How to Write a Narrative Essay

Co-authored by Christopher Taylor, PhD

Last Updated: November 4, 2022 References Approved

Narrative essays are commonly assigned pieces of writing at different stages through school. Like any story, they have a plot, conflict, and characters. Typically, assignments involve telling a story from your own life that connects with class themes. It can be a fun type of assignment to write, if you approach it properly. Learn how to choose a good topic, get a solid rough draft on paper, and revise your narrative essay.

Part 1

Part 1 of 3:

Choosing a Good Topic

1
Read narrative essays for inspiration. Becoming more familiar with narrative essays is an excellent way to understand the genre and to get ideas for what you want to write and how you will organize it. Make sure that you read any essays that your teacher has assigned, and you can also check out a collection of narrative essays or looking for narrative essays on the internet.^{[1]
X
Research source}
2
Choose a story that illustrates some topic or theme. Generally, narrative essays involve 2 main components: a story and some analysis of that story. A narrative essay may be "about" a particular issue, theme, or concept, but it uses a personal story to illustrate that idea.^{[2]
X
Research source}
- Most of the time, narrative essays will involve no outside research or references. Instead, you'll be using your personal story to provide the evidence of some point that you're trying to make.^{[3]
  X
  Trustworthy Source
  Purdue Online Writing Lab
  Trusted resource for writing and citation guidelines
  Go to source} However, in some cases using research may enhance your story because it will allow you to provide additional detail.
- Narrative essays are a common school assignment used to test your creative story-telling skills, as well as your ability to connect some element of your personal life to a topic you might be discussing in class.
Advertisement
3
Make sure your story fits the prompt. Often, narrative essays are school assignments or required for a college application, and you'll receive a prompt from the teacher or institution. Even if you've got a crazy story about the time you escaped from a deserted island on a hot air balloon, read the prompt closely to make sure your story fits the assignment. Common topics for narrative essays include but are not limited to a description of some moment that:^{[4]
X
Research source}
- You experienced adversity and had to overcome
- You failed and had to deal with the consequences of that failure
- Your personality or character was transformed
4
Choose a story with a manageable plot. Good narrative essays tell specific stories. You're not writing a novel, so the story needs to be fairly contained and concise. Try to limit it as much as possible in terms of other characters, setting, and plot. A specific family vacation or weekend with a friend? A disaster holiday, or night out during high school? Perfect.
- Bad narrative essays are generally too broad. "My senior year of high school" or "This summer" are examples of stories that would be far too big to tell in the amount of specific detail that a good narrative essay requires. Pick a single event from the summer, or a single week of your senior year, not something that takes months to unfold.
- It's also good to limit the number of characters you introduce. Only include other characters who are absolutely essential. Every single friend from your fifth grade class will be too many names to keep track of. Pick one.
5
Choose a story with vibrant details. Good narrative essays are full of specific details, particular images and language that helps make the story come alive for the reader. The sights and smells in your story should all be discussed in particular details. When you're thinking of stories that might make for good essays, it's important to think of some that are rich in these kinds of details.
- Let your imagination fill in the gaps. When you're describing your grandmother's house and a specific weekend you remember spending there, it's not important to remember exactly what was cooked for dinner on Friday night, unless that's an important part of the story. What did your grandmother typically cook? What did it usually smell like? Those are the details we need.
- Typically, narrative essays are "non-fiction," which means that you can't just make up a story. It needs to have really happened. Force yourself to stay as true as possible to the straight story.

Part 2

Part 2 of 3:

Writing a Draft

1
Outline the plot before you begin. Where does your story start? Where does it end? Writing up a quick list of the major plot points in the story is a good way of making sure you hit all the high points. Every story needs a beginning, a middle, and an end.^{[5]
X
Trustworthy Source
Purdue Online Writing Lab
Trusted resource for writing and citation guidelines
Go to source}
- It helps to limit things as much as possible. While it might seem like we need to know a bunch of specific details from your senior year, try to think of a particularly tumultuous day from that year and tell us that story. Where does that story start? Not the first day of school that year. Find a better starting point.
- If you want to tell the story of your prom night, does it start when you get dressed? Maybe. Does it start when you spill spaghetti sauce all down your dress before the dance? While that might seem like the climax of a story you want to tell, it might make a better starting place. Go straight to the drama.
- You don't need to write up a formal outline for a narrative essay unless it's part of the assignment or it really helps you write. Listing the major scenes that need to be a part of the story will help you get organized and find a good place to start.
2
Use a consistent point of view. Generally, narrative essays will be written in first person, making use of "I" statements, which is a little unusual compared to other assignments you'll be given in school. Whether you're giving us scenes with dialog, or discussing what happened in past-tense, it's perfectly fine to use first person in a narrative essay.^{[6]
X
Trustworthy Source
Purdue Online Writing Lab
Trusted resource for writing and citation guidelines
Go to source}
- Don't switch perspectives throughout the story. This is a difficult and advanced technique to try to pull off, and it usually has the effect of being too complicated. There should only be one "I" in the story.
- In general, narrative essays (and short stories for that matter) should also be told in past tense. So, you would write "Johnny and I walked to the store every Thursday" not "Johnny and I are walking to the store, like we do every Thursday."
- You may be instructed to write in the 3rd person (such as he, she, it, they, them, their). If so, be consistent with your pronouns throughout the story.
3
Describe the important characters. Who else is important to the story, other than yourself? Who else was present when the story took place. Who affected the outcome of the story? What specific, particular details can you remember about the people in the story? Use these to help build the characters into real people.
- Particular details are specific and only particular to the character being described. While it may be specific to say that your friend has brown hair, green eyes, is 5 feet tall with an athletic build, these things don't tell us much about the character. The fact that he only wears silk dragon shirts? Now that gives us something interesting.
- Try writing up a brief sketch of each principal character in your narrative essay, along with the specific details you remember about them. Pick a few essentials.
4
Find the antagonist and conflict. Good narratives often have a protagonist and an antagonist, which is what creates the conflict. The protagonist is usually the main character (in most narrative essays, that'll be you) who is struggling with something. It might be a situation, a condition, or a force, but whatever the case, a protagonist wants something and the reader roots for them. The antagonist is the thing or person who keeps the protagonist from getting what they want.
- Who or what is the antagonist in your story? To answer this question, you also need to find out what the protagonist wants. What is the goal? What's the best case scenario for the protagonist? What stands in the protagonist's way?
- The antagonist isn't "the bad guy" of the story, necessarily, and not every story has a clear antagonist. Also keep in mind that for some good personal narratives, you might be the antagonist yourself.
5
Describe the setting. Just as important to a good story as the characters and the plot is the setting. Where does the story take place? At home? Outside? In the city or the country? Describe the location that the story takes place and let the setting become part of your story.
- Do a freewrite about the location that your story takes place. What do you know about the place? What can you remember? What can you find out?
- If you do any research for your narrative essay, it will probably be here. Try to find out extra details about the setting of your story, or double-check your memory to make sure it's right.
6
Use vivid details. Good writing is in the details. Even the most boring office environment or the dullest town can be made compelling with the right kinds of details in the writing. Remember to use particulars–unique details that don't describe anything else but the specific thing you're writing about, and let these vivid details drive the story.^{[7]
X
Research source}
- A popular creative writing phrase tells writers to "show" not to "tell." What this means is that you should give us details whenever possible, rather than telling us facts. You might tell us something like, "My dad was always sad that year," but if you wrote "Dad never spoke when he got home from work. We heard his truck, then heard as he laid his battered hardhat on the kitchen table. Then we heard him sigh deeply and take off his work clothes, which were stained with grease."

Part 3

Part 3 of 3:

Revising Your Essay

1
Make sure your theme is clearly illustrated in the story. After you've written your rough draft, read back over it with an eye for your theme. Whatever the purpose of your telling us the story that you're telling us needs to be made very clear. The last thing you want is for the reader to get to the end and say, "Good story, but who cares?" Answer the question before the reader gets the chance to ask.
- Get the theme into the very beginning of the essay. Just as a researched argument essay needs to have a thesis statement somewhere in the first few paragraphs of the essay, a narrative essay needs a topic statement or a thesis statement to explain the main idea of the story.
- This isn't "ruining the surprise" of the story, this is foreshadowing the important themes and details to notice over the course of the story as you tell it. A good writer doesn't need suspense in a narrative essay. The ending should seem inevitable.
2
Use scenes and analyses. All narratives are made of two kinds of writing: scenes and analyses. Scenes happen when you need to slow down and tell specific details about an important moment of the story. Scenes are small moments that take a while to read. An analysis is used to narrate the time between scenes. They are longer moments that you read over more quickly.
- Scene: "On our walk to the store, Jared and I stopped at the empty grass lot to talk. 'What's your problem lately?' he asked, his eyes welling with tears. I didn't know what to tell him. I fidgeted, kicked an empty paint bucket that was rusted over at the edge of the lot. 'Remember when we used to play baseball here?' I asked him."
- Analysis: "We finished walking to the store and bought all the stuff for the big holiday dinner. We got a turkey, cornbread, cranberries. The works. The store was crazy-packed with happy holiday shoppers, but we walked through them all, not saying a word to each other. It took forever to lug it all home."
3
Use and format dialogue correctly. When you're writing a narrative essay, it's typically somewhere between a short story and a regular essay that you might write for school. You'll have to be familiar with the conventions of formatting both types of writing, and since most narrative essays will involve some dialogue, you should make formatting that dialogue correctly a part of your revision process.^{[8]
X
Research source}
- Anything spoken by a character out loud needs to be included in quotation marks and attributed to the character speaking it: "I've never been to Paris," said James.
- Each time a new character speaks, you need to make a new paragraph. If the same character speaks, multiple instances of dialog can exist in the same paragraph.
4
Revise your essay. Revision is the most important part of writing. Nobody, even the most experienced writers, get it right on the very first run through. Get a draft finished ahead of time and give yourself the chance to go back through your story carefully and see it again. How could it be improved?^{[9]
X
Research source}
- Revise for clarity first. Are your main points clear? If not, make them clear by including more details or narration in the writing. Hammer home your points.
- Was the decision you made about the starting place of the story correct? Or, now that you've written, might it be better to start the story later? Ask the tough questions.
- Proofreading is one part of revision, but it's a very minor part and it should be done last. Checking punctuation and spelling is the last thing you should be worried about in your narrative essay.

Sample Essay

Sample Narrative Essay

Expert Q&A
Did you know you can get expert answers for this article? Unlock expert answers by supporting wikiHow

Question

How do you start a narrative essay?

Christopher Taylor, PhD
English Professor
Christopher Taylor is an Adjunct Assistant Professor of English at Austin Community College in Texas. He received his PhD in English Literature and Medieval Studies from the University of Texas at Austin in 2014.

Christopher Taylor, PhD

English Professor

Expert Answer

Support wikiHow by unlocking this expert answer.

Have a clear understanding of the prompt, select a topic that interests you, and think of a story that fits with that topic. Briefly outline the story to make sure it has a manageable plot and fits the prompt.
Question

What is an example of a narrative?

Christopher Taylor, PhD
English Professor
Christopher Taylor is an Adjunct Assistant Professor of English at Austin Community College in Texas. He received his PhD in English Literature and Medieval Studies from the University of Texas at Austin in 2014.

Christopher Taylor, PhD

English Professor

Expert Answer

Support wikiHow by unlocking this expert answer.

Most narrative essays feature a story and some sort of analysis of this story. Examples of this genre range from published essays such as Ralph Emerson's "Self-Reliance" or James Baldwin's "Notes on a Native Son" to a story about what stands out most from your summer vacation.
Question

What is a narrative format?

Christopher Taylor, PhD
English Professor
Christopher Taylor is an Adjunct Assistant Professor of English at Austin Community College in Texas. He received his PhD in English Literature and Medieval Studies from the University of Texas at Austin in 2014.

Christopher Taylor, PhD

English Professor

Expert Answer

Support wikiHow by unlocking this expert answer.

This can vary depending on the prompt, but, generally speaking, a narrative essay details a personal experience and often then focuses on an insight or series of insights that story inspired in the author.