. The last thing you want to do in your personal narrative essay is confuse your readers. That means you have to give them all the background information they need to understand your personal narrative.

Do you need to clarify some lingo? do you need to explain how your family members are related to you? that doesn’t mean you have to spell it all out. Here are some ways to give your readers more details about your story and further involve them: use dialogue add descriptions of the scene that apply to the story include a flashback if you need to go into the past to explain something explain the significance of particular items or people within your story again, keep the show, don’t tell rule in mind, but make sure that all the pieces of the story are there. To test out the fluidity and logic of your personal narrative essay, read it to someone without context. You would expect the last episode of the fourth season of game of thrones to end on a cliffhanger, but your personal narrative essay likely won’t have a sequel to explain the rest of what happened. This is your chance to tie up loose ends, reiterate the point of your personal narrative essay why the story is important or how it impacted your life , and drive home any emotion you want to leave the reader. Fortunately, kibin has some great tips on writing concluding paragraphs for personal narrative essays that you can look at if you are stumped.