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How to Write a Narrative Essay | Example & Tips

Published on July 24, 2020 by Jack Caulfield . Revised on July 23, 2023.

A narrative essay tells a story. In most cases, this is a story about a personal experience you had. This type of essay , along with the descriptive essay , allows you to get personal and creative, unlike most academic writing .

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Table of contents

What is a narrative essay for, choosing a topic, interactive example of a narrative essay, other interesting articles, frequently asked questions about narrative essays.

When assigned a narrative essay, you might find yourself wondering: Why does my teacher want to hear this story? Topics for narrative essays can range from the important to the trivial. Usually the point is not so much the story itself, but the way you tell it.

A narrative essay is a way of testing your ability to tell a story in a clear and interesting way. You’re expected to think about where your story begins and ends, and how to convey it with eye-catching language and a satisfying pace.

These skills are quite different from those needed for formal academic writing. For instance, in a narrative essay the use of the first person (“I”) is encouraged, as is the use of figurative language, dialogue, and suspense.

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Narrative essay assignments vary widely in the amount of direction you’re given about your topic. You may be assigned quite a specific topic or choice of topics to work with.

• Write a story about your first day of school.
• Write a story about your favorite holiday destination.

You may also be given prompts that leave you a much wider choice of topic.

• Write about an experience where you learned something about yourself.
• Write about an achievement you are proud of. What did you accomplish, and how?

In these cases, you might have to think harder to decide what story you want to tell. The best kind of story for a narrative essay is one you can use to talk about a particular theme or lesson, or that takes a surprising turn somewhere along the way.

For example, a trip where everything went according to plan makes for a less interesting story than one where something unexpected happened that you then had to respond to. Choose an experience that might surprise the reader or teach them something.

Narrative essays in college applications

When applying for college , you might be asked to write a narrative essay that expresses something about your personal qualities.

For example, this application prompt from Common App requires you to respond with a narrative essay.

In this context, choose a story that is not only interesting but also expresses the qualities the prompt is looking for—here, resilience and the ability to learn from failure—and frame the story in a way that emphasizes these qualities.

An example of a short narrative essay, responding to the prompt “Write about an experience where you learned something about yourself,” is shown below.

Hover over different parts of the text to see how the structure works.

Since elementary school, I have always favored subjects like science and math over the humanities. My instinct was always to think of these subjects as more solid and serious than classes like English. If there was no right answer, I thought, why bother? But recently I had an experience that taught me my academic interests are more flexible than I had thought: I took my first philosophy class.

Before I entered the classroom, I was skeptical. I waited outside with the other students and wondered what exactly philosophy would involve—I really had no idea. I imagined something pretty abstract: long, stilted conversations pondering the meaning of life. But what I got was something quite different.

A young man in jeans, Mr. Jones—“but you can call me Rob”—was far from the white-haired, buttoned-up old man I had half-expected. And rather than pulling us into pedantic arguments about obscure philosophical points, Rob engaged us on our level. To talk free will, we looked at our own choices. To talk ethics, we looked at dilemmas we had faced ourselves. By the end of class, I’d discovered that questions with no right answer can turn out to be the most interesting ones.

The experience has taught me to look at things a little more “philosophically”—and not just because it was a philosophy class! I learned that if I let go of my preconceptions, I can actually get a lot out of subjects I was previously dismissive of. The class taught me—in more ways than one—to look at things with an open mind.

If you want to know more about AI tools , college essays , or fallacies make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples or go directly to our tools!

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If you’re not given much guidance on what your narrative essay should be about, consider the context and scope of the assignment. What kind of story is relevant, interesting, and possible to tell within the word count?

The best kind of story for a narrative essay is one you can use to reflect on a particular theme or lesson, or that takes a surprising turn somewhere along the way.

Don’t worry too much if your topic seems unoriginal. The point of a narrative essay is how you tell the story and the point you make with it, not the subject of the story itself.

Narrative essays are usually assigned as writing exercises at high school or in university composition classes. They may also form part of a university application.

When you are prompted to tell a story about your own life or experiences, a narrative essay is usually the right response.

The key difference is that a narrative essay is designed to tell a complete story, while a descriptive essay is meant to convey an intense description of a particular place, object, or concept.

Narrative and descriptive essays both allow you to write more personally and creatively than other kinds of essays , and similar writing skills can apply to both.

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The Ultimate Narrative Essay Guide for Beginners

A narrative essay tells a story in chronological order, with an introduction that introduces the characters and sets the scene. Then a series of events leads to a climax or turning point, and finally a resolution or reflection on the experience.

Speaking of which, are you in sixes and sevens about narrative essays? Don’t worry this ultimate expert guide will wipe out all your doubts. So let’s get started.

Table of Contents

Everything You Need to Know About Narrative Essay

What is a narrative essay.

When you go through a narrative essay definition, you would know that a narrative essay purpose is to tell a story. It’s all about sharing an experience or event and is different from other types of essays because it’s more focused on how the event made you feel or what you learned from it, rather than just presenting facts or an argument. Let’s explore more details on this interesting write-up and get to know how to write a narrative essay.

Elements of a Narrative Essay

Here’s a breakdown of the key elements of a narrative essay:

A narrative essay has a beginning, middle, and end. It builds up tension and excitement and then wraps things up in a neat package.

Real people, including the writer, often feature in personal narratives. Details of the characters and their thoughts, feelings, and actions can help readers to relate to the tale.

It’s really important to know when and where something happened so we can get a good idea of the context. Going into detail about what it looks like helps the reader to really feel like they’re part of the story.

Conflict or Challenge 

A story in a narrative essay usually involves some kind of conflict or challenge that moves the plot along. It could be something inside the character, like a personal battle, or something from outside, like an issue they have to face in the world.

Theme or Message

A narrative essay isn’t just about recounting an event – it’s about showing the impact it had on you and what you took away from it. It’s an opportunity to share your thoughts and feelings about the experience, and how it changed your outlook.

Emotional Impact

The author is trying to make the story they’re telling relatable, engaging, and memorable by using language and storytelling to evoke feelings in whoever’s reading it.

Narrative essays let writers have a blast telling stories about their own lives. It’s an opportunity to share insights and impart wisdom, or just have some fun with the reader. Descriptive language, sensory details, dialogue, and a great narrative voice are all essentials for making the story come alive.

The Purpose of a Narrative Essay

A narrative essay is more than just a story – it’s a way to share a meaningful, engaging, and relatable experience with the reader. Includes:

Sharing Personal Experience

Narrative essays are a great way for writers to share their personal experiences, feelings, thoughts, and reflections. It’s an opportunity to connect with readers and make them feel something.

Entertainment and Engagement

The essay attempts to keep the reader interested by using descriptive language, storytelling elements, and a powerful voice. It attempts to pull them in and make them feel involved by creating suspense, mystery, or an emotional connection.

Conveying a Message or Insight

Narrative essays are more than just a story – they aim to teach you something. They usually have a moral lesson, a new understanding, or a realization about life that the author gained from the experience.

Building Empathy and Understanding

By telling their stories, people can give others insight into different perspectives, feelings, and situations. Sharing these tales can create compassion in the reader and help broaden their knowledge of different life experiences.

Inspiration and Motivation

Stories about personal struggles, successes, and transformations can be really encouraging to people who are going through similar situations. It can provide them with hope and guidance, and let them know that they’re not alone.

Reflecting on Life’s Significance

These essays usually make you think about the importance of certain moments in life or the impact of certain experiences. They make you look deep within yourself and ponder on the things you learned or how you changed because of those events.

Demonstrating Writing Skills

Coming up with a gripping narrative essay takes serious writing chops, like vivid descriptions, powerful language, timing, and organization. It’s an opportunity for writers to show off their story-telling abilities.

Preserving Personal History

Sometimes narrative essays are used to record experiences and special moments that have an emotional resonance. They can be used to preserve individual memories or for future generations to look back on.

Cultural and Societal Exploration

Personal stories can look at cultural or social aspects, giving us an insight into customs, opinions, or social interactions seen through someone’s own experience.

Format of a Narrative Essay

Narrative essays are quite flexible in terms of format, which allows the writer to tell a story in a creative and compelling way. Here’s a quick breakdown of the narrative essay format, along with some examples:

Introduction

Set the scene and introduce the story.

Engage the reader and establish the tone of the narrative.

Hook: Start with a captivating opening line to grab the reader’s attention. For instance:

Example:  “The scorching sun beat down on us as we trekked through the desert, our water supply dwindling.”

Background Information: Provide necessary context or background without giving away the entire story.

Example:  “It was the summer of 2015 when I embarked on a life-changing journey to…”

Thesis Statement or Narrative Purpose

Present the main idea or the central message of the essay.

Offer a glimpse of what the reader can expect from the narrative.

Thesis Statement: This isn’t as rigid as in other essays but can be a sentence summarizing the essence of the story.

Example:  “Little did I know, that seemingly ordinary hike would teach me invaluable lessons about resilience and friendship.”

Body Paragraphs

Present the sequence of events in chronological order.

Develop characters, setting, conflict, and resolution.

Story Progression : Describe events in the order they occurred, focusing on details that evoke emotions and create vivid imagery.

Example : Detail the trek through the desert, the challenges faced, interactions with fellow hikers, and the pivotal moments.

Character Development : Introduce characters and their roles in the story. Show their emotions, thoughts, and actions.

Example : Describe how each character reacted to the dwindling water supply and supported each other through adversity.

Dialogue and Interactions : Use dialogue to bring the story to life and reveal character personalities.

Example : “Sarah handed me her last bottle of water, saying, ‘We’re in this together.'”

Reach the peak of the story, the moment of highest tension or significance.

Turning Point: Highlight the most crucial moment or realization in the narrative.

Example:  “As the sun dipped below the horizon and hope seemed lost, a distant sound caught our attention—the rescue team’s helicopters.”

Provide closure to the story.

Reflect on the significance of the experience and its impact.

Reflection : Summarize the key lessons learned or insights gained from the experience.

Example : “That hike taught me the true meaning of resilience and the invaluable support of friendship in challenging times.”

Closing Thought : End with a memorable line that reinforces the narrative’s message or leaves a lasting impression.

Example : “As we boarded the helicopters, I knew this adventure would forever be etched in my heart.”

Example Summary:

Imagine a narrative about surviving a challenging hike through the desert, emphasizing the bonds formed and lessons learned. The narrative essay structure might look like starting with an engaging scene, narrating the hardships faced, showcasing the characters’ resilience, and culminating in a powerful realization about friendship and endurance.

Different Types of Narrative Essays

There are a bunch of different types of narrative essays – each one focuses on different elements of storytelling and has its own purpose. Here’s a breakdown of the narrative essay types and what they mean.

Personal Narrative

Description : Tells a personal story or experience from the writer’s life.

Purpose: Reflects on personal growth, lessons learned, or significant moments.

Example of Narrative Essay Types:

Topic : “The Day I Conquered My Fear of Public Speaking”

Focus: Details the experience, emotions, and eventual triumph over a fear of public speaking during a pivotal event.

Descriptive Narrative

Description : Emphasizes vivid details and sensory imagery.

Purpose : Creates a sensory experience, painting a vivid picture for the reader.

Topic : “A Walk Through the Enchanted Forest”

Focus : Paints a detailed picture of the sights, sounds, smells, and feelings experienced during a walk through a mystical forest.

Autobiographical Narrative

Description: Chronicles significant events or moments from the writer’s life.

Purpose: Provides insights into the writer’s life, experiences, and growth.

Topic: “Lessons from My Childhood: How My Grandmother Shaped Who I Am”

Focus: Explores pivotal moments and lessons learned from interactions with a significant family member.

Experiential Narrative

Description: Relays experiences beyond the writer’s personal life.

Purpose: Shares experiences, travels, or events from a broader perspective.

Topic: “Volunteering in a Remote Village: A Journey of Empathy”

Focus: Chronicles the writer’s volunteering experience, highlighting interactions with a community and personal growth.

Literary Narrative

Description: Incorporates literary elements like symbolism, allegory, or thematic explorations.

Purpose: Uses storytelling for deeper explorations of themes or concepts.

Topic: “The Symbolism of the Red Door: A Journey Through Change”

Focus: Uses a red door as a symbol, exploring its significance in the narrator’s life and the theme of transition.

Historical Narrative

Description: Recounts historical events or periods through a personal lens.

Purpose: Presents history through personal experiences or perspectives.

Topic: “A Grandfather’s Tales: Living Through the Great Depression”

Focus: Shares personal stories from a family member who lived through a historical era, offering insights into that period.

Digital or Multimedia Narrative

Description: Incorporates multimedia elements like images, videos, or audio to tell a story.

Purpose: Explores storytelling through various digital platforms or formats.

Topic: “A Travel Diary: Exploring Europe Through Vlogs”

Focus: Combines video clips, photos, and personal narration to document a travel experience.

How to Choose a Topic for Your Narrative Essay?

Selecting a compelling topic for your narrative essay is crucial as it sets the stage for your storytelling. Choosing a boring topic is one of the narrative essay mistakes to avoid . Here’s a detailed guide on how to choose the right topic:

Reflect on Personal Experiences

• Significant Moments:

Moments that had a profound impact on your life or shaped your perspective.

Example: A moment of triumph, overcoming a fear, a life-changing decision, or an unforgettable experience.

• Emotional Resonance:

Events that evoke strong emotions or feelings.

Example: Joy, fear, sadness, excitement, or moments of realization.

• Lessons Learned:

Experiences that taught you valuable lessons or brought about personal growth.

Example: Challenges that led to personal development, shifts in mindset, or newfound insights.

Explore Unique Perspectives

• Uncommon Experiences:

Unique or unconventional experiences that might captivate the reader’s interest.

Example: Unusual travels, interactions with different cultures, or uncommon hobbies.

• Different Points of View:

Stories from others’ perspectives that impacted you deeply.

Example: A family member’s story, a friend’s experience, or a historical event from a personal lens.

Focus on Specific Themes or Concepts

• Themes or Concepts of Interest:

Themes or ideas you want to explore through storytelling.

Example: Friendship, resilience, identity, cultural diversity, or personal transformation.

• Symbolism or Metaphor:

Using symbols or metaphors as the core of your narrative.

Example: Exploring the symbolism of an object or a place in relation to a broader theme.

Consider Your Audience and Purpose

• Relevance to Your Audience:

Topics that resonate with your audience’s interests or experiences.

Example: Choose a relatable theme or experience that your readers might connect with emotionally.

• Impact or Message:

What message or insight do you want to convey through your story?

Example: Choose a topic that aligns with the message or lesson you aim to impart to your readers.

Brainstorm and Evaluate Ideas

• Free Writing or Mind Mapping:

Process: Write down all potential ideas without filtering. Mind maps or free-writing exercises can help generate diverse ideas.

• Evaluate Feasibility:

The depth of the story, the availability of vivid details, and your personal connection to the topic.

Imagine you’re considering topics for a narrative essay. You reflect on your experiences and decide to explore the topic of “Overcoming Stage Fright: How a School Play Changed My Perspective.” This topic resonates because it involves a significant challenge you faced and the personal growth it brought about.

Narrative Essay Topics

50 easy narrative essay topics.

• Learning to Ride a Bike
• My First Day of School
• A Surprise Birthday Party
• The Day I Got Lost
• Visiting a Haunted House
• An Encounter with a Wild Animal
• My Favorite Childhood Toy
• The Best Vacation I Ever Had
• An Unforgettable Family Gathering
• Conquering a Fear of Heights
• A Special Gift I Received
• Moving to a New City
• The Most Memorable Meal
• Getting Caught in a Rainstorm
• An Act of Kindness I Witnessed
• The First Time I Cooked a Meal
• My Experience with a New Hobby
• The Day I Met My Best Friend
• A Hike in the Mountains
• Learning a New Language
• An Embarrassing Moment
• Dealing with a Bully
• My First Job Interview
• A Sporting Event I Attended
• The Scariest Dream I Had
• Helping a Stranger
• The Joy of Achieving a Goal
• A Road Trip Adventure
• Overcoming a Personal Challenge
• The Significance of a Family Tradition
• An Unusual Pet I Owned
• A Misunderstanding with a Friend
• Exploring an Abandoned Building
• My Favorite Book and Why
• The Impact of a Role Model
• A Cultural Celebration I Participated In
• A Valuable Lesson from a Teacher
• A Trip to the Zoo
• An Unplanned Adventure
• Volunteering Experience
• A Moment of Forgiveness
• A Decision I Regretted
• A Special Talent I Have
• The Importance of Family Traditions
• The Thrill of Performing on Stage
• A Moment of Sudden Inspiration
• The Meaning of Home
• Learning to Play a Musical Instrument
• A Childhood Memory at the Park
• Witnessing a Beautiful Sunset

Narrative Essay Topics for College Students

• Discovering a New Passion
• Overcoming Academic Challenges
• Navigating Cultural Differences
• Embracing Independence: Moving Away from Home
• Exploring Career Aspirations
• Coping with Stress in College
• The Impact of a Mentor in My Life
• Balancing Work and Studies
• Facing a Fear of Public Speaking
• Exploring a Semester Abroad
• The Evolution of My Study Habits
• Volunteering Experience That Changed My Perspective
• The Role of Technology in Education
• Finding Balance: Social Life vs. Academics
• Learning a New Skill Outside the Classroom
• Reflecting on Freshman Year Challenges
• The Joys and Struggles of Group Projects
• My Experience with Internship or Work Placement
• Challenges of Time Management in College
• Redefining Success Beyond Grades
• The Influence of Literature on My Thinking
• The Impact of Social Media on College Life
• Overcoming Procrastination
• Lessons from a Leadership Role
• Exploring Diversity on Campus
• Exploring Passion for Environmental Conservation
• An Eye-Opening Course That Changed My Perspective
• Living with Roommates: Challenges and Lessons
• The Significance of Extracurricular Activities
• The Influence of a Professor on My Academic Journey
• Discussing Mental Health in College
• The Evolution of My Career Goals
• Confronting Personal Biases Through Education
• The Experience of Attending a Conference or Symposium
• Challenges Faced by Non-Native English Speakers in College
• The Impact of Traveling During Breaks
• Exploring Identity: Cultural or Personal
• The Impact of Music or Art on My Life
• Addressing Diversity in the Classroom
• Exploring Entrepreneurial Ambitions
• My Experience with Research Projects
• Overcoming Impostor Syndrome in College
• The Importance of Networking in College
• Finding Resilience During Tough Times
• The Impact of Global Issues on Local Perspectives
• The Influence of Family Expectations on Education
• Lessons from a Part-Time Job
• Exploring the College Sports Culture
• The Role of Technology in Modern Education
• The Journey of Self-Discovery Through Education

Narrative Essay Comparison

Narrative essay vs. descriptive essay.

Here’s our first narrative essay comparison! While both narrative and descriptive essays focus on vividly portraying a subject or an event, they differ in their primary objectives and approaches. Now, let’s delve into the nuances of comparison on narrative essays.

Narrative Essay:

Storytelling: Focuses on narrating a personal experience or event.

Chronological Order: Follows a structured timeline of events to tell a story.

Message or Lesson: Often includes a central message, moral, or lesson learned from the experience.

Engagement: Aims to captivate the reader through a compelling storyline and character development.

First-Person Perspective: Typically narrated from the writer’s point of view, using “I” and expressing personal emotions and thoughts.

Plot Development: Emphasizes a plot with a beginning, middle, climax, and resolution.

Character Development: Focuses on describing characters, their interactions, emotions, and growth.

Conflict or Challenge: Usually involves a central conflict or challenge that drives the narrative forward.

Dialogue: Incorporates conversations to bring characters and their interactions to life.

Reflection: Concludes with reflection or insight gained from the experience.

Descriptive Essay:

Vivid Description: Aims to vividly depict a person, place, object, or event.

Imagery and Details: Focuses on sensory details to create a vivid image in the reader’s mind.

Emotion through Description: Uses descriptive language to evoke emotions and engage the reader’s senses.

Painting a Picture: Creates a sensory-rich description allowing the reader to visualize the subject.

Imagery and Sensory Details: Focuses on providing rich sensory descriptions, using vivid language and adjectives.

Point of Focus: Concentrates on describing a specific subject or scene in detail.

Spatial Organization: Often employs spatial organization to describe from one area or aspect to another.

Objective Observations: Typically avoids the use of personal opinions or emotions; instead, the focus remains on providing a detailed and objective description.

Comparison:

Focus: Narrative essays emphasize storytelling, while descriptive essays focus on vividly describing a subject or scene.

Perspective: Narrative essays are often written from a first-person perspective, while descriptive essays may use a more objective viewpoint.

Purpose: Narrative essays aim to convey a message or lesson through a story, while descriptive essays aim to paint a detailed picture for the reader without necessarily conveying a specific message.

Narrative Essay vs. Argumentative Essay

The narrative essay and the argumentative essay serve distinct purposes and employ different approaches:

Engagement and Emotion: Aims to captivate the reader through a compelling story.

Reflective: Often includes reflection on the significance of the experience or lessons learned.

First-Person Perspective: Typically narrated from the writer’s point of view, sharing personal emotions and thoughts.

Plot Development: Emphasizes a storyline with a beginning, middle, climax, and resolution.

Message or Lesson: Conveys a central message, moral, or insight derived from the experience.

Argumentative Essay:

Persuasion and Argumentation: Aims to persuade the reader to adopt the writer’s viewpoint on a specific topic.

Logical Reasoning: Presents evidence, facts, and reasoning to support a particular argument or stance.

Debate and Counterarguments: Acknowledge opposing views and counter them with evidence and reasoning.

Thesis Statement: Includes a clear thesis statement that outlines the writer’s position on the topic.

Thesis and Evidence: Starts with a strong thesis statement and supports it with factual evidence, statistics, expert opinions, or logical reasoning.

Counterarguments: Addresses opposing viewpoints and provides rebuttals with evidence.

Logical Structure: Follows a logical structure with an introduction, body paragraphs presenting arguments and evidence, and a conclusion reaffirming the thesis.

Formal Language: Uses formal language and avoids personal anecdotes or emotional appeals.

Objective: Argumentative essays focus on presenting a logical argument supported by evidence, while narrative essays prioritize storytelling and personal reflection.

Purpose: Argumentative essays aim to persuade and convince the reader of a particular viewpoint, while narrative essays aim to engage, entertain, and share personal experiences.

Structure: Narrative essays follow a storytelling structure with character development and plot, while argumentative essays follow a more formal, structured approach with logical arguments and evidence.

In essence, while both essays involve writing and presenting information, the narrative essay focuses on sharing a personal experience, whereas the argumentative essay aims to persuade the audience by presenting a well-supported argument.

Narrative Essay vs. Personal Essay

While there can be an overlap between narrative and personal essays, they have distinctive characteristics:

Storytelling: Emphasizes recounting a specific experience or event in a structured narrative form.

Engagement through Story: Aims to engage the reader through a compelling story with characters, plot, and a central theme or message.

Reflective: Often includes reflection on the significance of the experience and the lessons learned.

First-Person Perspective: Typically narrated from the writer’s viewpoint, expressing personal emotions and thoughts.

Plot Development: Focuses on developing a storyline with a clear beginning, middle, climax, and resolution.

Character Development: Includes descriptions of characters, their interactions, emotions, and growth.

Central Message: Conveys a central message, moral, or insight derived from the experience.

Personal Essay:

Exploration of Ideas or Themes: Explores personal ideas, opinions, or reflections on a particular topic or subject.

Expression of Thoughts and Opinions: Expresses the writer’s thoughts, feelings, and perspectives on a specific subject matter.

Reflection and Introspection: Often involves self-reflection and introspection on personal experiences, beliefs, or values.

Varied Structure and Content: Can encompass various forms, including memoirs, personal anecdotes, or reflections on life experiences.

Flexibility in Structure: Allows for diverse structures and forms based on the writer’s intent, which could be narrative-like or more reflective.

Theme-Centric Writing: Focuses on exploring a central theme or idea, with personal anecdotes or experiences supporting and illustrating the theme.

Expressive Language: Utilizes descriptive and expressive language to convey personal perspectives, emotions, and opinions.

Focus: Narrative essays primarily focus on storytelling through a structured narrative, while personal essays encompass a broader range of personal expression, which can include storytelling but isn’t limited to it.

Structure: Narrative essays have a more structured plot development with characters and a clear sequence of events, while personal essays might adopt various structures, focusing more on personal reflection, ideas, or themes.

Intent: While both involve personal experiences, narrative essays emphasize telling a story with a message or lesson learned, while personal essays aim to explore personal thoughts, feelings, or opinions on a broader range of topics or themes.

A narrative essay is more than just telling a story. It’s also meant to engage the reader, get them thinking, and leave a lasting impact. Whether it’s to amuse, motivate, teach, or reflect, these essays are a great way to communicate with your audience. This interesting narrative essay guide was all about letting you understand the narrative essay, its importance, and how can you write one.

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When writers set down the facts of their lives into a compelling story , they’re writing a narrative essay. Personal narrative essays explore the events of the writer’s own life, and by crafting a nonfiction piece that resonates as storytelling, the essayist can uncover deeper truths in the world.

Narrative essays weave the author’s factual lived experiences into a compelling story.

So, what is a narrative essay? Whether you’re writing for college applications or literary journals , this article separates fact from fiction. We’ll look at how to write a narrative essay through a step-by-step process, including a look at narrative essay topics and outlines. We’ll also analyze some successful narrative essay examples.

Learn how to tell your story, your way. Let’s dive into this exciting genre!

What is a Narrative Essay?

The narrative essay is a branch of creative nonfiction . Also known as a personal essay, writers of this genre are tasked with telling honest stories about their lived experiences and, as a result, arriving at certain realizations about life.

Think of personal narrative essays as nonfiction short stories . While the essay and the short story rely on different writing techniques, they arrive at similar outcomes: a powerful story with an idea, theme , or moral that the reader can interpret for themselves.

Now, if you haven’t written a narrative essay before, you might associate the word “essay” with high school English class. Remember those tedious 5-paragraph essays we had to write, on the topic of some book we barely read, about subject matter that didn’t interest us?

Don’t worry—that’s not the kind of essay we’re talking about. The word essay comes from the French essayer , which means “to try.” That’s exactly what writing a narrative essay is: an attempt at organizing the real world into language—a journey of making meaning from the chaos of life.

Narrative essays work to surface meaning from lived experience.

Narrative Essay Example

A great narrative essay example is the piece “Flow” by Mary Oliver, which you can read for free in Google Books .

The essay dwells on, as Mary Oliver puts it, the fact that “we live in paradise.” At once both an ode to nature and an urge to love it fiercely, Oliver explores our place in the endless beauty of the world.

Throughout the essay, Oliver weaves in her thoughts about the world, from nature’s noble beauty to the question “What is the life I should live?” Yet these thoughts, however profound, are not the bulk of the essay. Rather, she arrives at these thoughts via anecdotes and observations: the migration of whales, the strings of fish at high tide, the inventive rescue of a spiny fish from the waterless shore, etc.

What is most profound about this essay, and perhaps most amusing, is that it ends with Oliver’s questions about how to live life. And yet, the stories she tells show us exactly how to live life: with care for the world; with admiration; with tenderness towards all of life and its superb, mysterious, seemingly-random beauty.

Such is the power of the narrative essay. By examining the random facts of our lives, we can come to great conclusions.

What do most essays have in common? Let’s look at the fundamentals of the essay, before diving into more narrative essay examples.

Narrative Essay Definition: 5 Fundamentals

The personal narrative essay has a lot of room for experimentation. We’ll dive into those opportunities in a bit, but no matter the form, most essays share these five fundamentals.

• Personal experience
• Meaning from chaos
• The use of literary devices

Let’s explore these fundamentals in depth.

All narrative essays have a thesis statement. However, this isn’t the formulaic thesis statement you had to write in school: you don’t need to map out your argument with painstaking specificity, you need merely to tell the reader what you’re writing about.

Take the aforementioned essay by Mary Oliver. Her thesis is this: “How can we not know that, already, we live in paradise?”

It’s a simple yet provocative statement. By posing her thesis as a question, she challenges us to consider why we might not treat this earth as paradise. She then delves into her own understanding of this paradise, providing relevant stories and insights as to how the earth should be treated.

Now, be careful with abstract statements like this. Mary Oliver is a master of language, so she’s capable of creating a thesis statement out of an abstract idea and building a beautiful essay. But concrete theses are also welcome: you should compel the reader forward with the central argument of your work, without confusing them or leading them astray.

You should compel the reader forward with the central argument of your work, without confusing them or leading them astray

2. Personal Experience

The personal narrative essay is, shockingly, about personal experience. But how do writers distill their experiences into meaningful stories?

There are a few techniques writers have at their disposal. Perhaps the most common of these techniques is called braiding . Rather than focusing on one continuous story, the writer can “braid” different stories, weaving in and out of different narratives and finding common threads between them. Often, the subject matter of the essay will require more than one anecdote as evidence, and braiding helps the author uphold their thesis while showing instead of telling .

Another important consideration is how you tell your story . Essayists should consider the same techniques that fiction writers use. Give ample consideration to your essay’s setting , word choice , point of view , and dramatic structure . The narrative essay is, after all, a narrative, so tell your story how it deserves to be told.

3. Meaning from Chaos

Life, I think we can agree, is chaotic. While we can trace the events of our lives through cause and effect, A leads to B leads to C, the truth is that so much of our lives are shaped through circumstances beyond our control.

The narrative essay is a way to reclaim some of that control. By distilling the facts of our lives into meaningful narratives, we can uncover deeper truths that we didn’t realize existed.

By distilling the facts of our lives into meaningful narratives, we can uncover deeper truths that we didn’t realize existed.

Consider the essay “ Only Daughter ” by Sandra Cisneros. It’s a brief read, but it covers a lot of different events: a lonesome childhood, countless moves, university education, and the trials and tribulations of a successful writing career.

Coupled with Cisneros’ musings on culture and gender roles, there’s a lot of life to distill in these three pages. Yet Cisneros does so masterfully. By organizing these life events around her thesis statement of being an only daughter, Cisneros finds meaning in the many disparate events she describes.

As you go about writing a narrative essay, you will eventually encounter moments of insight . Insight describes those “aha!” moments in the work—places in which you come to deeper realizations about your life, the lives of others, and the world at large.

Now, insight doesn’t need to be some massive, culture-transforming realization. Many moments of insight are found in small interactions and quiet moments.

For example, In the above essay by Sandra Cisneros, her moments of insight come from connecting her upbringing to her struggle as an only daughter. While her childhood was often lonely and disappointing, she realizes in hindsight that she’s lucky for that upbringing: it helped nurture her spirit as a writer, and it helped her pursue a career in writing. These moments of gratitude work as insight, allowing her to appreciate what once seemed like a burden.

When we reach the end of the essay, and Cisneros describes how she felt when her father read one of her stories, we see what this gratitude is building towards: love and acceptance for the life she chose.

5. Literary Devices

The personal narrative essay, as well as all forms of creative writing, uses its fair share of literary devices . These devices don’t need to be complex: you don’t need a sprawling extended metaphor or an intricate set of juxtapositions to make your essay compelling.

However, the occasional symbol or metaphor will certainly aid your story. In Mary Oliver’s essay “Flow,” the author uses literary devices to describe the magnificence of the ocean, calling it a “cauldron of changing greens and blues” and “the great palace of the earth.” These descriptions reinforce the deep beauty of the earth.

In Sandra Cisneros’ essay “Only Daughter,” the author employs different symbols to represent her father’s masculinity and sense of gender roles. At one point, she lists the few things he reads—sports journals, slasher magazines, and picture paperbacks, often depicting scenes of violence against women. These symbols represent the divide between her father’s gendered thinking and her own literary instincts.

More Narrative Essay Examples

Let’s take a look at a few more narrative essay examples. We’ll dissect each essay based on the five fundamentals listed above.

Narrative Essay Example: “Letting Go” by David Sedaris

Read “Letting Go” here in The New Yorker .

Sedaris’ essay dwells on the culture of cigarette smoking—how it starts, the world it builds, and the difficulties in quitting. Let’s analyze how this narrative essay example uses the five fundamentals of essay writing.

• Thesis: There isn’t an explicitly defined thesis, which is common for essays that are meant to be humorous or entertaining. However, this sentence is a plausible thesis statement: “It wasn’t the smoke but the smell of it that bothered me. In later years, I didn’t care so much, but at the time I found it depressing: the scent of neglect.”
• Personal Experience: Sedaris moves between many different anecdotes about smoking, from his family’s addiction to cigarettes to his own dependence. We learn about his moving around for cheaper smokes, his family’s struggle to quit, and the last cigarette he smoked in the Charles de Gaulle airport.
• Meaning from Chaos: Sedaris ties many disparate events together. We learn about his childhood and his smoking years, but these are interwoven with anecdotes about his family and friends. What emerges is a narrative about the allure of smoking.
• Insight: Two parts of this essay are especially poignant. One, when Sedaris describes his mother’s realization that smoking isn’t sophisticated, and soon quits her habit entirely. Two, when Sedaris is given the diseased lung of a chain smoker, and instead of thinking about his own lungs, he’s simply surprised at how heavy the lung is.
• Literary Devices: Throughout the essay, Sedaris demonstrates how the cigarette symbolizes neglect: neglect of one’s body, one’s space, and one’s self-presentation.

 Narrative Essay Example: “My Mother’s Tongue” by Zavi Kang Engles

Read “My Mother’s Tongue” here in The Rumpus .

Engles’ essay examines the dysphoria of growing up between two vastly different cultures and languages. By asserting the close bond between Korean language and culture, Engles explores the absurdities of growing up as a child of Korean immigrants. Let’s analyze how this narrative essay example uses the five fundamentals of essay writing.

• Thesis: Engles’ essay often comes back to her relationship with the Korean language, especially as it relates to other Korean speakers. This relationship is best highlighted when she writes “I glowed with [my mother’s] love, basked in the warm security of what I thought was a language between us. Perhaps this is why strangers asked for our photos, in an attempt to capture a secret world between two people.”This “secret world” forms the crux of her essay, charting not only how Korean-Americans might exist in relation to one another, but also how Engles’ language is strongly tied to her identity and homeland.
• Personal Experience: Engles writes about her childhood attachment to both English and Korean, her adolescent fallout with the Korean language, her experiences as “not American enough” in the United States and “not Korean enough” in Korea, and her experiences mourning in a Korean hospital.
• Meaning from Chaos: In addition to the above events, Engles ties in research about language and identity (also known as code switching ). Through language and identity, the essay charts the two different cultures that the author stands between, highlighting the dissonance between Western individualism and an Eastern sense of belonging.
• Insight: There are many examples of insight throughout this essay as the author explores how out of place she feels, torn between two countries. An especially poignant example comes from Engles’ experience in a Korean hospital, where she writes “I didn’t know how to mourn in this country.”
• Literary Devices: The essay frequently juxtaposes the languages and cultures of Korea and the United States. Additionally, the English language comes to symbolize Western individualism, while the Korean language comes to symbolize Eastern collectivism.

Narrative Essay Example: 3 Rules for Middle-Age Happiness by Deborah Copaken

Read “3 Rules for Middle-Age Happiness” here in The Atlantic .

Copaken’s essay explores her relationship to Nora Ephron, the screenwriter for When Harry Met Sally . Let’s analyze how this narrative essay example uses the five fundamentals of essay writing.

• Thesis: This essay hands us the thesis statement in its subtitle: “Gather friends and feed them, laugh in the face of calamity, and cut out all the things—people, jobs, body parts—that no longer serve you.”
• Personal Experience: Copaken weaves two different threads through this essay. One thread is her personal life, including a failing marriage, medical issues, and her attempts at building a happy family. The other is Copaken’s personal relationship to Ephron, whose advice coincides with many of the essay’s insights.
• Meaning from Chaos: This essay organizes its events chronologically. However, the main sense of organization is found in the title: many of the essayist’s problems can be perceived as middle-aged crises (family trouble, divorce, death of loved ones), but the solutions to those crises are simpler than one might realize.
• Insight: In writing this essay, Copaken explores her relationship to Ephron, as well as Copaken’s own relationship to her children. She ties these experiences together at the end, when she writes “The transmission of woes is a one-way street, from child to mother. A good mother doesn’t burden her children with her pain. She waits until it becomes so heavy, it either breaks her or kills her, whichever comes first.”
• Literary Devices: The literary devices in this article explore the author’s relationship to womanhood. She wonders if having a hysterectomy will make her “like less of a woman.” Also important is the fact that, when the author has her hysterectomy, her daughter has her first period. Copaken uses this to symbolize the passing of womanhood from mother to daughter, which helps bring her to the above insight.

How to Write a Narrative Essay in 5 Steps

No matter the length or subject matter, writing a narrative essay is as easy as these five steps.

1. Generating Narrative Essay Ideas

If you’re not sure what to write about, you’ll want to generate some narrative essay ideas. One way to do this is to look for writing prompts online: Reedsy adds new prompts to their site every week, and we also post writing prompts every Wednesday to our Facebook group .

Taking a step back, it helps to simply think about formative moments in your life. You might a great idea from answering one of these questions:

• When did something alter my worldview, personal philosophy, or political beliefs?
• Who has given me great advice, or helped me lead a better life?
• What moment of adversity did I overcome and grow stronger from?
• What is something that I believe to be very important, that I want other people to value as well?
• What life event of mine do I not yet fully understand?
• What is something I am constantly striving for?
• What is something I’ve taken for granted, but am now grateful for?

Finally, you might be interested in the advice at our article How to Come Up with Story Ideas . The article focuses on fiction writers, but essayists can certainly benefit from these tips as well.

2. Drafting a Narrative Essay Outline

Once you have an idea, you’ll want to flesh it out in a narrative essay outline.

Your outline can be as simple or as complex as you’d like, and it all depends on how long you intend your essay to be. A simple outline can include the following:

• Introduction—usually a relevant anecdote that excites or entices the reader.
• Event 1: What story will I use to uphold my argument?
• Analysis 1: How does this event serve as evidence for my thesis?
• Conclusion: How can I tie these events together? What do they reaffirm about my thesis? And what advice can I then impart on the reader, if any?

One thing that’s missing from this outline is insight. That’s because insight is often unplanned: you realize it as you write it, and the best insight comes naturally to the writer. However, if you already know the insight you plan on sharing, it will fit best within the analysis for your essay, and/or in the essay’s conclusion.

Insight is often unplanned: you realize it as you write it, and the best insight comes naturally to the writer.

Another thing that’s missing from this is research. If you plan on intertwining your essay with research (which many essayists should do!), consider adding that research as its own bullet point under each heading.

For a different, more fiction-oriented approach to outlining, check out our article How to Write a Story Outline .

3. Starting with a Story

Now, let’s tackle the hardest question: how to start a narrative essay?

Most narrative essays begin with a relevant story. You want to draw the reader in right away, offering something that surprises or interests them. And, since the essay is about you and your lived experiences, it makes sense to start your essay with a relevant anecdote.

Think about a story that’s relevant to your thesis, and experiment with ways to tell this story. You can start with a surprising bit of dialogue , an unusual situation you found yourself in, or a beautiful setting. You can also lead your essay with research or advice, but be sure to tie that in with an anecdote quickly, or else your reader might not know where your essay is going.

For examples of this, take a look at any of the narrative essay examples we’ve used in this article.

Theoretically, your thesis statement can go anywhere in the essay. You may have noticed in the previous examples that the thesis statement isn’t always explicit or immediate: sometimes it shows up towards the center of the essay, and sometimes it’s more implied than stated directly.

You can experiment with the placement of your thesis, but if you place your thesis later in the essay, make sure that everything before the thesis is intriguing to the reader. If the reader feels like the essay is directionless or boring, they won’t have a reason to reach your thesis, nor will they understand the argument you’re making.

4. Getting to the Core Truth

With an introduction and a thesis underway, continue writing about your experiences, arguments, and research. Be sure to follow the structure you’ve sketched in your outline, but feel free to deviate from this outline if something more natural occurs to you.

Along the way, you will end up explaining why your experiences matter to the reader. Here is where you can start generating insight. Insight can take the form of many things, but the focus is always to reach a core truth.

Insight might take the following forms:

• Realizations from connecting the different events in your life.
• Advice based on your lived mistakes and experiences.
• Moments where you change your ideas or personal philosophy.
• Richer understandings about life, love, a higher power, the universe, etc.

5. Relentless Editing

With a first draft of your narrative essay written, you can make your essay sparkle in the editing process.

Remember, a first draft doesn’t have to be perfect, it just needs to exist.

Remember, a first draft doesn’t have to be perfect, it just needs to exist. Here are some things to focus on in the editing process:

• Clarity: Does every argument make sense? Do my ideas flow logically? Are my stories clear and easy to follow?
• Structure: Does the procession of ideas make sense? Does everything uphold my thesis? Do my arguments benefit from the way they’re laid out in this essay?
• Style: Do the words flow when I read them? Do I have a good mix of long and short sentences? Have I omitted any needless words ?
• Literary Devices: Do I use devices like similes, metaphors, symbols, or juxtaposition? Do these devices help illustrate my ideas?
• Mechanics: Is every word spelled properly? Do I use the right punctuation? If I’m submitting this essay somewhere, does it follow the formatting guidelines?

Your essay can undergo any number of revisions before it’s ready. Above all, make sure that your narrative essay is easy to follow, every word you use matters, and that you come to a deeper understanding about your own life.

Above all, make sure that your narrative essay is easy to follow, every word you use matters, and that you come to a deeper understanding about your own life.

Next Steps for Narrative Essayists

When you have a completed essay, what’s next? You might be interested in submitting to some literary journals . Here’s 24 literary journals you can submit to—we hope you find a great home for your writing!

If you’re looking for additional feedback on your work, feel free to join our Facebook group . You can also take a look at our upcoming nonfiction courses , where you’ll learn the fundamentals of essay writing and make your story even more compelling.

Writing a narrative essay isn’t easy, but you’ll find that the practice can be very rewarding. You’ll learn about your lived experiences, come to deeper conclusions about your personal philosophies, and perhaps even challenge the way you approach life. So find some paper, choose a topic, and get writing—the world is waiting for your story!

Sean Glatch

Thanks for a superbly efficient and informative article…

We’re glad it was helpful, Mary!

Very helpful,, Thanks!!!

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Sat / act prep online guides and tips, 3 great narrative essay examples + tips for writing.

General Education

A narrative essay is one of the most intimidating assignments you can be handed at any level of your education. Where you've previously written argumentative essays that make a point or analytic essays that dissect meaning, a narrative essay asks you to write what is effectively a story .

But unlike a simple work of creative fiction, your narrative essay must have a clear and concrete motif —a recurring theme or idea that you’ll explore throughout. Narrative essays are less rigid, more creative in expression, and therefore pretty different from most other essays you’ll be writing.

But not to fear—in this article, we’ll be covering what a narrative essay is, how to write a good one, and also analyzing some personal narrative essay examples to show you what a great one looks like.

What Is a Narrative Essay?

At first glance, a narrative essay might sound like you’re just writing a story. Like the stories you're used to reading, a narrative essay is generally (but not always) chronological, following a clear throughline from beginning to end. Even if the story jumps around in time, all the details will come back to one specific theme, demonstrated through your choice in motifs.

Unlike many creative stories, however, your narrative essay should be based in fact. That doesn’t mean that every detail needs to be pure and untainted by imagination, but rather that you shouldn’t wholly invent the events of your narrative essay. There’s nothing wrong with inventing a person’s words if you can’t remember them exactly, but you shouldn’t say they said something they weren’t even close to saying.

Another big difference between narrative essays and creative fiction—as well as other kinds of essays—is that narrative essays are based on motifs. A motif is a dominant idea or theme, one that you establish before writing the essay. As you’re crafting the narrative, it’ll feed back into your motif to create a comprehensive picture of whatever that motif is.

For example, say you want to write a narrative essay about how your first day in high school helped you establish your identity. You might discuss events like trying to figure out where to sit in the cafeteria, having to describe yourself in five words as an icebreaker in your math class, or being unsure what to do during your lunch break because it’s no longer acceptable to go outside and play during lunch. All of those ideas feed back into the central motif of establishing your identity.

The important thing to remember is that while a narrative essay is typically told chronologically and intended to read like a story, it is not purely for entertainment value. A narrative essay delivers its theme by deliberately weaving the motifs through the events, scenes, and details. While a narrative essay may be entertaining, its primary purpose is to tell a complete story based on a central meaning.

Unlike other essay forms, it is totally okay—even expected—to use first-person narration in narrative essays. If you’re writing a story about yourself, it’s natural to refer to yourself within the essay. It’s also okay to use other perspectives, such as third- or even second-person, but that should only be done if it better serves your motif. Generally speaking, your narrative essay should be in first-person perspective.

Though your motif choices may feel at times like you’re making a point the way you would in an argumentative essay, a narrative essay’s goal is to tell a story, not convince the reader of anything. Your reader should be able to tell what your motif is from reading, but you don’t have to change their mind about anything. If they don’t understand the point you are making, you should consider strengthening the delivery of the events and descriptions that support your motif.

Narrative essays also share some features with analytical essays, in which you derive meaning from a book, film, or other media. But narrative essays work differently—you’re not trying to draw meaning from an existing text, but rather using an event you’ve experienced to convey meaning. In an analytical essay, you examine narrative, whereas in a narrative essay you create narrative.

The structure of a narrative essay is also a bit different than other essays. You’ll generally be getting your point across chronologically as opposed to grouping together specific arguments in paragraphs or sections. To return to the example of an essay discussing your first day of high school and how it impacted the shaping of your identity, it would be weird to put the events out of order, even if not knowing what to do after lunch feels like a stronger idea than choosing where to sit. Instead of organizing to deliver your information based on maximum impact, you’ll be telling your story as it happened, using concrete details to reinforce your theme.

3 Great Narrative Essay Examples

One of the best ways to learn how to write a narrative essay is to look at a great narrative essay sample. Let’s take a look at some truly stellar narrative essay examples and dive into what exactly makes them work so well.

A Ticket to the Fair by David Foster Wallace

Today is Press Day at the Illinois State Fair in Springfield, and I’m supposed to be at the fairgrounds by 9:00 A.M. to get my credentials. I imagine credentials to be a small white card in the band of a fedora. I’ve never been considered press before. My real interest in credentials is getting into rides and shows for free. I’m fresh in from the East Coast, for an East Coast magazine. Why exactly they’re interested in the Illinois State Fair remains unclear to me. I suspect that every so often editors at East Coast magazines slap their foreheads and remember that about 90 percent of the United States lies between the coasts, and figure they’ll engage somebody to do pith-helmeted anthropological reporting on something rural and heartlandish. I think they asked me to do this because I grew up here, just a couple hours’ drive from downstate Springfield. I never did go to the state fair, though—I pretty much topped out at the county fair level. Actually, I haven’t been back to Illinois for a long time, and I can’t say I’ve missed it.

Throughout this essay, David Foster Wallace recounts his experience as press at the Illinois State Fair. But it’s clear from this opening that he’s not just reporting on the events exactly as they happened—though that’s also true— but rather making a point about how the East Coast, where he lives and works, thinks about the Midwest.

In his opening paragraph, Wallace states that outright: “Why exactly they’re interested in the Illinois State Fair remains unclear to me. I suspect that every so often editors at East Coast magazines slap their foreheads and remember that about 90 percent of the United States lies between the coasts, and figure they’ll engage somebody to do pith-helmeted anthropological reporting on something rural and heartlandish.”

Not every motif needs to be stated this clearly , but in an essay as long as Wallace’s, particularly since the audience for such a piece may feel similarly and forget that such a large portion of the country exists, it’s important to make that point clear.

But Wallace doesn’t just rest on introducing his motif and telling the events exactly as they occurred from there. It’s clear that he selects events that remind us of that idea of East Coast cynicism , such as when he realizes that the Help Me Grow tent is standing on top of fake grass that is killing the real grass beneath, when he realizes the hypocrisy of craving a corn dog when faced with a real, suffering pig, when he’s upset for his friend even though he’s not the one being sexually harassed, and when he witnesses another East Coast person doing something he wouldn’t dare to do.

Wallace is literally telling the audience exactly what happened, complete with dates and timestamps for when each event occurred. But he’s also choosing those events with a purpose—he doesn’t focus on details that don’t serve his motif. That’s why he discusses the experiences of people, how the smells are unappealing to him, and how all the people he meets, in cowboy hats, overalls, or “black spandex that looks like cheesecake leotards,” feel almost alien to him.

All of these details feed back into the throughline of East Coast thinking that Wallace introduces in the first paragraph. He also refers back to it in the essay’s final paragraph, stating:

At last, an overarching theory blooms inside my head: megalopolitan East Coasters’ summer treats and breaks and literally ‘getaways,’ flights-from—from crowds, noise, heat, dirt, the stress of too many sensory choices….The East Coast existential treat is escape from confines and stimuli—quiet, rustic vistas that hold still, turn inward, turn away. Not so in the rural Midwest. Here you’re pretty much away all the time….Something in a Midwesterner sort of actuates , deep down, at a public event….The real spectacle that draws us here is us.

Throughout this journey, Wallace has tried to demonstrate how the East Coast thinks about the Midwest, ultimately concluding that they are captivated by the Midwest’s less stimuli-filled life, but that the real reason they are interested in events like the Illinois State Fair is that they are, in some ways, a means of looking at the East Coast in a new, estranging way.

The reason this works so well is that Wallace has carefully chosen his examples, outlined his motif and themes in the first paragraph, and eventually circled back to the original motif with a clearer understanding of his original point.

When outlining your own narrative essay, try to do the same. Start with a theme, build upon it with examples, and return to it in the end with an even deeper understanding of the original issue. You don’t need this much space to explore a theme, either—as we’ll see in the next example, a strong narrative essay can also be very short.

Death of a Moth by Virginia Woolf

After a time, tired by his dancing apparently, he settled on the window ledge in the sun, and, the queer spectacle being at an end, I forgot about him. Then, looking up, my eye was caught by him. He was trying to resume his dancing, but seemed either so stiff or so awkward that he could only flutter to the bottom of the window-pane; and when he tried to fly across it he failed. Being intent on other matters I watched these futile attempts for a time without thinking, unconsciously waiting for him to resume his flight, as one waits for a machine, that has stopped momentarily, to start again without considering the reason of its failure. After perhaps a seventh attempt he slipped from the wooden ledge and fell, fluttering his wings, on to his back on the window sill. The helplessness of his attitude roused me. It flashed upon me that he was in difficulties; he could no longer raise himself; his legs struggled vainly. But, as I stretched out a pencil, meaning to help him to right himself, it came over me that the failure and awkwardness were the approach of death. I laid the pencil down again.

In this essay, Virginia Woolf explains her encounter with a dying moth. On surface level, this essay is just a recounting of an afternoon in which she watched a moth die—it’s even established in the title. But there’s more to it than that. Though Woolf does not begin her essay with as clear a motif as Wallace, it’s not hard to pick out the evidence she uses to support her point, which is that the experience of this moth is also the human experience.

In the title, Woolf tells us this essay is about death. But in the first paragraph, she seems to mostly be discussing life—the moth is “content with life,” people are working in the fields, and birds are flying. However, she mentions that it is mid-September and that the fields were being plowed. It’s autumn and it’s time for the harvest; the time of year in which many things die.

In this short essay, she chronicles the experience of watching a moth seemingly embody life, then die. Though this essay is literally about a moth, it’s also about a whole lot more than that. After all, moths aren’t the only things that die—Woolf is also reflecting on her own mortality, as well as the mortality of everything around her.

At its core, the essay discusses the push and pull of life and death, not in a way that’s necessarily sad, but in a way that is accepting of both. Woolf begins by setting up the transitional fall season, often associated with things coming to an end, and raises the ideas of pleasure, vitality, and pity.

At one point, Woolf tries to help the dying moth, but reconsiders, as it would interfere with the natural order of the world. The moth’s death is part of the natural order of the world, just like fall, just like her own eventual death.

All these themes are set up in the beginning and explored throughout the essay’s narrative. Though Woolf doesn’t directly state her theme, she reinforces it by choosing a small, isolated event—watching a moth die—and illustrating her point through details.

With this essay, we can see that you don’t need a big, weird, exciting event to discuss an important meaning. Woolf is able to explore complicated ideas in a short essay by being deliberate about what details she includes, just as you can be in your own essays.

Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin

On the twenty-ninth of July, in 1943, my father died. On the same day, a few hours later, his last child was born. Over a month before this, while all our energies were concentrated in waiting for these events, there had been, in Detroit, one of the bloodiest race riots of the century. A few hours after my father’s funeral, while he lay in state in the undertaker’s chapel, a race riot broke out in Harlem. On the morning of the third of August, we drove my father to the graveyard through a wilderness of smashed plate glass.

Like Woolf, Baldwin does not lay out his themes in concrete terms—unlike Wallace, there’s no clear sentence that explains what he’ll be talking about. However, you can see the motifs quite clearly: death, fatherhood, struggle, and race.

Throughout the narrative essay, Baldwin discusses the circumstances of his father’s death, including his complicated relationship with his father. By introducing those motifs in the first paragraph, the reader understands that everything discussed in the essay will come back to those core ideas. When Baldwin talks about his experience with a white teacher taking an interest in him and his father’s resistance to that, he is also talking about race and his father’s death. When he talks about his father’s death, he is also talking about his views on race. When he talks about his encounters with segregation and racism, he is talking, in part, about his father.

Because his father was a hard, uncompromising man, Baldwin struggles to reconcile the knowledge that his father was right about many things with his desire to not let that hardness consume him, as well.

Baldwin doesn’t explicitly state any of this, but his writing so often touches on the same motifs that it becomes clear he wants us to think about all these ideas in conversation with one another.

At the end of the essay, Baldwin makes it more clear:

This fight begins, however, in the heart and it had now been laid to my charge to keep my own heart free of hatred and despair. This intimation made my heart heavy and, now that my father was irrecoverable, I wished that he had been beside me so that I could have searched his face for the answers which only the future would give me now.

Here, Baldwin ties together the themes and motifs into one clear statement: that he must continue to fight and recognize injustice, especially racial injustice, just as his father did. But unlike his father, he must do it beginning with himself—he must not let himself be closed off to the world as his father was. And yet, he still wishes he had his father for guidance, even as he establishes that he hopes to be a different man than his father.

In this essay, Baldwin loads the front of the essay with his motifs, and, through his narrative, weaves them together into a theme. In the end, he comes to a conclusion that connects all of those things together and leaves the reader with a lasting impression of completion—though the elements may have been initially disparate, in the end everything makes sense.

You can replicate this tactic of introducing seemingly unattached ideas and weaving them together in your own essays. By introducing those motifs, developing them throughout, and bringing them together in the end, you can demonstrate to your reader how all of them are related. However, it’s especially important to be sure that your motifs and clear and consistent throughout your essay so that the conclusion feels earned and consistent—if not, readers may feel mislead.

5 Key Tips for Writing Narrative Essays

Narrative essays can be a lot of fun to write since they’re so heavily based on creativity. But that can also feel intimidating—sometimes it’s easier to have strict guidelines than to have to make it all up yourself. Here are a few tips to keep your narrative essay feeling strong and fresh.

Develop Strong Motifs

Motifs are the foundation of a narrative essay . What are you trying to say? How can you say that using specific symbols or events? Those are your motifs.

In the same way that an argumentative essay’s body should support its thesis, the body of your narrative essay should include motifs that support your theme.

Try to avoid cliches, as these will feel tired to your readers. Instead of roses to symbolize love, try succulents. Instead of the ocean representing some vast, unknowable truth, try the depths of your brother’s bedroom. Keep your language and motifs fresh and your essay will be even stronger!

Use First-Person Perspective

In many essays, you’re expected to remove yourself so that your points stand on their own. Not so in a narrative essay—in this case, you want to make use of your own perspective.

Sometimes a different perspective can make your point even stronger. If you want someone to identify with your point of view, it may be tempting to choose a second-person perspective. However, be sure you really understand the function of second-person; it’s very easy to put a reader off if the narration isn’t expertly deployed.

If you want a little bit of distance, third-person perspective may be okay. But be careful—too much distance and your reader may feel like the narrative lacks truth.

That’s why first-person perspective is the standard. It keeps you, the writer, close to the narrative, reminding the reader that it really happened. And because you really know what happened and how, you’re free to inject your own opinion into the story without it detracting from your point, as it would in a different type of essay.

Stick to the Truth

Your essay should be true. However, this is a creative essay, and it’s okay to embellish a little. Rarely in life do we experience anything with a clear, concrete meaning the way somebody in a book might. If you flub the details a little, it’s okay—just don’t make them up entirely.

Also, nobody expects you to perfectly recall details that may have happened years ago. You may have to reconstruct dialog from your memory and your imagination. That’s okay, again, as long as you aren’t making it up entirely and assigning made-up statements to somebody.

Dialog is a powerful tool. A good conversation can add flavor and interest to a story, as we saw demonstrated in David Foster Wallace’s essay. As previously mentioned, it’s okay to flub it a little, especially because you’re likely writing about an experience you had without knowing that you’d be writing about it later.

However, don’t rely too much on it. Your narrative essay shouldn’t be told through people explaining things to one another; the motif comes through in the details. Dialog can be one of those details, but it shouldn’t be the only one.

Use Sensory Descriptions

Because a narrative essay is a story, you can use sensory details to make your writing more interesting. If you’re describing a particular experience, you can go into detail about things like taste, smell, and hearing in a way that you probably wouldn’t do in any other essay style.

These details can tie into your overall motifs and further your point. Woolf describes in great detail what she sees while watching the moth, giving us the sense that we, too, are watching the moth. In Wallace’s essay, he discusses the sights, sounds, and smells of the Illinois State Fair to help emphasize his point about its strangeness. And in Baldwin’s essay, he describes shattered glass as a “wilderness,” and uses the feelings of his body to describe his mental state.

All these descriptions anchor us not only in the story, but in the motifs and themes as well. One of the tools of a writer is making the reader feel as you felt, and sensory details help you achieve that.

What’s Next?

Looking to brush up on your essay-writing capabilities before the ACT? This guide to ACT English will walk you through some of the best strategies and practice questions to get you prepared!

Part of practicing for the ACT is ensuring your word choice and diction are on point. Check out this guide to some of the most common errors on the ACT English section to be sure that you're not making these common mistakes!

A solid understanding of English principles will help you make an effective point in a narrative essay, and you can get that understanding through taking a rigorous assortment of high school English classes !

Melissa Brinks graduated from the University of Washington in 2014 with a Bachelor's in English with a creative writing emphasis. She has spent several years tutoring K-12 students in many subjects, including in SAT prep, to help them prepare for their college education.

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Crafting Compelling Narrative Essays: Storytelling Techniques for Students

Understanding narrative essays, storytelling elements in narrative essays, developing a strong narrative voice, creating vivid descriptions, building emotional connection, here are strategies to build this connection:, structuring your narrative essay, editing and refining your essay, final thoughts.

In conclusion, narrative essays offer a unique opportunity for students to express themselves creatively and connect with their readers. By utilizing storytelling techniques effectively, students can create essays that are not only academically successful but also personally fulfilling and engaging for their audience.

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How to write a narrative essay [Updated 2023]

A narrative essay is an opportunity to flex your creative muscles and craft a compelling story. In this blog post, we define what a narrative essay is and provide strategies and examples for writing one.

What is a narrative essay?

Similarly to a descriptive essay or a reflective essay, a narrative essay asks you to tell a story, rather than make an argument and present evidence. Most narrative essays describe a real, personal experience from your own life (for example, the story of your first big success).

Alternately, your narrative essay might focus on an imagined experience (for example, how your life would be if you had been born into different circumstances). While you don’t need to present a thesis statement or scholarly evidence, a narrative essay still needs to be well-structured and clearly organized so that the reader can follow your story.

When you might be asked to write a narrative essay

Although less popular than argumentative essays or expository essays, narrative essays are relatively common in high school and college writing classes.

The same techniques that you would use to write a college essay as part of a college or scholarship application are applicable to narrative essays, as well. In fact, the Common App that many students use to apply to multiple colleges asks you to submit a narrative essay.

How to choose a topic for a narrative essay

When you are asked to write a narrative essay, a topic may be assigned to you or you may be able to choose your own. With an assigned topic, the prompt will likely fall into one of two categories: specific or open-ended.

Examples of specific prompts:

• Write about the last vacation you took.
• Write about your final year of middle school.

Examples of open-ended prompts:

• Write about a time when you felt all hope was lost.
• Write about a brief, seemingly insignificant event that ended up having a big impact on your life.

A narrative essay tells a story and all good stories are centered on a conflict of some sort. Experiences with unexpected obstacles, twists, or turns make for much more compelling essays and reveal more about your character and views on life.

If you’re writing a narrative essay as part of an admissions application, remember that the people reviewing your essay will be looking at it to gain a sense of not just your writing ability, but who you are as a person.

In these cases, it’s wise to choose a topic and experience from your life that demonstrates the qualities that the prompt is looking for, such as resilience, perseverance, the ability to stay calm under pressure, etc.

It’s also important to remember that your choice of topic is just a starting point. Many students find that they arrive at new ideas and insights as they write their first draft, so the final form of your essay may have a different focus than the one you started with.

How to outline and format a narrative essay

Even though you’re not advancing an argument or proving a point of view, a narrative essay still needs to have a coherent structure. Your reader has to be able to follow you as you tell the story and to figure out the larger point that you’re making.

You’ll be evaluated on is your handling of the topic and how you structure your essay. Even though a narrative essay doesn’t use the same structure as other essay types, you should still sketch out a loose outline so you can tell your story in a clear and compelling way.

To outline a narrative essay, you’ll want to determine:

• how your story will start
• what points or specifics that you want to cover
• how your story will end
• what pace and tone you will use

In the vast majority of cases, a narrative essay should be written in the first-person, using “I.” Also, most narrative essays will follow typical formatting guidelines, so you should choose a readable font like Times New Roman in size 11 or 12. Double-space your paragraphs and use 1” margins.

To get your creative wheels turning, consider how your story compares to archetypes and famous historical and literary figures both past and present. Weave these comparisons into your essay to improve the quality of your writing and connect your personal experience to a larger context.

How to write a narrative essay

Writing a narrative essay can sometimes be a challenge for students who typically write argumentative essays or research papers in a formal, objective style. To give you a better sense of how you can write a narrative essay, here is a short example of an essay in response to the prompt, “Write about an experience that challenged your view of yourself.”

Narrative essay example

Even as a child, I always had what people might call a reserved personality. It was sometimes framed as a positive (“Sarah is a good listener”) and at other times it was put in less-than-admiring terms (“Sarah is withdrawn and not very talkative”). It was the latter kind of comments that caused me to see my introverted nature as a drawback and as something I should work to eliminate. That is, until I joined my high school’s student council.

The first paragraph, or introduction, sets up the context, establishing the situation and introducing the meaningful event upon which the essay will focus.

The other four students making up the council were very outspoken and enthusiastic. I enjoyed being around them, and I often agreed with their ideas. However, when it came to overhauling our school’s recycling plan, we butted heads. When I spoke up and offered a different point of view, one of my fellow student council members launched into a speech, advocating for her point of view. As her voice filled the room, I couldn’t get a word in edgewise. I wondered if I should try to match her tone, volume, and assertiveness as a way to be heard. But I just couldn’t do it—it’s not my way, and it never has been. For a fleeting moment, I felt defeated. But then, something in me shifted.

In this paragraph, the writer goes into greater depth about how her existing thinking brought her to this point.

I reminded myself that my view was valid and deserved to be heard. So I waited. I let my fellow council member speak her piece and when she was finished, I deliberately waited a few moments before calmly stating my case. I chose my words well, and I spoke them succinctly. Just because I’m not a big talker doesn’t mean I’m not a big thinker. I thought of the quotation “still waters run deep” and I tried to embody that. The effect on the room was palpable. People listened. And I hadn’t had to shout my point to be heard.

This paragraph demonstrates the turn in the story, the moment when everything changed. The use of the quotation “still waters run deep” imbues the story with a dash of poetry and emotion.

We eventually reached a compromise on the matter and concluded the student council meeting. Our council supervisor came to me afterward and said: “You handled that so well, with such grace and poise. I was very impressed.” Her words in that moment changed me. I realized that a bombastic nature isn't necessarily a powerful one. There is power in quiet, too. This experience taught me to view my reserved personality not as a character flaw, but as a strength.

The final paragraph, or conclusion, closes with a statement about the significance of this event and how it ended up changing the writer in a meaningful way.

Narrative essay writing tips

1. pick a meaningful story that has a conflict and a clear “moral.”.

If you’re able to choose your own topic, pick a story that has meaning and that reveals how you became the person your are today. In other words, write a narrative with a clear “moral” that you can connect with your main points.

2. Use an outline to arrange the structure of your story and organize your main points.

Although a narrative essay is different from argumentative essays, it’s still beneficial to construct an outline so that your story is well-structured and organized. Note how you want to start and end your story, and what points you want to make to tie everything together.

3. Be clear, concise, concrete, and correct in your writing.

You should use descriptive writing in your narrative essay, but don’t overdo it. Use clear, concise, and correct language and grammar throughout. Additionally, make concrete points that reinforce the main idea of your narrative.

4. Ask a friend or family member to proofread your essay.

No matter what kind of writing you’re doing, you should always plan to proofread and revise. To ensure that your narrative essay is coherent and interesting, ask a friend or family member to read over your paper. This is especially important if your essay is responding to a prompt. It helps to have another person check to make sure that you’ve fully responded to the prompt or question.

Frequently Asked Questions about narrative essays

A narrative essay, like any essay, has three main parts: an introduction, a body and a conclusion. Structuring and outlining your essay before you start writing will help you write a clear story that your readers can follow.

The first paragraph of your essay, or introduction, sets up the context, establishing the situation and introducing the meaningful event upon which the essay will focus.

In the vast majority of cases, a narrative essay should be written in the first-person, using “I.”

The 4 main types of essays are the argumentative essay, narrative essay, exploratory essay, and expository essay. You may be asked to write different types of essays at different points in your education.

Most narrative essays will be around five paragraphs, or more, depending on the topic and requirements. Make sure to check in with your instructor about the guidelines for your essay. If you’re writing a narrative essay for a college application, pay close attention to word or page count requirements.

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Telling the Story of Yourself: 6 Steps to Writing Personal Narratives

Jennifer Xue

Table of Contents

Why do we write personal narratives, 6 guidelines for writing personal narrative essays, inspiring personal narratives, examples of personal narrative essays, tell your story.

First off, you might be wondering: what is a personal narrative? In short, personal narratives are stories we tell about ourselves that focus on our growth, lessons learned, and reflections on our experiences.

From stories about inspirational figures we heard as children to any essay, article, or exercise where we're asked to express opinions on a situation, thing, or individual—personal narratives are everywhere.

According to Psychology Today, personal narratives allow authors to feel and release pains, while savouring moments of strength and resilience. Such emotions provide an avenue for both authors and readers to connect while supporting healing in the process.

That all sounds great. But when it comes to putting the words down on paper, we often end up with a list of experiences and no real structure to tie them together.

In this article, we'll discuss what a personal narrative essay is further, learn the 6 steps to writing one, and look at some examples of great personal narratives.

As readers, we're fascinated by memoirs, autobiographies, and long-form personal narrative articles, as they provide a glimpse into the authors' thought processes, ideas, and feelings. But you don't have to be writing your whole life story to create a personal narrative.

You might be a student writing an admissions essay , or be trying to tell your professional story in a cover letter. Regardless of your purpose, your narrative will focus on personal growth, reflections, and lessons.

Personal narratives help us connect with other people's stories due to their easy-to-digest format and because humans are empathising creatures.

We can better understand how others feel and think when we were told stories that allow us to see the world from their perspectives. The author's "I think" and "I feel" instantaneously become ours, as the brain doesn't know whether what we read is real or imaginary.

In her best-selling book Wired for Story, Lisa Cron explains that the human brain craves tales as it's hard-wired through evolution to learn what happens next. Since the brain doesn't know whether what you are reading is actual or not, we can register the moral of the story cognitively and affectively.

In academia, a narrative essay tells a story which is experiential, anecdotal, or personal. It allows the author to creatively express their thoughts, feelings, ideas, and opinions. Its length can be anywhere from a few paragraphs to hundreds of pages.

Outside of academia, personal narratives are known as a form of journalism or non-fiction works called "narrative journalism." Even highly prestigious publications like the New York Times and Time magazine have sections dedicated to personal narratives. The New Yorke is a magazine dedicated solely to this genre.

The New York Times holds personal narrative essay contests. The winners are selected because they:

had a clear narrative arc with a conflict and a main character who changed in some way. They artfully balanced the action of the story with reflection on what it meant to the writer. They took risks, like including dialogue or playing with punctuation, sentence structure and word choice to develop a strong voice. And, perhaps most important, they focused on a specific moment or theme – a conversation, a trip to the mall, a speech tournament, a hospital visit – instead of trying to sum up the writer’s life in 600 words.

In a nutshell, a personal narrative can cover any reflective and contemplative subject with a strong voice and a unique perspective, including uncommon private values. It's written in first person and the story encompasses a specific moment in time worthy of a discussion.

Writing a personal narrative essay involves both objectivity and subjectivity. You'll need to be objective enough to recognise the importance of an event or a situation to explore and write about. On the other hand, you must be subjective enough to inject private thoughts and feelings to make your point.

With personal narratives, you are both the muse and the creator – you have control over how your story is told. However, like any other type of writing, it comes with guidelines.

1. Write Your Personal Narrative as a Story

As a story, it must include an introduction, characters, plot, setting, climax, anti-climax (if any), and conclusion. Another way to approach it is by structuring it with an introduction, body, and conclusion. The introduction should set the tone, while the body should focus on the key point(s) you want to get across. The conclusion can tell the reader what lessons you have learned from the story you've just told.

2. Give Your Personal Narrative a Clear Purpose

Your narrative essay should reflect your unique perspective on life. This is a lot harder than it sounds. You need to establish your perspective, the key things you want your reader to take away, and your tone of voice. It's a good idea to have a set purpose in mind for the narrative before you start writing.

Let's say you want to write about how you manage depression without taking any medicine. This could go in any number of ways, but isolating a purpose will help you focus your writing and choose which stories to tell. Are you advocating for a holistic approach, or do you want to describe your emotional experience for people thinking of trying it?

Having this focus will allow you to put your own unique take on what you did (and didn't do, if applicable), what changed you, and the lessons learned along the way.

3. Show, Don't Tell

It's a narration, so the narrative should show readers what happened, instead of telling them. As well as being a storyteller, the author should take part as one of the characters. Keep this in mind when writing, as the way you shape your perspective can have a big impact on how your reader sees your overarching plot. Don't slip into just explaining everything that happened because it happened to you. Show your reader with action.

You can check for instances of telling rather than showing with ProWritingAid. For example, instead of:

"You never let me do anything!" I cried disdainfully.

"You never let me do anything!" To this day, my mother swears that the glare I levelled at her as I spat those words out could have soured milk.

Using ProWritingAid will help you find these instances in your manuscript and edit them without spending hours trawling through your work yourself.

4. Use "I," But Don't Overuse It

You, the author, take ownership of the story, so the first person pronoun "I" is used throughout. However, you shouldn't overuse it, as it'd make it sound too self-centred and redundant.

ProWritingAid can also help you here – the Style Report will tell you if you've started too many sentences with "I", and show you how to introduce more variation in your writing.

5. Pay Attention to Tenses

Tense is key to understanding. Personal narratives mostly tell the story of events that happened in the past, so many authors choose to use the past tense. This helps separate out your current, narrating voice and your past self who you are narrating. If you're writing in the present tense, make sure that you keep it consistent throughout.

6. Make Your Conclusion Satisfying

Satisfy your readers by giving them an unforgettable closing scene. The body of the narration should build up the plot to climax. This doesn't have to be something incredible or shocking, just something that helps give an interesting take on your story.

The takeaways or the lessons learned should be written without lecturing. Whenever possible, continue to show rather than tell. Don't say what you learned, narrate what you do differently now. This will help the moral of your story shine through without being too preachy.

GoodReads is a great starting point for selecting read-worthy personal narrative books. Here are five of my favourites.

Owl Moon by Jane Yolen

Jane Yolen, the author of 386 books, wrote this poetic story about a daughter and her father who went owling. Instead of learning about owls, Yolen invites readers to contemplate the meaning of gentleness and hope.

Night by Elie Wiesel

Elie Wiesel was a teenager when he and his family were sent to Auschwitz concentration camp in 1944. This Holocaust memoir has a strong message that such horrific events should never be repeated.

The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank

This classic is a must-read by young and old alike. It's a remarkable diary by a 13-year-old Jewish girl who hid inside a secret annexe of an old building during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands in 1942.

The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

This is a personal narrative written by a brave author renowned for her clarity, passion, and honesty. Didion shares how in December 2003, she lost her husband of 40 years to a massive heart attack and dealt with the acute illness of her only daughter. She speaks about grief, memories, illness, and hope.

Educated by Tara Westover

Author Tara Westover was raised by survivalist parents. She didn't go to school until 17 years of age, which later took her to Harvard and Cambridge. It's a story about the struggle for quest for knowledge and self-reinvention.

Narrative and personal narrative journalism are gaining more popularity these days. You can find distinguished personal narratives all over the web.

Curating the best of the best of personal narratives and narrative essays from all over the web. Some are award-winning articles.

Narratively

Long-form writing to celebrate humanity through storytelling. It publishes personal narrative essays written to provoke, inspire, and reflect, touching lesser-known and overlooked subjects.

Narrative Magazine

It publishes non,fiction narratives, poetry, and fiction. Among its contributors is Frank Conroy, the author of Stop-Time , a memoir that has never been out of print since 1967.

Thought Catalog

Aimed at Generation Z, it publishes personal narrative essays on self-improvement, family, friendship, romance, and others.

Personal narratives will continue to be popular as our brains are wired for stories. We love reading about others and telling stories of ourselves, as they bring satisfaction and a better understanding of the world around us.

Personal narratives make us better humans. Enjoy telling yours!

Write like a bestselling author

Love writing? ProWritingAid will help you improve the style, strength, and clarity of your stories.

Jennifer Xue is an award-winning e-book author with 2,500+ articles and 100+ e-books/reports published under her belt. She also taught 50+ college-level essay and paper writing classes. Her byline has appeared in Forbes, Fortune, Cosmopolitan, Esquire, Business.com, Business2Community, Addicted2Success, Good Men Project, and others. Her blog is JenniferXue.com. Follow her on Twitter @jenxuewrites].

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Best 10+ Narrative Essay Examples for Engaging Storytelling

Discover a collection of captivating narrative essay examples that will inspire and enhance your storytelling skills.

Narrative essays are a popular form of storytelling that allows writers to share their personal experiences or recount fictional tales in a compelling and engaging manner. These essays often captivate readers and take them on a journey, immersing them in the narrative and evoking emotions. Whether you are a student looking for inspiration or an aspiring writer seeking to hone your skills, this article will provide you with the best 10+ narrative essay examples for engaging storytelling.

What is a narrative essay? A narrative essay is a genre of writing that involves the telling of a story, typically from the writer's point of view. It allows the author to convey their experiences, thoughts, emotions, and insights to the readers, creating a personal connection with the audience. Unlike other forms of writing, such as expository or argumentative essays, narrative essays focus on creating a vivid and captivating story.

Different types of narrative essays:

Personal narrative: These essays are based on the writer's personal experiences, memories, or reflections. They often explore important moments, significant events, or life-changing encounters, providing valuable insights and lessons.

Fictional narrative: In these essays, writers create fictional stories that may be inspired by real-life events or completely fabricated. They allow the writer's imagination to soar, developing characters, plotlines, and settings that captivate and entertain the readers.

Descriptive narrative: This type of narrative essay focuses on creating vivid descriptions, painting a clear picture of a person, place, or event. It allows the readers to experience the story through their senses, immersing them in a world full of sensory details.

• Autobiographical narrative: Autobiographical narrative essays are based on the author's own life. They delve deep into the writer's personal history, exploring their upbringing, struggles, successes, and relationships. These essays provide a unique perspective and allow readers to connect with the writer on a personal level.

How to write a narrative essay: Writing a compelling narrative essay involves several key elements. Here are some tips to help you craft an engaging and well-structured narrative:

Choose a captivating topic: Select a topic that is meaningful to you and has the potential to resonate with your readers. It could be a significant event, a memorable journey, or a personal realization.

Develop a strong opening: Grab your reader's attention from the beginning with an intriguing opening paragraph. Use descriptive language or a thought-provoking statement to draw them into the narrative.

Create well-rounded characters: If your narrative essay involves characters, develop them with depth and complexity. Show their emotions, motivations, and conflicts to make them relatable and engaging.

Build a compelling plot: Structure your essay with a clear beginning, middle, and end. Include rising action, climax, and resolution to keep the readers hooked and satisfied.

Use descriptive language: Paint a vivid picture with your words by incorporating sensory details, figurative language, and descriptive imagery. This will immerse the readers in your narrative and make it more engaging.

Reflect on the experience: After describing the events or experiences, take the time to reflect on their significance and the lessons learned. This introspection adds depth and meaning to your narrative.

By following these guidelines and drawing inspiration from the best narrative essay examples, you can create compelling and engaging stories that resonate with your audience. So, let's dive into the top 10+ narrative essay examples that will captivate and inspire you to tell your own unique stories.

1. Childhood Memories: The Day I Learned to Ride a Bike

It was a sunny summer day when my father first took off my training wheels. With shaky legs and a racing heart, I hopped onto my new bicycle. The exhilarating feeling of the wind in my hair and the freedom beneath my wheels is a memory that has stayed with me for a lifetime.

2. A Life-Changing Encounter: My Meeting with a Homeless Stranger

On a chilly winter evening, I stopped to help a homeless man who was struggling in the bitter cold. Little did I know, this encounter would leave a lasting impact on my outlook on life and the importance of empathy.

3. Overcoming Fear: Conquering Stage Fright on Opening Night

As the curtains rose and the spotlight shone upon me, I felt my heart race and my palms sweat. However, through sheer determination and countless rehearsals, I found the courage to conquer my stage fright and deliver an unforgettable performance.

4. The Journey of Self-Discovery: Exploring the Unknown

Leaving the comfort of my familiar surroundings, I embarked on a solo backpacking trip through Southeast Asia. This journey not only introduced me to diverse cultures and breathtaking landscapes but also pushed me out of my comfort zone, leading me to discover my true passions and strengths.

5. A Lesson in Perseverance: Overcoming a Personal Health Struggle

From battling a chronic illness to enduring numerous hospital visits, I faced a seemingly insurmountable challenge. However, through resilience and the support of loved ones, I learned the power of perseverance and the incredible strength of the human spirit.

6. A Tale of Friendship: The Unbreakable Bond

From childhood adventures to adulthood trials, my best friend has been by my side through every high and low. Our shared experiences and unwavering support have taught me the true meaning of friendship and the importance of having a shoulder to lean on.

7. Unexpected Kindness: The Stranger Who Restored My Faith in Humanity

In a world filled with cynicism and indifference, a small act of kindness from a stranger can have a profound impact. The heartwarming story of how a stranger's generosity restored my faith in humanity serves as a reminder that kindness can be found in the most unexpected places.

8. Love Knows No Distance: Navigating a Long-Distance Relationship

Being separated by thousands of miles and different time zones is no easy feat. However, through resilience, trust, and constant communication, my partner and I have managed to maintain a flourishing long-distance relationship that has taught us the true meaning of love and commitment.

9. Facing a Fear of Heights: The Thrill of Skydiving

From the moment I jumped out of the airplane and plummeted towards the earth, I knew I had conquered my fear of heights. Skydiving taught me that sometimes, the most exhilarating experiences can be found on the other side of fear.

10. A Miraculous Encounter: The Day I Saved a Stranded Animal

Stumbling upon a wounded animal on a deserted road, I made a split-second decision to rescue it. Little did I know, that selfless act would not only save a life but also restore my faith in the power of compassion and the interconnectedness of all living beings.

In conclusion, narrative essays allow us to capture and share powerful moments, personal growth, and life lessons through engaging storytelling. These examples illustrate the diverse range of narratives that can be explored, from childhood memories to transformative experiences. Each narrative provides a unique perspective and highlights the universal human experiences that connect us all.

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How to Tell a Story Effectively: 7 Storytelling Tips

Written by MasterClass

Last updated: Sep 7, 2021 • 4 min read

Storytelling allowed people to make sense of the world and derive deeper meaning from their lives since the beginning of human history. The techniques and delivery methods of good storytelling may have changed since then, but the power of storytelling to move us and provoke a deeper sense of connection between us has stayed consistent. As a writer, developing your storytelling skills and learning how to spin your own experiences into a story takes practice, but there are tried and true methods of improving your craft.

We’re reviewing our resources this spring (May-August 2024). We will do our best to minimize disruption, but you might notice changes over the next few months as we correct errors & delete redundant resources. 

Telling a Story in Academic Writing

Storytelling is the most engaging way to communicate. In storytelling, writers use a variety of methods to maintain an appealing pace, to create human connections with their readers, and to help readers visualize their ideas. These same techniques are effective across all types of writing. They can be used to make writing assignments more engaging, more readable, and more persuasive.

When you build plot, you think of your writing as a sequence of connected events where anticipation (tension) rises toward a final climactic event, and ends with a resolution.  For an academic argument, you can use the traditional narrative arc as a basic structure. The following shows how these narrative arcs of story structure might map onto academic paper.

• Story: “This is the background you need to know to understand what’s coming next.”
• Academic Writing: Introduce the issue and the argument you want to develop.

Rising action

• Story: “First this happened. Then this happened. Then this happened.”
• Academic Writing: To build tension, arrange your arguments to build in strength. How each point builds upon the previous one should be clear. For example, in a literature review, you would arrange the previous research to show how and why you came to your own research question. (You might think of this format like a detective story. The problems, successes, or omissions in previous research serve as the “clues” that led you to your own research project).
• Story: “All of that led to this big event.”
• Academic Writing: At the climax, reveal your most convincing reasoning and evidence.
• Story: “Here’s how everything came together at the end.”
• Academic Writing: In the final phase, summarize your arguments and emphasizing the significance of the issue.

Balance Action with Commentary

Academic writing with too much action - where the writer presents facts and descriptions, one after the other - reads like a rapid-fire list of statements. This kind of writing doesn’t give the reader time to process and reflect on the information. Make sure that you include analysis, reflection, and other commentary to build the right pace for your readers.

In contrast, academic writing with too much commentary feels slow and plodding and often has so much discussion that the reader loses sight of the writer’s goal. Make sure that you provide only the most important commentary. Then move on.

Instead of . . .

“ So and so argues this… so and so claims this… so and so analyzes this…  “ or  “One definition of the topic is x. Another is y. The definition proposed by z is….”  or   “There are multiple approaches to the topic. X looks at this . . ., Y views this. . ., Z combines this. . .”

“ There are many approaches to the topic. X looks at this . . ., which establishes important criteria for the field but avoids finding a consensus about issue M.  Y’s research adds to the conversation about fundamental criteria for assessing these clinical situations. However, the author also takes a critical look at the disagreements underlying certain existing criteria. In contrast, rather than establishing criteria, Z investigates systemic assumptions in the field that lead practitioners to weigh some criteria more heavily than others.”

Focus on Pacing

Use active voice.

When writers use active voice they focus their sentences on an actor and the action – the two most important parts of storytelling. For more information on using active voice, check out our resource,   Active and passive voice .

Ideally, to avoid unintentional bias in our measurements, information regarding the source population of each specimen   was withheld   from the observer.

We strived   to avoid unintentional bias in our measurements. To that end,   we withheld   from observers, information about each specimen’s source population.

Vary sentence and paragraph length

Blair shone in his extracurricular activities at school. During his time at university he produced a magazine, joined in the production of other publications, and, in addition, participated in the college’s acapella group, but his academic performance reports suggested that he neglected his academic studies. His parents could not afford to send him to university without him winning another scholarship, and thus they concluded from his poor results that he would not be able to win one. His family decided that Blair should join the Imperial Police instead of finishing school.

Blair shone in his extracurricular activities at school. During his time at university he produced a magazine and also joined in the production of other publications. In addition, he participated in the college’s acapella group. Despite these achievements, his parents could not afford to send him to university without him winning another scholarship. Judging from Blair’s poor results, his family concluded that he would not be able to win. They thought Blair should join the Imperial Police instead.

Omit clutter

Too many unnecessary words in a sentence can not only lead to confusion, but also slow the pace and make text feel onerous and tiresome.

It has been found that   CO2 and H2O formation   has been reduced   at high temperatures.

Less   CO2 and H2O   form   at higher temperatures.

Humanize your Writing

Stories are powerful because, in one way or another, they place human concerns as their focus. To remind your readers of the human concerns that your research paper addresses, put human elements into your writing.

Use characters as your subjects

When a sentence describes an action completed by a person, that person should be the subject of the sentence. This small change in structure provides your sentences with characters and their actions, adding human elements to the paper.

Fetal DNA has been found in maternal plasma but exists as a minor fraction among a high background of maternal DNA. Even with highly precise single counting methods such as digital PCR, a large number of DNA molecules and hence maternal plasma volume would need to be analyzed to achieve the necessary analytical precision.

Researchers   have found fetal DNA in maternal plasma, but it exists as a minor fraction among a high background of maternal DNA. Hence, even with highly precise, single molecule counting methods, such as digital PCR,   geneticists   must analyze a large number of DNA molecules and maternal plasma to achieve the necessary analytical precision.

Use the first person (I/we )

First person provides a human connection and improves clarity. It lets the reader know clearly who did what.

Here, instead of using approaches that target specific gene loci, the use of a locus-independent method would greatly increase the number of target molecules from the aneuploidy chromosome that could be analyzed within the same fixed volume of plasma.

Try . .   .

Here,   we chose   not to use approaches that target specific gene loci. Rather, by using a locus-independent method,   we could greatly increase   the number of target molecules from the aneuploidy chromosome, and, with this increase,   improve our analysis   within the same fixed volume of plasma.

Add Metaphor

When we use one object, experience, or event to help symbolize and represent a different one, we are using metaphor. Through metaphor, writers use a concept familiar to the reader to help explain something that is unfamiliar. Metaphor helps a reader understand a concept from two pathways – literal and visual – and increases engagement.

Beyond treating individual letters as physical objects, the human brain may also perceive a text in its entirety as a kind of physical landscape, similar to the mental maps we create of terrain. For example, in the physical world we might recall that we passed the red farmhouse near the start of a trail we hiked. In a similar way, in text, we remember that we read about Mr. Darcy rebuffing Elizabeth Bennett on the bottom of the left-hand page in one of the earlier chapters.

A Storytelling Guide: Step-By-Step, With Examples

Storytelling is a great way of building connections with your readers and ideal audience. Like any skill, it takes practice. Our storytelling guide explains more.

Once upon a time, I avoided using stories as part of my non-fiction writing.

I felt like stories were too hard to pull off, they didn’t resonate with non-fiction readers, and I didn’t have the writing chops to tell a story that mattered. Instead, I leaned heavily on research and interviews.

But my articles and book chapters were dry and bland. 

One day, I went to a lecture by the screenwriting guru Robert McKee.

There, he explained:

“He who tells the best story wins.”

He told us storytelling is an art form. The best non-fiction writers use stories as part of their work. It helps writers connect with readers. 

And not just novelists. 

He called out content marketers, advertisers and non-fiction writers. 

I discovered the readers of a well-told story share the emotions of the characters in a story, and they will recall the key points of this story later, far better than any article that’s based solely on reason and logic.

I knew I needed to change my approach to storytelling. 

Even if you write non-fiction online, incorporating simple stories into your writing will help you communicate a memorable message with readers and even stir up their emotions.

Living Writer contains time-saving templates for authors and novelists. iOS and Android apps available

Why Tell Stories?

What types of stories can you tell, step 1: decide what type of story you’re telling, step 2: identify your target audience, step 3: select the medium, step 4: establish your central character, step 5: give your character a problem, step 6: your character meets a guide, step 7: the guide gives your character a plan, step 8 the guide calls your character to adventure, step 9: identify what’s at stake, step 10: let your character choose, storytelling: the most powerful weapon at your disposal, storytelling guide resources, what is the objective of storytelling, what are the benefits of storytelling, what are examples of stories, [interview] gaming, digital storytelling and creative projects with john romero, storytelling resources.

Stories inform how we make sense of the world, our past experiences, and what the future holds. 

They bring people together around a common idea or narrative. Think back to when people gathered around a campfire late at night.

They also stir up emotions in the hearts of a target audience and they remember lessons from the story long after the end.

Stories are also more impactful than facts, figures, logic and reason because they appeal to people’s values and beliefs.

It doesn’t matter if you’re a content marketer, copywriter, poet or novelist. Stories belong in your work.

And you don’t need to be Stephen King, Mario Puzo or a great American novelist to use them either. 

• If you’re a  content marketer , tell a story about the brand or include one in a marketing campaign and explain how your company helps a target audience.
• If you’re a  copywriter , you could tell a story about how a customer used the product you’re selling to solve a problem.
• If you’re a  poet , you could perform spoken word at a recital.
• If you’re a  podcaster , you could use stories in each podcast episode (oral storytelling has a long tradition and lends itself well to digital media)
• If you’re writing a blog post , you could insert a personal story to balance research, recommendations and information.
• If you’re delivering  a presentation , you could open with a short story related to the topic at hand.
• If you’re  a business leader , you could tell a story about how you or your company overcame a big professional challenge (great leaders are comfortable displaying vulnerability).

Each genre has conventions that storytellers must follow. 

A good story achieves at least one of several things.

• It’s  entertaining . The target audience enjoys hearing, watching or consuming it.
• It’s  inspiring . People feel motivated to act after the end,
• It’s  educational . We come away from the story knowing more about a topic or issue.
• It’s  universal . Although a story may speak to a specific audience, niche or geography, anyone can follow it.
• It’s  organized . A good story follows a certain framework like the hero’s journey.

Every great story is created for someone. Who is your ideal target audience? What are their:

• Frustrations

Understanding this information up front will help you figure out how to deliver your message. If in doubt, survey or interview them.

Thanks to digital storytelling tools, it’s easier than ever to mix and match various formats. You could:

• Create a video series on YouTube
• Record a series of podcasts episodes
• Publish several blog posts on a topic
• Create customer testimonials
• Record a short film
• Write and self-publish a book
• Perform your story in front of an audience and record it

It’s even possible to take material from one format and remix it for another.

In every great story, a central character or hero goes on a journey or an adventure.

For example in the film  Star Wars , Luke Skywalker is the primary character.

He is called to adventure by Obi-Wan Kenobi to rescue Princess Leia and defeat an evil empire.

He’s a character we can empathise with. You don’t need to love science fiction either to understand Luke’s arc in this film.

To tell the story of how I learnt to write 1,000 words day, I could present myself or my reader as the main character. In this case, I picked myself.

For B2B storytellers, copywriters and advertisers, the central character is typically the target audience. 

Now that you’ve chosen the hero or central character ask: “What is he or she struggling with right now?”

In  Star Wars , Luke struggles to escape his home planet after Darth Vadar’s troopers kill his aunt and uncle.

In the book and film  The Godfather  by Mario Puzo, Michael Corleone struggles with his family and the direction of his life after his uncle Don Corleone is shot and his mafia family begins to fall apart.

If you’re telling a non-fiction story, describe in a few sentences a problem that you have or one that you know your readers have.

While telling the story of how I learnt to write 1,000 words a day , I wrote about my inability to finish a book.

I didn’t increase my daily word count, I would never have anything to publish.

And a writer who can’t finish and publish his book has a serious problem.

If you’re a content marketer, you could:

• Write about a pain-point customers have like their tax returns
• Paint a picture via video and audio of your ideal audience struggling to understand a part of their business

Next, the hero or central character of your story must meet someone who listens to and understands their problems.

This guide should empathise rather than sympathise with the central character of your story and even help them.

In  Star Wars , Luke meets Obi-Wan Kenobi who then explains to Luke how he can escape his ordinary life and go on an adventure to rescue a princess.

If you’re writing non-fiction, you can present yourself as a guide that understands your reader’s problems, or you can write about someone who helped you.

It’s easy to present yourself as a guide if you use language familiar to your readers and if you use words like “you” rather than “I”.

For example, I committed to writing 1,000 words a day after Stephen King explained what he does in his book On Writing.

“I like to get ten pages a day, which amounts to 2,000 words. That’s 180,000 words over a three-month span, a goodish length for a book – something in which the reader can get happily lost, if the tale is done well and stays fresh.”

Later, King empathised with the distractions new writers face and argued they (me) should aim for at least 1,000 words a day.

For B2B storytellers, your company or its product represents the guide, 

The guide’s role in your story is to help the hero overcome the problem you identified previously.

In  Star Wars , Obi-Wan Kenobi helps Luke leave his home planet, find the force and ultimately defeat Darth Vadar.

If you’re writing non-fiction, you can give your reader a plan for overcoming their problem by acting as a guide and explaining what they need to do next.

Alternatively, you can write about how someone you met helped you overcome this problem and explain that your readers can do the same.

In my case, I explained how Stephen King gave me a plan: I must write 1,000 words a day every day by eliminating other distractions.

“So okay- there you are in your room with the shade down and the door shut and the plug pulled out of the base of the telephone. You’ve blown up your TV and committed yourself to a thousand words a day, come hell or high water. Now comes the big question: What are you going to write about? And the equally big answer: Anything you damn well want.”

For B2B storytellers, your company or its product represents the offer. 

Every great story has a moment of crisis where the main character must decide: will I or won’t I?

In  The Godfather  , Michael must decide will he turn his back on his family and a life of crime?

Or will he leave his old life behind him and avenge the attempted murder of his uncle by killing a corrupt policeman?

If you’re writing non-fiction, you can call your reader to adventure by asking them to pursue something they desire.

This could be:

• Writing 1,000 words a day
• Publishing a book
• Starting a popular blog

In my case, I explained that after I started writing 1,000 words a day, I ran out of things to write about and had to consider where I was going.

For B2B storytellers, your company or its product represents the call-to-action e.g. buy now, subscribe. 

Every successful story contains a moment of crisis within which the story’s core value(s) is stake.

In the Godfather, Michael knows his family will be destroyed if he doesn’t act and protect them.

However, he also knows he risks his soul if he murders another man in cold blood to protect his family.

The core values here are family and ethics.

If you’re writing non-fiction, you can identify what’s at stake by explaining what the reader will gain or lose if they take action.

To write 1,000 words every day, I had to give up or cut back on other activities like television and social events (what I stand to lose).

If didn’t give these things up and write 1,000 words every , then I would never write a book (what’s at stake).

The core values here are immediate gratification and ambition.

If you’re a copywriting telling a story, you could:

• Show  how a product  will save the reader money or time
• Reveal a hidden benefit that only customers of this product get  if  they act now
• Demonstrate the  before and after  transformation via pictures or videos e.g. think testimonials from happy clients of a personal trainer

Your central character’s decision must have consequences if you want your story to sound compelling.

In  Star Wars , Luke must decide if he wants to take his place next to his father and join the Dark Side or reject his father.

He chooses the latter and as a consequence, he sacrifices himself by jumping to his death (only be rescued last minute by his friends).

In  The Godfather , Michael chooses to protect his family by killing a policeman in cold blood.

As a consequence, he must go into hiding in Italy and eventually return and assume his place as head of a powerful crime family.

When I started writing 1,000 words a day , I quickly discovered I didn’t have an audience for my work and that I would never improve as a writer without an audience. This new knowledge set me on the path towards blogging.

Tip:  Start at the End and Write Backwards Before you write your story, think about how it ends.

Why? It’s easier to tell a story when you know exactly what happened and how things turned out.

This means doing the following:

• Define your target audience
• Identify what your audience needs
• Pick a problem they have

Many successful non-fiction writers figure out who they are writing for and what they want to say before they put pen to paper i.e. they pitch their idea to an editor before they write it.

Before writing my story of how I learnt to write 1,000 words a day, I identified my target audience as other new writers who wanted to do the same and those who were curious about my journey.

I knew some of these writers and bloggers were interested because they’d emailed me and asked how they can write more frequently.

It’s not as difficult as it sounds to tell a story as part of your non-fiction writing, and it will help you win the hearts and minds of readers.

All it takes is some practice and a little knowledge of what a good story involves.

I used  Star Wars  and  The Godfather  as examples because they’re fantastic stories that anyone can relate to.

I included my story to show you that you don’t need to be George Lucas or Mario Puzo to incorporate storytelling into your work.

If you’re still struggling with the art of storytelling, I recommend reading Robert McKee’s book Story: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting.

If your story is genuine and honest, you will impact your readers more than through cold logic and reason.

The below presentation explains how to tell simple stories as per the Pixar framework.

Pixar’s 22 Rules to Phenomenal Storytelling   from  Gavin McMahon

Storytelling Guide: FAQs

Storytelling should inform, educate, entertain or inspire readers. A good story is universal and memorable. It speaks to the human experience and rises up some emotion in the audience.

A good story is more memorable than facts, figures and logic. For example, if you’re a content marketer, a story may cause your audience to feel loyal to a brand and even buy a product or a service.

Popular examples of stories include Star Wars, The Godfather, Game of Thrones and Finding Nemo. Other examples of stories include poems, the spoken word and even fairy tales.

In a now-famous essay, Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham argued for dividing a working day up into maker and manager time.

Writers and creative professionals can use the former to attend to business and the latter for deep work, like writing or coding.

But what does this look like in practice?

Enter John Romero.

Although not a writer, he’s the creative talent behind games like Doom and Quake.

In this podcast episode, Romero explains:

• How he structures his day for working on his business and deep creative work
• The role of play for creative professionals
• His approach to building a relationship with fans

And lots more

First vs Third Person Point of View: What Makes Sense for Your Story?

How to Write a Story Outline that Works: 9 Steps

The 11 Best Story Writing Apps for This Year

The Hero’s Journey: Explained In 12 Steps

The Inciting Incident: 7 Tips For Starting Your Story With A Bang

Synopsis Example: How To Write A Winning Summary Of Your Story

Allegory vs Parable: What Are the Differences?

7 Types of Conflict in Literature Worth Exploring

12 Character Archetypes To Drive Your Writing

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The Art of Storytelling: Techniques for Writing Engaging Narratives

May 16, 2023 //  by  Lindsay Ann //   Leave a Comment

Sharing is caring!

Neuroscience shows us that our brains are naturally designed for writing narratives. We can see narratives being told as far back as our cave dwelling ancestors who told the story of their fantastic hunts by drawing pictures on their cave walls.

Storytelling preserves culture. It creates connection. It helps us learn lessons and grow as people. By telling stories, humans have learned from cautionary tales, taught others how to make something, do something, or where to find something.

When we hear a story, our brain releases dopamine that gives us a sense of calm and lowers our blood pressure.

Businesses have recognized that storytelling is far more powerful in selling products and services than persuasion alone.

In short, people love narratives . 

Despite our natural inclination for stories, sometimes the narrative can be the first assignment on the chopping block when trying to figure out the jigsaw puzzle that is all of that ELA curriculum in just 180 short days.

But given what we know about how important narrative stories are to human development, maybe it’s time we reconsider being so willing to let go of the narrative! 

Today let’s check out some unique ways to bring the art of storytelling into the high school English classroom to tap into our students’ instinctual desire to tell great stories. 

Written Narratives

When it comes to teaching written narratives, we may believe that form matters. The personal narrative or memoir tends to be the form that dominates the narrative standards in the high school ELA curriculum, or at least it does in my district. I have found that it can be easier to get students to turn their life experiences into a narrative than it is to get them to come up with a complete story from scratch. 

However, if we want our students to pursue authentic writing and write with audience and purpose in mind, we also need to remember that the good ole fashioned fictional story has a place in our year-long scope and sequence.

Neither the personal narrative nor the short story is more important than the other. The skills and processes required to write both forms are similar, so allow room for flexibility!

Personal Writing Examples

Here are some examples of narrative writing that include both personal narrative and fiction stories:

• A student might write about a coming of age experience or rite of passage they’ve had and write it as a personal narrative.
• A student might take their coming of age experience and turn it into a completely fictionalized narrative using made up character names, changing character traits, reimagining the setting, and even playing with the order of events and changing up the events altogether.
• A student may take a family story that’s been passed down from generation to generation but tell it through the eyes of an ancestor. 

There’s no limit to the rich, authentic writing that can come from our students’ minds when we allow them the freedom to express themselves and explore various formats to accomplish their purpose. 

Writing a Narrative Essay

Writing a narrative essay follows the same steps of the writing process as any other genre of writing. The trick for writing a narrative essay, though, is to get students to understand that stories are everywhere and yes , they have an important story to tell!

Brainstorming

Start by showing students that stories are everywhere. By looking for stories in everyday life, they’ll start to brainstorm ideas before their pen hits the paper.

Get students to start to tell their own stories. Sit in a circle and share about a time they were embarrassed, a prized childhood possession, their favorite teacher. 

Challenge them to think beyond their own stories . Give them prompts that will inspire fiction writing . Encourage them to make up their own world, characters, and conflicts. And they can totally draw inspiration from their own life to do this!

Planning for the “story arc”

Once they have an idea, now it’s time to plan!

For narrative writing, students should focus on mapping out their story.

The Freytag’s Pyramid is an oldie but goodie for this kind of thinking work. What information should be included in the exposition? What will be the climax of their story? Will they choose to absolutely infuriate their readers and leave them with a cliffhanger ending?

By the time they get to high school, students are pretty familiar with the elements of plot, but they may not be used to considering pacing . The pacing of the story is best described as that thrilling moment in a mystery when you’re flying through the pages at the edge of your seat about to catch the killer in action.

When planning for pacing, an easy way to do so is for students to divvy up the important plot points and create a bar graph to represent how much time and space those sections will take up in their story.

They may want to slooooowly drag the reader along in the rising action in order to create a dramatic climax but quickly fly through the falling action and briefly resolve. Or they may want to quickly get to the climax but draw out the resolution. All of these options are fair game, but students need to be taught to be intentional about making these choices in their writing.

Collaborative feedback

I’ve found that when writing narratives, collaborative feedback from a peer or a small group of peers is almost always valuable to the writer. 

I’m not a writing scientist (if that is an occupation, SIGN ME UP!), but if I had to wager a bet, I’d put my money on the fact that, because people really do love stories so much, it’s easier for us to tell someone else if their story is engaging or not. 

When responding to storytelling, students don’t feel the pressure of telling their partner or small group technical things like if their anaphora is well placed. Instead, they can simply say, “I don’t understand why this character did this,” or “I wasn’t very shocked by the ending and I know you wanted it to be. What would make it shocking is if…”

Writing is a recursive process. Students can toggle back and forth between writing and revising and collaborating before the piece is finally done and ready to be published. 

As with any writing, it’s important to remind students not to skip this part of the writing process!

This is where they can take the feedback and apply it to make their story even more powerful. 

Publication

Check out these outlets for publishing students’ narrative writing:

• Make a book for Six Word Memoirs
• Create a class blog
• Scholastic writing contest
• NCTE writing awards
• Skipping Stones magazine

Narrative Writing Mentor Texts

Students need to see examples of a wide variety of narratives to understand how to play with language, form, and syntax.

High quality narrative mentor texts can be used for brainstorming, mini lessons, writing conferences, and sooooo much more. 

Here are some examples of traditional and some non traditional ways to bring the narratives of others into your classroom!

New York Times student contest winners : These are student submissions from the Times’ narrative contest. Students will love relating to the topics of these submissions and learning craft from amateur writers who are on their level.

Randy Pausch’s Last Lecture : When diagnosed with terminal cancer, Randy Pausch, professor at Carnegie Mellon University, delivered one final lecture. The lecture ended up being a love letter to his family. Discuss how Pausch ties smaller stories, a.k.a. “life lessons” together under a unifying theme and illustrates each story with a concise, bite-sized aphorism takeaway. If you’re looking for a real-world assignment, have students write their own last lectures to deliver to the class at the end of the year.

Vlogs/Tik Tok/Instagram: Don’t sleep on using social media as mentor texts. Some of the best examples of personal narratives come from those Day in the Life Of style posts, and some Tik Tok creators have told amazingly elaborate fiction stories using that medium!

The Moth : The Moth brings the art of storytelling to life. Professional and amateur storytellers and performers orally share stories to live audiences and via a recorded podcast. At my school, freshmen end the year by writing and sharing their own Moth speeches.

TED Talks on Storytelling Activity: You know I’m obsessed with using TED Talks in the classroom, but they’re soooo great for teaching narrative writing because of the range of talks on the subject. There are talks that are instructive on how to write a narrative, there are talks that share personal stories, talks that share fiction stories, and everything in between!

Podcasts : Beyond The Moth, there are sooooo many podcasts that are formatted as a narrative. Here are some of my faves:

• Welcome to Night Vale

Narrative writing with pictures : Let. Students. Write. Using. Pictures. That is the message.

Yes, even in high school.

The graphic novel, graphic memoir, and graphic stories are all valuable! Show students some examples of this and see what they can create!

Memoir Reading & Writing: Memoirs are a great way to teach reading analysis skills and use the reading as a mentor text for student writing.

Here are some titles I think work perfectly for this: 

• Autobiography of a Face by Lucy Grealy
• Becoming by Michelle Obama 
• Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates
• Born a Crime by Trevor Noah
• 57 Bus by Dashka Slater
• I Am Malala by Christina Lamb and Malala Yousafzai
• Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer
• Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer
• Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson
• Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris
• Night by Elie Wiesel
• Somebody’s Daughter Ashley C. Ford
• The Color of Water by James McBride
• The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls
• The Other Wes Moore by Wes Moore
• Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom
• Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand
• When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi

Simple Writing Activities

Need story ideas for your students?

Snowball writing: This method allows students to be collaborative and creative. One student starts the writing process for the class (you can use a prompt or have your student make up their own idea!).

After writing for a specified amount of time, the student will crumple up the paper and make a “snowball,” and toss it to someone else. That person continues writing and repeats the process. You can even make a snowball fight where multiple stories are being thrown around at the same time. 

Simple Snowball Prompts: 

• What are some words of wisdom you’ve been given that guide your life?
• What events have brought you closer to your family?
• What’s special about where you grew up?
• What places do you remember fondly from your childhood?
• What’s the best party you’ve ever been to?
• What’s one song that every time you hear it you’re transported back to a moment in time? Write about that moment.

Photo Essay: Check out this resource for descriptive writing using a photo essay. This is such a unique way to get students thinking about their own stories (and the stories all pictures tell).

Credos: Credos challenge students to think about who they are at their core. What beliefs and ideals guide them through life? What has shaped them into who they are?

This “Personal Credo” lesson is a perfect opportunity for students to think critically about their life experiences and analyze how those experiences have impacted the way they think. 

Wrapping Up

I hope you found this post helpful. I really believe when we allow students flexibility to tell stories in their own ways and on their own terms, we can untap creativity they didn’t even know they had. 

Tell me about your best and worst experiences with teaching narrative writing in the comments below! I’d love to hear what’s worked and what hasn’t! 

About Lindsay Ann

Lindsay has been teaching high school English in the burbs of Chicago for 19 years. She is passionate about helping English teachers find balance in their lives and teaching practice through practical feedback strategies and student-led learning strategies. She also geeks out about literary analysis, inquiry-based learning, and classroom technology integration. When Lindsay is not teaching, she enjoys playing with her two kids, running, and getting lost in a good book.

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How to Write a Narrative Essay or Speech

• Ph.D., Rhetoric and English, University of Georgia
• M.A., Modern English and American Literature, University of Leicester
• B.A., English, State University of New York

A narrative essay or speech is used to tell a story, often one that is based on personal experience. This genre of work comprises works of nonfiction that hew closely to the facts and follow a logical chronological progression of events. Writers often use anecdotes to relate their experiences and engage the reader. In doing so, you can give your narrative a level of emotional appeal. It can be serious or humorous, but this emotional appeal is essential if you want to  give your audience some way to connect with your story.

The most successful narrative essays usually share these three basic traits:

• They make a central point.
• They contain  specific details in support  of that point.
• They are clearly  organized in time .

Constructing the Essay

Magazines like the New Yorker and websites like Vice are known for the pages-long narrative essays they publish, sometimes called long-format journalism. But an effective narrative essay can be as short as five paragraphs. As with other kinds of essay writing, narratives follow the same basic outline:

• Introduction: This is the opening paragraph of your essay. It contains the hook, which is used to grab the reader's attention, and the thesis or topic, which you'll detail in the next section.
• Body: This is the heart of your essay, usually three to five paragraphs in length. Each paragraph should contain one example, such as a personal anecdote or noteworthy event, that supports your larger topic.
• Conclusion: This is the final paragraph of your essay. In it, you'll sum up the main points of the body and bring your narrative to an end. Writers sometimes embellish the conclusion with an epilogue or a takeaway.

Narrative Essay Topics

Choosing the topic for your essay may be the hardest part. What you're looking for is a particular incident that you can recount in a well-developed and clearly organized essay  or speech . We have a few ideas to help you brainstorm topics. They're quite broad, but something will surely spark an idea.

• An embarrassing experience
• A memorable wedding or funeral
• An exciting minute or two of a football game (or another sporting event)
• Your first or last day at a job or new school
• A disastrous date
• A memorable moment of failure or success
• An encounter that changed your life or taught you a lesson
• An experience that led to a renewed faith
• A strange or unexpected encounter
• An experience of how technology is more trouble than it's worth
• An experience that left you disillusioned
• A frightening or dangerous experience
• A memorable journey
• An encounter with someone you were in awe of or afraid of
• An occasion when you experienced rejection
• Your first visit to the countryside (or to a large city)
• The circumstances that led to the breakup of a friendship
• An experience that showed that you should be careful of what you wish for
• A significant or comic misunderstanding
• An experience that showed how appearances can be deceiving
• An account of a difficult decision that you had to make
• An event that marked a turning point in your life
• An experience that changed your viewpoint on a controversial issue
• A memorable encounter with someone in authority
• An act of heroism or cowardice
• An imaginary encounter with a real person
• A rebellious act
• A brush with greatness or death
• A time that you took a stand on an important issue
• An experience that altered your view of someone
• A trip that you would like to take
• A vacation trip from your childhood
• An account of a visit to a fictional place or time
• Your first time away from home
• Two different versions of the same event
• A day when everything went right or wrong
• An experience that made you laugh until you cried
• The experience of being lost
• Surviving a natural disaster
• An important discovery
• An eyewitness account of an important event
• An experience that helped you grow up
• A description of your secret place
• An account of what it would be like to live as a particular animal
• Your dream job and what it would be like
• An invention you'd like to create
• A time when you realized your parents were right
• An account of your earliest memory
• Your reaction when you heard the best news of your life
• A description of the one thing you can't live without

Other Types of Essays

Narrative essays are one of the major essay types. Others include:

• Argumentative: In argumentative essays , the writer makes the case for a specific opinion on a topic, using research and analysis to persuade the reader.
• Descriptive: This kind of writing relies on detail to describe or define a person, place, thing, or experience. Writing may be either objective or subjective.
• Expository: Like argumentative essays, expository writing requires research and analysis in order to expound upon a subject. Unlike argumentative essays, the intention is not to change the readers' opinion but to inform the readers.
• Angelli, Elizabeth; Baker, Jack; and Brizee, Allen. " Essay Writing ." Perdue.edu. 9 February 2018.
• Beck, Kate. " Instructions to Write a Narrative Essay. " SeattlePI.com.
• Santa Barbara City College staff. "Structure of a Personal Narrative Essay." SBCC.edu.
• 100 Persuasive Essay Topics
• 50 Great Topics for a Process Analysis Essay
• Examples of Great Introductory Paragraphs
• 50 Argumentative Essay Topics
• Compose a Narrative Essay or Personal Statement
• How to Write a Personal Narrative
• 501 Topic Suggestions for Writing Essays and Speeches
• The Ultimate Guide to the 5-Paragraph Essay
• 6 Steps to Writing the Perfect Personal Essay
• How to Write a Great Process Essay
• Revision and Editing Checklist for a Narrative Essay
• How to Write a Great Essay for the TOEFL or TOEIC
• Write an Attention-Grabbing Opening Sentence for an Essay
• Personal Essay Topics
• What Is Expository Writing?
• How to Write a Solid Thesis Statement

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You've reached your free article limit for this month. connect to your subscription or subscribe for full access, thanks for being a subscriber, the story of storytelling.

T he story begins, as so many do, with a journey. In this case, it’s a seemingly simple one: a young girl, cloaked in red, must carry a basket of food through the woods to her bedridden grandmother. Along the way, she meets a duplicitous wolf who persuades her to dawdle: Notice the robins, he says; Laze in the sun, breathe in the hyacinth and bluebells; Wouldn’t your grandmother like a fresh bouquet? Meanwhile, he hastens to her grandmother’s cottage, where he swallows the old woman whole, slips into her bed, and waits for his final course.

Little Red Riding Hood, 1885, print after a drawing by Frédéric Théodore Lix From Les Contes de Perrault, published by Garnier Frères © akg-images

“Little Red Riding Hood”—with its striding plot, its memorable characters, and its rich symbolism—has inspired ceaseless adaptations. Since the seventeenth century, writers have expanded, revised, and modernized the beloved fairy tale thousands of times. Literary scholars, anthropologists, and folklorists have devoted reams of text to analyzing the long-lived story, interpreting it as an allegory of puberty and sexual awakening, a parable about spiritual rebirth, a metaphor for nature’s cycles (night swallowing day, day bursting forth again), and a cautionary tale about kidnapping, pedophilia, and rape. Artists have retold the story in just about every medium: television, film, theater, pop music, graphic novels, video games. Anne Sexton wrote a poem about “a shy budkin / in a red red hood” and a huntsman who rescues her with “a kind of caesarian section.” In Roald Dahl’s version, she “whips a pistol from her knickers,” shoots the wolf in the head, and wears his fur as a coat. The 1996 movie Freeway recasts the wolf as a serial killer and Little Red Riding Hood as a teenage runaway. Liza Minnelli starred in a Christmas special modeled on the fable. Both Walt Disney and Tex Avery—­the cartoonist and director who helped popularize Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, and Elmer Fudd—made animated versions with decidedly different themes.

It is generally assumed, especially in the West, that the many variations of “Little Red Riding Hood” are based on a single definitive European folktale: the one with a wolf in a nightgown and a famous exchange about big eyes and teeth. In truth, this familiar narrative is just one member of a remarkably ancient and cosmopolitan family of myths and stories. If you were raised in Italy, you may recall the girl eating the food in the basket herself and replacing it with donkey dung, only to be gobbled up by her vengeful werewolf relative. Perhaps you know the tale of the baby goats who are devoured by a devious wolf but rescued when their mother cuts open the beast’s torso and fills it with rocks instead. In Africa, there’s a story about a girl freed from the stomach of an ogre who impersonated her brother. And in Asia, there’s a tale of siblings who escape from a tiger posing as their grandmother.

As a child in Dubai, the anthropologist Jamie Tehrani grew up with the what-big-teeth-you-have version of “Little Red Riding Hood.” Decades later, while studying tribal culture in rural Iran, Tehrani noticed that numerous local folktales were curiously similar to the ones he had heard as a kid. There was a story about a beautiful woman cursed to fall into a deep sleep and the brave warrior who woke her up—an Iranian “Sleeping Beauty”—and another about a boy attacked by a wolf while traveling to visit a relative. These ringing echoes might have been coincidence. But it was also possible, Tehrani realized, that the tales were related—that they shared ancestry. This is the same dilemma evolutionary biologists confront when they find two very similar species in different parts of the world. Narrative doppelgängers might have descended from a common ancestor, like tigers and snow leopards, or independently converged on similar features, like bats and birds.

In many ways, stories are uncannily similar to living organisms. They seem to have their own interests. They compel us to share them and, once told, they begin to grow and change, often becoming longer and more elaborate. They compete with one another for our attention—for the opportunity to reach as many minds as possible. They find each other, intermingle, and multiply.

Since Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859, scientists have repeatedly proposed that the laws of biological evolution apply not just to bird and beast but also to creatures of the mind. Perhaps most famously, in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, the En­glish evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins coined the word meme to describe a “unit of cultural transmission” analogous to a biological gene. Memes, he wrote, could be ideas, tunes, or styles of clothing—­essentially any product of human intellect. Moreover, they were not just metaphorically alive but technically living things.

As early as 1909, folklorists started comparing the evolution of stories and organisms, envisioning Linnaean taxonomies and evolutionary trees, or phylogenies, for myths and tales. Generations of scholars compiled and sorted folktales from around the world, resulting in the Aarne–Thompson–Uther Index: a compendium of more than two thousand folktales, each with a unique identifying number, grouped first by specific shared motifs—“Supernatural Tasks”; “Man Kills Ogre”; “God Rewards and Punishes”—and then into larger tribes, such as “Animal Tales” and “Tales of Magic.” But until recently, researchers did not have the advantage of sophisticated statistical techniques or advanced computer software.

Tehrani wondered whether he could sort out the genealogy of all the “Little Red Riding Hood” variants—Aarne–Thompson–Uther type 333—with something similar to modern phylogenetics, the DNA-informed statistical method biologists use to construct evolutionary trees of living things. Genetics revolutionized evolutionary biology and taxonomy. Unlike their predecessors in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, modern biologists no longer depend primarily on morphology and anatomy—on appearances—­to establish evolutionary relationships between organisms. They can also compare their DNA, which maintains a record of familial mergers and divisions over great spans of time. As different species evolve, they accumulate genetic mutations at a more or less steady rate. In general, the more similar the genomes of two species—the more that certain key sequences of A s, T s, C s, and G s match—the more recently they split from a common ancestor. Using this general approach, Tehrani and a few other researchers pioneered a new kind of “phylogenetics” specifically for folktales and myths. The gist of their method is to reduce stories to their most fundamental structural elements—the narrative analogue to genes, sometimes called ­mythemes—and statistically analyze the number of discrepancies between those elements to determine ancestral relationships.

Tehrani gathered fifty-eight variants of “Little Red Riding Hood” from thirty-three cultures and broke them down into seventy-two essential narrative elements, such as type of protagonist (single child or siblings, male or female), tricks used by the villain, whether the protagonist is devoured, whether the protagonist escapes, and so on. Then he fed the data into computer programs that use statistics to build phylogenetic trees.

The results provided a new resolution to decades of debate regarding the origins of “Little Red Riding Hood.” An ancient story preserved in oral traditions in rural France, Austria, and northern Italy was the archetype for the classic folktale familiar to most Westerners. On a separate limb of the tree, the story of the goats descended from an Aesopian tale dated to 400 ad . Those two narrative threads merged in Asia, along with other local tales, sometime in the seventeenth century to form “Tiger Grandmother.”

Inspired, Tehrani and his colleague Sara Silva used similar methods on 275 “Tales of Magic” from fifty populations in India and Europe. Scholars have long pondered the true origins of such stories, many of which only achieved widespread literary fame between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, following publications by folklorists such as Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm. Were they really sourced from European peasants, as claimed? And if they were genuine folktales passed down through the generations, just how old were they? This time the results were even more revealing. Tehrani and Silva discovered that some had existed for far longer than previously known. “Beauty and the Beast” and “Rumpelstiltskin,” for example, were not just a few hundred years old, as some scholars had proposed—they were more than 2,500 years old.

Another folktale, known as “The Smith and the Devil,” was astonishingly ancient. Multiple iterations—which vary greatly but typically involve a blacksmith outwitting a demon—have appeared throughout history across Europe and Asia, from India to Scandinavia, and occasionally in Africa and North America as well. “The Smith and the Devil” became part of Appalachian folklore, and it’s a likely forerunner of the legend of Faust. Tehrani and Silva’s research suggests that not only are these geographically disparate stories directly related—as opposed to evolving independently—­­but their common ancestor emerged around five thousand years ago, during the Bronze Age.

“Most stories probably don’t survive that long,” says Tehrani. “But when you find a story shared by populations that speak closely related languages, and the variants follow a treelike model of descent, I think coincidence or convergence is an incredibly unlikely explanation. I have young children myself, and I read them bedtime stories, just as parents have done for hundreds of generations. To think that some of these stories are so old that they are older than the language I’m using to tell them—I find something deeply compelling about that.”

The story of storytelling began so long ago that its opening lines have dissolved into the mists of deep time. The best we can do is loosely piece together a first chapter. We know that by 1.5 million years ago early humans were crafting remarkably symmetrical hand axes, hunting cooperatively, and possibly controlling fire. Such skills would have required careful observation and mimicry, step-by-step instruction, and an ability to hold a long series of events in one’s mind—an incipient form of plot. At least one hundred thousand years ago, and possibly much earlier, humans were drawing, painting, making jewelry, and ceremonially burying the dead. And by forty thousand years ago, humans were creating the type of complex, imaginative, and densely populated murals found on the chalky canvases of ancient caves: art that reveals creatures no longer content to simply experience the world but who felt compelled to record and re-imagine it. Over the past few hundred thousand years, the human character gradually changed. We became consummate storytellers.

A miniature of the crow, the turtle, the rat, and the gazelle, characters from Kalila wa Dimna, a collection of Arabic fables, thirteenth century © PVDE/Bridgeman Images

T he name Polyphemus comes from the Greek poly, meaning many, and pheme, meaning speech, reputation, or fame. Polyphemus, then, means one much spoken of, someone of great repute. In 1857, Wilhelm Grimm (of the Brothers Grimm) published an essay comparing ten legends and myths similar to the tale of Polyphemus, the man-­eating, sheepherding cyclops who traps Odysseus and his crew inside a cave in the Odyssey. Each of these ten stories pitted a hero against a malevolent one-eyed giant. Grimm believed they all branched off from a single ur-mythos.

Recent research suggests that Grimm was right. In the past six years, Julien d’Huy, a scholar at the Institut des Mondes Africains, has performed a series of phylogenetic analyses on fifty-six variants of the Polyphemus tale. Based on his results, d’Huy thinks that the essential plot common to all these narratives—a hunter encounters a monster guarding a group of animals, gets trapped with the monster, and manages to escape by clinging to the animals—emerged more than twenty thousand years ago during the Paleolithic period. Later, the myth traveled through Africa and then across Europe, in parallel with the spread of livestock farming, morphing and speciating all the while. To d’Huy, the myth represents an ancient belief in a “master of animals” and the desire to free those animals from his or her control—perhaps a personification of chance or a metaphor for the struggle of early humans against the vagaries of weather, disease, and hunting. In a way, the many iterations and adaptations of the tale of Polyphemus are their own woolly disguise, so thickly layered on such an ancient story that we can only glimpse its original form.

One of the oldest and most prevalent motifs in storytelling—and a testament to the creative power of stories themselves—is the transformation of the inanimate into the living, often at the hands of a talented artist. In Greek mythology, Hephaestus, the god of crafts, creates a giant bronze automaton to protect Europa, the mother of King Minos of Crete. In Jewish folklore, golems are anthropomorphic figures animated by magic, often depicted as large troll-like creatures made from clay or mud. In a tale from China, a magician gives a young peasant boy an enchanted paintbrush that brings whatever he paints to life. And the Italian writer Carlo Collodi created the character of Pinocchio, a wooden puppet that dreams of being a real boy.

Many scholars regard the myth of Pygmalion—eventually canonized in Ovid’s Metamorphoses —as a probable inspiration for at least some of these tales. In Ovid’s telling, Pygmalion was a Cypriot sculptor who carved an ivory woman of extraordinary beauty in place of a wife. Though he knew it was madness, Pygmalion became increasingly infatuated with his creation and prayed for a living likeness. When he returned home from the feast of Venus and kissed the statue, she came to life. They married and had a son, the namesake of the city of Paphos.

D’Huy thinks the origins of the Pygmalion myths are much deeper than is typically thought. He noticed that Ovid’s version strongly resembles stories told by the Bara people of Madagascar, the Berbers of North Africa, and various tribes throughout eastern Africa; they all involve carvings or drawings that come to life and live with their creators. In a South African variant, for example, a tribal leader tries to abduct a recently animated woman from the sculptor who made her. The sculptor throws the woman to the ground and she turns back into wood. When d’Huy performed a phylogenetic analysis on various iterations of Pygmalion, he discovered that the Greek and Bara myths likely split from the Berber story three thousand to four thousand years ago. These nascent Pygmalion myths then spread to other parts of Africa and the Levant with migrating livestock herders.

Any contemporary interpretation of a story that potentially existed long before recorded history is necessarily speculative. Although the phylogenetic analysis of folktales and myths may benefit from the latest statistical techniques and software, it remains a new and uncertain science that many folklorists regard with a mix of intrigue and skepticism. And the vast majority of ancient tales surely perished with their tellers. If certain beloved stories really have endured for many thousands of years, however, they tell us something important about the origin and nature of narrative itself.

Ulysses escapes under the ram (detail), from a black-figured convex lekythos, c. 590 bc © Erich Lessing/Art Resource, New York City

E very month or so, indigenous hunter-gatherers in the Philippines known as the Agta pick up their banana-leaf lean-tos and move to a different region of Northern Sierra Madre National Park. They fish, hunt, and forage along the coast and in the jungle. They sometimes trade for rice with nearby agricultural villages, but they are mostly self-sufficient—one of the few such groups still in existence. Since 2001, the anthropologist Andrea Migliano and her colleagues have routinely visited the Agta and have learned some of the group’s folklore from elders who tell stories around the campfire at night. Although living hunter-gatherers are of course not replicas of our Paleolithic ancestors, their cultures—combined with archaeological evidence—help compose a portrait of how humans likely lived before the widespread adoption of agriculture and densely populated settlements.

In the process of cataloguing the Agta’s tales, Migliano realized that many of them encouraged friendship, cooperation, and egalitarianism. In one story, the moon proves that it is as strong as the sun and the two agree to share dominion of the sky. In another, a winged ant snubs her flightless peers and tries to befriend birds and butterflies instead; after those creatures reject her, she returns to her colony, accepts her true identity, and becomes a queen. Similar themes run through the myths and folktales of hunter-gatherer societies around the world. When Migliano analyzed eighty-nine stories from seven different forager societies, she found that about 70 percent focused on regulating social behavior.

In 2014, Migliano and her colleague Daniel Smith, along with several other researchers, began surveying the Agta about the characteristics they valued most in their peers. To their surprise, storytelling topped the list—it was even more prized than hunting skills and medicinal knowledge. When they asked nearly three hundred Agta which of their peers they would most like to live with, skilled storytellers were two times more likely to be selected than those without such talents, regardless of age, sex, and prior friendship. And when they asked the Agta to play resource allocation games, in which they could keep bags of rice or donate them to others, people from camps with talented storytellers were more generous, giving away more rice, and esteemed storytellers were themselves more likely to receive gifts. Most profoundly, Agta with a reputation as good storytellers were more reproductively successful: they had 0.5 more children, on average, than their peers.

“There is an adaptive advantage to storytelling,” says Migliano. “I think this work confirms that storytelling is important to communicate social norms and what is essential for hunter-gatherer survival.”

“Little Red Riding Hood,” the tale of Polyphemus, and other ancient tales are all preoccupied with peril. They are populated by predators real and imaginary. They are replete with physical and interpersonal threats—in particular deceit. They confront characters with at least one crisis and force them to either resolve it or meet a terrible fate. Even the folktales of the Agta, which emphasize harmony, only do so through a sharp contrast with discord. When we try to define the qualities of memorable narratives today, we often fall back on clichés and tautologies. Stories need conflict, we say. Why? Because conflict makes for a good story. But maybe there’s a deeper reason.

Not only are ancient myths and folktales almost universally concerned with danger and death; they are blatantly didactic. If we remove their layers of symbolism and subtext—which have been interpreted and reinterpreted for millennia—and focus on their narrative skeletons, we find that they are studded with practical and moral insights: people are not always what they seem; the mind is as much a weapon as the body; sometimes humility is the best path to victory. Modern stories frequently plunge us into lengthy interior monologues, exhaustively describe settings and people’s physical features, delight in the random, absurd, and orthogonal, and end with deliberate ambiguity. The earliest stories were, for all their fantasy, far more pragmatic. Their villains were often thinly veiled analogies for real-world threats, and their conclusions offered useful lessons. They were simulations that allowed our ancestors to develop crucial mental and social skills and to practice overcoming conflict without being in actual danger. Though we may never definitively know what confluence of biological and cultural pressures hatched the first stories—though narrative has far exceeded its preliminary role in human evolution—it seems that our predecessors relied on stories to teach each other how to survive.

But fixating on the social benefits of storytelling elides an even more fundamental purpose: a story is really a way of thinking—perhaps the most powerful and versatile skill in the human cognitive repertoire. The world confronts the mind with myriad impressions, a profusion of other often perplexing beings, and an infinity of possible futures. The increasingly large brains of our ancestors, all the more attuned to the world’s complexity, needed a way to organize this overwhelming torrent of information, to pass the multiplicity of experience through a reverse prism and distill it into a single coherent sequence. Stories were the solution.

A story is a choreographed hallucination that temporarily displaces reality. At the behest of the storyteller, this conjured world may mimic perceived reality, perhaps rehearsing a past experience; it may modify reality, placing proxies of actual people in hypothetical scenarios or fictional people in familiar settings; or it may abandon reality for a realm of fantasy. Before stories, the human mind was only a partial participant in its own conscious experience of life, restricted to the recent past and near future, to its immediate surroundings and fragmented memories of other places. By telling stories, early humans gained unprecedented autonomy over their subjective experiences: they could dictate and record extensive histories and make intricate long-term plans; they could obscure, revise, and mythologize truth; they could dwell in alternate worlds of their own making. Storytelling transformed our species from intelligent ape to demigod.

So’yokmana Katsina (Ogre Maiden), a kachina doll carved from cottonwood root. Gift of the Estate of Mary Hemenway © President and Fellows of Harvard College, Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, PM# 45-25-10/28835

I n the 1880s, the Prussian Ministry of Agriculture commissioned the German biologist Albert Bern­hard Frank to systematically research the possibility of cultivating truffles—the pungent and delectable fruiting bodies of various fungi. As so many before and after him, Frank failed to find a reliable and economical method of fungiculture. Instead, he unearthed secrets that would eventually transform our understanding of ecology. Frank and other scientists had observed that truffles always grew around certain trees, such as beeches, hornbeams, oaks, and pines. In a series of meticulous studies, digging through tract after tract of woodland soil, Frank revealed that a gossamer mesh of fungal threads completely enveloped the root systems of many trees. “The entire structure is neither tree root nor fungus alone,” Frank wrote; it is “a union of two different organisms into a single, morphological organ.” We now know that massive lattices of fungi link the roots of neighboring trees, even those of different species, and that trees use these underground networks to exchange water, nutrients, and chemical messages.

Like trees in a forest, we too are rooted in the living mesh of another organism—in a web of story. We give life to the stories we tell, imagining entire worlds and preserving them on rock, paper, and silicon. Stories sustain us: they open paths of clarity in the chaos of existence, maintain a record of human thought, and grant us the power to shape our perceptions of reality. The coevolution of humans and stories may not be one of the oldest partnerships in the history of life on Earth, but it is certainly one of the most robust. As a psychic creature simultaneously parasitizing and nourishing the human mind, narrative was so thoroughly successful that it is now all but inextricable from language and thought. Stories live through us, and we live through stories.

The symbiosis of people and stories is unique in at least one regard. In order to survive, most symbiotic organisms need a specific partner and a narrow set of environmental conditions. In the wild, many seedlings will wither and die if their roots are not colonized by the right fungi; likewise, many fungi will fail to grow if they cannot find their botanical allies. Although we may rely on narrative to think, speak, and live, stories are not tethered to us in quite the same way.

Once recorded, a story has the potential to live longer and spread farther than any other creature. All it requires is a consciousness to inhabit—and that consciousness need not be human, or even organic. Stories that earn the widest audiences over the longest stretches of time are exceedingly likely to continue surviving in one form or another. And if a recorded story finds itself utterly alone, it is perfectly content to wait indefinitely for the arrival of a new audience, whether that audience be human, alien, machine, or something else altogether. Stories are capable of symbiosis that transcends species; they are also a kind of life that transcends biology itself. If any organism can achieve true immortality, it is surely the story.

Right now, Voyager 1, a space probe launched by ­NASA on September 5, 1977, is traveling at 38,000 miles per hour through interstellar space, more than 13 billion miles from Earth—about three and a half times the distance between the sun and Pluto. Of all the objects we have hurled beyond our orbit, it has journeyed the farthest. It carries a twelve-inch gold-plated phonograph record intended as a greeting to the universe. When the disc is played at the right speed, and its audio-­encoded images are deciphered, it reveals a mosaic portrait of our planet and its creatures: salutations in fifty-five languages; folk music from China, India, Georgia, and Peru; concertos and quartets by Beethoven and Mozart; songs by Chuck Berry and Blind Willie Johnson; more than one hundred diagrams and photos depicting physics equations, DNA, human anatomy, elephants, dolphins, trees, the Golden Gate Bridge, cars, fishing boats, trains, a supermarket, and a dinner party; and a sampling of brain waves, recorded as the project’s creative director, Ann Druyan, thought about violence, poverty, the predicaments of civilization, and what it’s like to fall in love. The record is more polyphony than symphony, or perhaps polyphemy —a story told in many voices.

“This is a present from a small, distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts, and our feelings,” President Jimmy Carter said in a message included on the record. “We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours.”

 is a writer based in Portland, Oregon. His work has been anthologized by the Best American Science and Nature Writing series.

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Ideas and insights from Harvard Business Publishing Corporate Learning

The Science Behind The Art Of Storytelling

 This is the first of two posts co-written by Lani and Vanessa Boris, Senior Manager, Video Solutions at Harvard Business Publishing Corporate Learning.

Storytelling has the power to engage, influence, teach and inspire listeners. That’s why we argue for organizations to build a storytelling culture and place storytelling at the heart of their learning programs. There’s an art to telling a good story, and we all know a good story when we hear one. But there’s also a science behind the art of storytelling.

Here’s how it works, starting with the science of the non-story:

We’ve all listened to (and suffered through) long PowerPoint presentations made up of bullet points – bullet points that may be meaningful to the presenter, but lack the same punch for the audience. Even if the presenter is animated, when we hear information being ticked off like this, the language processing parts in our brain, known as Broca’s area and Wernicke’s area, get to work, translating those bullet points into story form where we can find our own meaning. The problem with this, however, is that the story we come up with in our mind may not be the same one the speaker is intending to convey through data.

When a speaker delivers those same facts within a story, however, something else happens in the brain. In his essay “The Science of Storytelling: What Listening to a Story Does to Our Brains”, entrepreneur and storyteller Leo Widrich noted that there’s research to suggest that when we hear a story, “not only are the language processing parts in our brain activated, but any other area in our brain that we would use when experiencing the events of the story are, too.” For example, sensory details like  the client was as excited as if he had won the lottery  engage a listener’s sensory cortex. Action words like  drive this project home  engage the motor cortex, all leading to a more connected and richer experiencing of the message. In short, the more a speaker conveys  information in story form, the closer the listener’s experience and understanding will be to what the speaker actually intended.

Neuroscientists are still debating these findings, but we know from experience that when we’re listening to a good story — rich in detail, full of metaphor, expressive of character — we tend to imagine ourselves in the same situation. Just think about all those scary stories told around the campfire. Your heart rate increases, you get goosebumps, the hair on the back of your neck stands on end. The stories told in a business setting might not be quite as dramatic (or hair-raising), but nevertheless  can be more impactful than data alone.

Lisa Cron, in  Wired for Story , speaks to additional benefits of sharing stories in business settings, “Stories allow us to simulate intense experience without having to actually live through them. Stories allow us to experience the world before we actually have to experience it.” Leo Widrich, citing Princeton neuroscientist Uri Hasson, writes that “a story is the only way to activate parts in the brain so that a listener turns the story into their own idea and experience.” The potential value here for managers to use story to mentor and coach is clear. Through stories, we can utilize vicarious experience, mentally rehearsing how we might handle a situation before we have to face it. Internal data banks, so full of  what if’s  and  how to’s , are refreshed with new options, without our having to live through an experience and all the risk that might entail.

There are additional scientific elements at play. Scientists are discovering that chemicals like cortisol, dopamine and oxytocin are released in the brain when we’re told a story. Why does that matter? If we are trying to make a point stick, cortisol assists with our formulating memories. Dopamine, which helps regulate our emotional responses, keeps us engaged. When it comes to creating deeper connections with others, oxytocin is associated with empathy, an important element in building, deepening or maintaining good relationships.

Perhaps most importantly, storytelling is central to meaning-making and sense-making. It is through story that our minds form and examine our own truths and beliefs, as well as discern how they correlate with the truths and beliefs of others. Through story listening, we gain new perspectives and a better understanding of the world around us. We challenge and expand our own understanding by exploring how others see and understand the world through their lens.

By sharing and listening to each other’s stories, we all get a little bit closer to what’s true.

Ultimately, storytelling is about the exchange of ideas, about growth – and that’s learning. That’s why we believe that it’s important that we embed storytelling in our organizational cultures and in our learning programs. Storytelling is essential. If you’re trying to engage, influence, teach, or inspire others, you should be telling or listening to a story, and encouraging others to tell a story with you. You’ll have plenty of science to back you up.

Lani Peterson, Psy.D. is a psychologist, professional storyteller and executive coach who specializes in the use of story as a powerful medium for personal growth, connection and change. Drawing on her broad experience with individuals, teams and organizations in the profit and nonprofit worlds, Lani brings a unique combination of personal stories, knowledge of the theory behind stories, and deep experience helping people use stories to transform their understanding of themselves and others. Lani’s professional training includes a doctorate in psychology from William James University, a master’s in counseling psychology from Lesley University, and bachelor’s degree in literature from Smith College.  She is a member of the National Speakers Association, the National Storytelling Network, and serves on the Executive Committee of the Healing Story Alliance, which she recently chaired for five years.

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On How to Tell a Great Story Essay

• To find inspiration for your paper and overcome writer’s block
• As a source of information (ensure proper referencing)
• As a template for you assignment

Introduction

Storytelling is a means by which one can convey events using words, images or by means of sound. This is done through making the story more appealing to the audience. Storytelling has been an activity practiced by all diverse cultures all over the world. Each culture has its own way of telling its own stories with different objectives.

One, stories are used for educational purposes. Secondly, stories are used for entertainment purposes. Lastly, stories are a means of preserving cultural beliefs of a community, and they help in instilling morality to the society. In telling a story, one has to consider the plot of a story, characters depicted and the storyline narrative point (Hansen 1).

Demonstrate insight and creativity when choosing the book to be told

When choosing a storybook, the storyteller has to consider the vocabularies in the book and the words used should be motivational to the hearers in order to get their interest to listen. The book should stimulate imagination in that it should be richly creative. The stories should be meaningful and be of moral encouragement to the hearers. Another insight in choosing a book is to consider one with series parts since it encourages one to follow a character in its adventurers (Hansen 1).

Provide a short description of the book and the appropriate age of the audience

The description below will revolve around a story called “The Little Prince”. The little prince is a story about the life of a prince who was alone and lived on a tiny planet. He had ownership of two volcanoes and a flower. The little prince had so much pride in him that he had to travel to several planets. On his travels, he came to earth. When he came to earth, he met a fox who taught him the secrets of the most valuable things in life. This book is suited for young children (De Saint 1).

Describe in detail the planning and rehearsal needed to tell the story

Telling a compelling story involves well-planned steps. First, the storyteller has to know the relevance of his/her story to the audience. The story should be easy to relate to and should have broad ideas. The storyteller would draft the story if it were the first time for its presentation. The lesson of the story should be appropriate to the context of the whole story.

A talented storyteller should engage the hearers of the story and be able to engage their senses in that they can visualize the story. The responses from the audience make the storyteller are aware when his/her story is appealing or uninteresting. Lastly, the delivery of a story is of importance since it makes the audiences enthusiastic about it (Hansen 1).

Demonstrate an understanding of effective storytelling strategies

In telling a compelling story, one has to take into consideration certain aspects like, take into consideration the choice of book. Secondly, the storyteller should take his/her time to get to know the story and its context. This will make sure that the story is not discriminative or not offensive to any religion, culture or belief. Thirdly, the storyteller needs to have read the book well ahead before since it gives a better concept on how to tell the story in an effective way.

Another way to tell a story is by use of expressions, a storyteller can use facial expressions to depict how the plot of the story flows and because it makes the hearers feel the story. Lastly, it is an acceptable practice to change voices depending on the character since it gives life to characters (Hansen 1).

Provide a detailed description and analysis of the actual storytelling event, including concerns or lessons learned

The most valuable thing while telling a story is engaging the audiences all through the process. The context of the story should be relevant to the type of audience that who are hearers of the story. In telling a story, we learn that the right choice of the story is valuable to the success of the story. Most importantly, storytellers should give more educative stories since they have a great impact in the lives of the listeners. (Hansen 1).

Storytelling is an event that has been available for decades and remains to be valuable to the society. Different cultures use stories for different reasons since the cultures play a vital role for the storyteller to know the purpose of his/her story. Stories told about a community, significantly affects its morality in the way the people conduct their daily business and how they relate to others (De Saint 1).

Works cited

De Saint, Antoine. “The Little Prince”. Sparknotes. 2011. Web.

Hansen, Heather. “Story-Telling Basics – 7 Powerful Steps to Telling Great Stories!” Articlesbase. 2007. Web.

• Novella "Cathedral" by Raymond Carver
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• ‘Homer’s The Odyssey’ by Bernhard Frank Literature Analysis
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IvyPanda. (2020, April 27). On How to Tell a Great Story. https://ivypanda.com/essays/storytelling-concepts/

"On How to Tell a Great Story." IvyPanda , 27 Apr. 2020, ivypanda.com/essays/storytelling-concepts/.

IvyPanda . (2020) 'On How to Tell a Great Story'. 27 April.

IvyPanda . 2020. "On How to Tell a Great Story." April 27, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/storytelling-concepts/.

1. IvyPanda . "On How to Tell a Great Story." April 27, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/storytelling-concepts/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "On How to Tell a Great Story." April 27, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/storytelling-concepts/.

ENG4U - Part 1 Essay Analysis Notes

• Arts & Humanities

San Antonio Report Introduces $250 Stipend for Narrative Essays on Local Neighborhoods

San Antonians have a fresh incentive to put pen to paper—or fingers to keys—about the places they call home. As part of a move to diversify local storytelling, the San Antonio Report is now offering a $250 "Where I Live" stipend for residents willing to shine a spotlight on their neighborhoods. Funded through a partnership with the Know Your Neighbor initiative of the H. E. Butt Foundation, the series emphasizes local narratives, as if painting a literary mosaic of city life.

Submitting an essay to the San Antonio Report has typically been a labor of love for proud locals, volunteering their time to articulate their community's character and dreams for posterity. Dedicated authors who sought to capture the essence of their environment did so without financial compensation until now. According to the San Antonio Report , the essays "share what they love about their neighborhood—and what they envision for its future."

With this new stipend, the publication hopes to eliminate a key barrier that might have prevented some voices from joining the conversation: the cost of time. The aim, as stated by the San Antonio Report, is to "allow new voices to emerge by reducing the barriers to participation in this popular series." And for those who might not need the money, there's an option to "pay it forward" to future storytellers.

The initiative appears to be more than just compensation for words; it's an investment in community engagement. The "Where I Live" series has been influential in constructing an interactive map where readers can click through and learn about different neighborhoods. Recognizing that every person's perspective is a piece of the city's puzzle, the stipend is a clear message: every story holds value, every narrative deserves a platform.

For all the aspiring writers or community members who've been on the fence about sharing their experiences, this might be the push they need. The San Antonio Report is actively seeking submissions, encouraging participation by asking, "Which neighborhood on our map is missing? Which voices haven’t we heard from yet?" As this initiative unfolds, it stands to reason that the 'Where I Live' feature will become an even richer tapestry of San Antonio's diversity and identity, woven through the words of those who know it best.

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Future Shines Bright for the Class of 2024

Published date.

Story by: Sara Bock  /  [email protected] ,  Amanda Rubalcava  /  [email protected]

Photos by: Erik Jepsen

Article Content

As a stunning fireworks display lit up the night sky over RIMAC Field, visible emotions of pride, elation and awe appeared on the illuminated faces of the thousands of Class of 2024 graduates who stood below, necks craned, soaking in every single moment of this milestone celebration.  

June 15 marked an All Campus Commencement of “firsts” for UC San Diego: the first major commencement ceremony held at night, and the first time the university selected not one, but eight outstanding student speakers, each of whom delivered words of inspiration to their fellow graduates via video.

Chancellor Pradeep K. Khosla shared uplifting opening remarks, emphasizing the remarkable resilience demonstrated by this year’s graduates amid the “seismic events”—a global pandemic, devastating wars, struggles for civil rights, the impacts of climate change and more—that have defined their most formative years.

“Graduates, you have risen to meet every challenge,” Khosla said as he addressed the crowd. “Now, as you move forward in your lives and careers, keep building that capacity to bounce back, to be flexible, to adapt and to make the best of each situation. To learn continuously, and sometimes pivot and start anew.”

Climate advocate and former U.S. Vice President Al Gore delivered this year’s keynote address, which elicited a standing ovation from the crowd. Speaking to the tremendous contributions UC San Diego has made to humanity’s chances for success in resolving the climate crisis, Gore called on the university’s newly minted graduates to employ their talents and skills to help solve the climate crisis in whatever walk of life they choose to pursue.

“In this moment, we represent the brightest thinkers, innovators and dreamers UC San Diego has ever produced.” 

- Keanu Sina Nazemi '24, Student Speaker

With messages that touched on themes ranging from navigating their first year of college in an online setting to finding common ground with one another amid the current conflicts and crises in the world, this year’s eight student speakers shared their insights in an impactful video compilation. This new approach allowed Kole Gregory Kistler, Mineh Balushian Haftevani, Adamari Martinez, Qui-Shawn Tran, Keanu Sina Nazemi, Jiayi Liang, Onyekachi Samuel Ezeokeke and Bindu Priyanka Achalla to reflect on their own personal stories and acknowledge the collective journey of the Class of 2024. Many of this year's graduates missed out on a traditional high school graduation experience due to the pandemic.

“I don’t know of any university community anywhere in the world that has made greater contributions to climate science and to the awareness necessary to solve the climate crisis than UC San Diego and Scripps Institution of Oceanography.”

- Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore

"The past four years have been memorable, filled with new experiences and new friends. I'm glad to be able to end it all on a good note."

- Onyekachi Samuel Ezeokeke '24, Student Speaker

"The ceremony was an amazing experience. I didn't expect the fireworks at all! It felt very rewarding—like I am coming into the world again, fresh and ready to go."

- Ruslan Bodelan '24

After the firework show, proud family members and friends reunited with their new graduates, celebrating not just the culmination of academic achievements but also the shared journey made possible through the strength of community.

Ian Lutz, who received his degree in chemical engineering, was accompanied by his family, who shook pom-poms in the air as they cheered his successes. They beamed with pride, describing their excitement level as “1,000.”

"I'm continuing here for another year at UC San Diego to get my master's degree in chemical engineering," said Lutz, expressing his gratitude for his favorite professors who mentored him and helped him reach this milestone.

Chloe Riveros, who received her degree in clinical psychology, was lifted into the air by her big brothers, who shared in the excitement of her graduation. The oldest sibling in her family and the first to graduate from college, Riveros was joined in celebration by her mother, father, grandmother, aunt and boyfriend.

“It feels awesome, and I'm just ready for the next chapter of my life,” said Riveros, who plans to move abroad to Mexico to complete clinical work. 

"Coming out of the pandemic with no high school graduation, this is a big win—for us and for her."

- Stephanie Riveros, mother of Chloe Riveros '24

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Shane Goldmacher is a national political correspondent, covering the 2024 campaign and the major developments, trends and forces shaping American politics. He can be reached at [email protected] . More about Shane Goldmacher

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