14.3 Narrative

Narrative is the telling of a story, and this section covers only narrative as used as a strategy or mode within essays and exposition writing. This means we are not covering the true, full narrative arts themselves, which are covered separately in creative writing courses.

However, the narrative within the exposition still taps into some of that power. When readers are absorbing your ideas through your explanations, they are thinking, but when you give them a story that shows your ideas, they are immersed. They can embody the ideas. Narrative offers the chance for readers to feel connected to individual people, to picture specific images, and to feel involved in an event or present in a place. If you can align your thesis statements or main points to the engaging stories you tell about them, your audience will find your writing to be more effective.

Narrative writing includes the act of writing about yourself, which is exceptionally difficult for most writers but is nonetheless required for many circumstances in and out of college, such as scholarship application essays, statements of purpose for applying to exclusive educational programs, cover letters for employment, even appeals to college professors, departments, or administrators.

The elements of narrative

If narrative is the telling of a story, what is a story? A story can be defined by the functions of its elements: characters striving within their worlds through occurrences and confronting important meanings.

These are the four elements you need to make clear in your narrative. Leaving any one of them out, or leaving any one of them vague, will leave the tale pointless or useless, and will likely leave readers confused or disappointed. Vagueness and abstraction are the antitheses of narrative, which functions through specificity: the use of words to summon concrete images, sensations, and experiences.

Keep in mind that real or factual narratives require great amounts of selection from you, the writer. You cannot and should not try to include everything and everyone involved in the real or factual occurrence. Instead, you must choose to tell only the most vital parts, which are those associated with these  four elements:

Theme

This means the overall concept, dilemma, question, point, message, or moral that the story treats. Stories essentially explore important meanings in one’s own life, or in life itself, and this exploration of meaning is the theme. For our purpose here, the theme is often the thesis that the narrative supports, or the main point that the narrative illustrates. You need to know what the point of your story is, and you must make it clear to readers. The lack of explicit clarity (which is called ambiguity) is not for this kind of narrative. That is better left to the separate art and craft of creative writing. Readers of a narrative essay should be able to pinpoint the significant events.

Characters

These are the participants in the story. They can include yourself, the writer (normally by using first-person pronouns), and/or others. For your readers, characters in a narrative are not the people themselves in real life. They are constructs of words that the readers must imagine. So in a narrative, characters exist only through what you say about them, and what you say about them should show the only two things they can do: act and speak. It is your job as the writer to create the characters by rendering their actions and/or speech through your words.

And remember that we act and speak for reasons. In other words, action and speech are motivated–they are attempts to get or accomplish something–so clarify the characters’ motivations. Sometimes such motivations are concrete or material, such as winning the trophy, getting the job, returning home alive, etc. Other times motivations are social, moral, or otherwise abstract, such as wanting acceptance, love, control, or a guilt-free conscience. What matters most is that the motivations are clarified for the characters and are reflected through their actions and speech.

Remember that narration of real or factual stories requires selection. If a person was there in the true event but did and said nothing that had any bearing on anything, do not bother to mention them. Leave them out. Their presence will simply distract or mislead. Such a person is still real but is not a character in that narrative.

Setting

This means the time and place of the story. As with characters, the names or pure data mean almost nothing without specifics regarding what it was like and how it affected the plot, characters, theme, or other parts of the setting.

A narrative essay is personal and it should give the reader that feeling as well. The writer should use effective descriptions and pay attention to details to ‘show’ the story to the reader (the notion of “show don’t tell” applies here). Narratives are subjective–which is part of what gives them the power they have–so do not fear to re-interpret reality based on your perceptions.

It is perhaps most useful to think of setting in terms of scenes: specific sets where and when the story happened. A common error among student writers is to place the narrative vaguely over a year, or during high school, or some other kind of non-setting. Instead, select one specific place and time. Again, this requires selection. You cannot render all important places and times relevant to you; you must select the few best suited to your overall narrative.

Plot

This means the events and occurrences of the story. In other words, the plot is what happens, both externally (physically, historically) and internally (mentally, emotionally). This is probably the most difficult and complex aspect of narrative for student writers to achieve, largely due to the selection and arrangement it requires. To develop a plot, you must reinterpret what happened as certain narrative categories, or types of occurrences, often called plot beats.

Telling what happened (according to what you think were facts) without selection or plot-crafting results in a mere information report or chronology, which is likely to lack any bearing on the theme. Such an attempt at narrative will therefore seem to readers to be pointless. There is no narrative essay without connected events and plots. Like any other essay, a writer needs effective transitions to connect their separate ideas (or plot points).

Narrative Help for Writing About Yourself

As noted at the beginning of this section, inside and outside of college you are often required to write about yourself. Employers want cover letters, or examples of your past experiences, successes, and failures. Scholarships want you to write essays about yourself, your experiences, and your goals. Educational programs want you to write about yourself as a candidate for admission. You even have to write about yourself if you are appealing to a college or institution. But writing about yourself is one of the most difficult challenges a writer can confront. It’s hard to know where to begin, what to address, what to add, and what to omit. And it is even harder to view yourself and your own life as a construction of words in the mind of a stranger reading your work.

These techniques do not include the details of structure or format that are specific to certain types of writing about yourself, such as a job application cover letter. Instead, this is meant to teach the techniques needed to write about yourself as a skill that you can apply to many different tasks and challenges.