Introduction to Narrative

What is a Narrative?

• Simple answer: narrative tells a story.

• More complicated answer: The word “narrative” is slightly different from “story” because “narrative” implies the importance of the way you tell the story (think about its likeness to the verb “to narrate”).
  • It’s not just about the content (the plot): it’s about the words you choose, the punctuation you use, the pacing you maintain, the emotional atmosphere you create, etc.

• Narratology, the study of narratives, makes this distinction between story and narrative:
  • A story is: This happened. Then this happened. Finally, this happened.
  • A narrative Re-emphasizes, Re-arranges, and Re-values the events. (How would your audience know the actual “truth?”)

• Re-emphasizes: Some events get tons of time, while others are told in a very small amount of time or aren’t even mentioned. You can conveniently “forget” some fact while “remembering” others.

• Re-arranges: First, second, third, and last don’t always matter for stories. You can tell the first stuff last, the last first, the middle first—whatever will tell your story the “right” way for you. You can conveniently ditch some of the people and add others. You can add dialogue or take it away. You can make the story happen in a different place, at a different time, or at a different speed.

• Re-values: Your narrative decides the good, the bad, and the ugly. Take a minute and decide if that awful event wasn’t actually good for you in the long run, or if somebody’s “nice” action wasn’t so nice after all.

Why Narrative?

• I’d argue that the most basic human urge (after, you know, “eating” and “sleeping”) is telling stories.

• We narrate in order to understand our experiences.
  Without telling stories about ourselves, our lives are a bundle of unrelated objects and events. Just a bunch of people, some colors and shapes, some sounds. They don’t mean anything until you put the information together in a COHERENT BUNDLE —in other words, a NARRATIVE.

• Telling stories allows us to ’’claim causality’’ (why did this happen? what happened because this happened?), to ’’evaluate situations’’ (was this a good event? a bad one? would you do it over again? would you change what you did?), to ’’evaluate people’’ (whose fault was it? did I act like a good person?), and to ’’hypothesize significance’’ (why does this event matter?)

• You take control of your life by controlling the stories you think and tell about it.
  • Think about it: do you really control what you get to do, what you own, what people think of you, what happens to you?
  • You can psychologically make up for your comparative loss of control by telling a narrative.
    • In your story, you get to decide who was right and who wasn’t. You get to decide the real reason why you did what you did. ’’You get to determine whether the result was fair or not.
  • Grab hold of your life by telling a narrative!

• Reinsert the “I” in your life!

Why a Narrative Essay?

• Narratives already have significance for your audience (“Hey, I’m a person too!”); you’ve already pretty much argued why they should care about what you have to say. Put simply, people want to know about other people.

• This tool will help you write other essays: narratives are often a component of larger, more complex essays.

• You already have done the research: you know your material cold, and you can concentrate on how to say it, rather than worry about researching and documenting and analyzing etc.

• And they’re fun. You get to talk about yourself, the people you love (or love to hate), the places you’ve been, and what’s happened to you.

Describing the Assignment

Read Assignment Sheet

If that prompt does not help you, try this method: Think of a personality characteristic you have that you would like to share with your classmates. Then, scour your memory for the moment in your life when you developed that characteristic or when you exhibited that characteristic.

You need not choose a positive experience or a positive characteristic: you could show how you are often lazy, undependable, or snobbish, or you could choose a moment in life when you learned that you couldn’t trust the people around you as easily as you could choose an event that convinced you that you could. Why would you do so? Well, choosing a positive moment or characteristic can be boringly predictable and can sometimes lead to sounding proud, smug, or naive. Also, choosing a negative characteristic makes you sound reasonable, approachable, and down-to-earth, while choosing a negative experience might make you sound mature, rational, and wise.

You need to perform a few basic tasks in order to create a successful narrative:

• You must convince your audience of its unique, fascinating significance to your life.
  • How did this event change your life?
• You must entertain your audience, whether by making them laugh or provoking some kind of compelling emotional response (sadness, happiness, anger, remorse, etc.).
  • As you write, you should feel these emotions too!
• You must create and maintain a personal voice in order to transmit your own personality.
  • Use interesting words and phrases, use lots of interesting punctuation marks, and try to write the way you speak.

Cautionary Notes

• Know your purpose. Unless you are famous, a personal narrative that only tells your audience about yourself rather misses the mark and appears narcissistic. We must have some kind of advice or moral to transmit in order to have people interested in our stories. (EXCEPTION: if you write a comic essay—one intended primarily to make the audience laugh—you do not need to have a “moral of the story.”)
• Avoid heavy-handed or obvious moralizing.
  • Do not saturate your audience with too much sentimentality. Do not let your essay sound like a lecture!
  • If you are worried about a particular sentence or paragraph sounding too serious or too sobby, read it aloud and pay attention to the tone in which you deliver the lines. If you feel like you’re auditioning for a role in a soap opera, you should probably revise.
  • Furthermore, make sure to have a unique, unexpected moral or lesson, not one that the reader has heard a million times. In other words, don’t be trite.
  • Finally, don’t spend too long on your moral. Try to integrate your moral in with the dialogue, action, and description in your essay.

Some Suggestions

• Don’t say, “That afternoon, I learned that if I wanted to grow up to become the person I wanted to be, I had to accept help from the people I love.”
• Instead, end the essay with a scene of you hugging your parents, shaking your new boss’s hand, dialing your best friend’s phone number, or asking someone for help.
• In addition, make sure that early in the essay, you show yourself rejecting help from someone. You tell your parents not to wait up for you Saturday night, you say to your best friend that you can handle this on your own, or you describe a scene of you doing something important alone (driving somewhere, applying to a job or school alone, etc.
• Also, the words you use to describe the characters and setting can help provide a mood. At the beginning, have your character look at “a lone pine tree at the top of a hill” in “the middle of a dark, empty parking lot.” At the end, though, place your character in “a bright park, sprinkled with yellow, green, and red benches,” surrounded by his/her family and friends.
• In the beginning of the essay, you can get away with a certain amount of direct explanation, but you should minimize it. For example, you could mention, “In those days, I never asked for anyone’s help,” but if you do so, don’t make another explanation like that any other time in the essay. Only use this technique if you can’t figure out how to “show” what you mean with action, dialogue, or description.
• Find a unique topic.
  • Choosing the first day of school is too obvious. Choosing the first day you drove your own car is too obvious. Choose some moment in your development that no one else you know has gone through.
  • Your reader wants to know what you have to say because you presumably have an unfamiliar story to tell or a new idea to transmit. In fact, by choosing an uncommon experience, you practically have met your principal goal already: you have made yourself stand out from the crowd.

Narrative Activity