How to Write a Narrative

Step-by-Step Guide

1. 1

   Step 1: Pick your moment.

   This is not your life story.
   
   Your narrative should be something that happened to you that changed you or was significant in some way.
   
   The event doesn't have to be huge
   -- au contraire; sometimes the smaller, simpler events make for more moving outcomes
   -- but the consequences or your thought process behind it should be.
   
   It could be a childhood event, achieving a goal, a failure, or a good or bad deed.If it'd be easy and interesting to write, odds are it'd be a good read.
   
   Make sure you have a point.
   
   Just like writing a paper, your narrative should have a "thesis." After all, if you don't have a point, why should your audience listen to you?There should be a lesson learned or some significant outcome that leaves an impression with your readers.
   
   Make an outline of the basic parts of your narrative.
   
   Because the experience is (most likely) from your memory, there are hundreds of little pieces of information you have to sift through to organize and possibly throw out.
   
   Creating an outline will give you the bare bones of your story and help jog your memory in a chronological fashion. , The reader's imagination needs to fill in some of the details.
   
   You know how you absolutely adore a book and then you go to see the movie, and it's not as good? Part of that is because you got to see it for yourself with your imagination.
   
   Let the reader take it to where they want it to go.
   
   This is a very, very fine line and even the best of writers may struggle with it.
   
   You want to avoid both spelling everything out for the reader (every exhalation of breath, every slight change in color) but you also want to provide vivid details (events need texture, after all).
   
   Try to zero in on what's meaningful and what caught your attention.
   
   Don't go about fabricating details to achieve poetic eloquence
   -- you've probably forgotten those things for a reason. , This doesn't mean setting your treadmill at a certain speed and never deviating from it
   -- this means knowing when to speed up and slow down.
   
   Again, another fine art.
   
   But, if the experience is yours, you should have a good idea of when to gloss over the details and when to zero in on what's happening.
   
   Think of episodes as pearls on a string.
   
   Make the pearls full orbed; keep the string stringy.
   
   The reader dwells in the episodes, but she needs to be oriented to them, and that is the function of the transitions. , This is where the narrative gets interesting.
   
   Remember that the narrator isn't necessarily the writer (though it can be) and you can be in the story without narrating it.
   
   This gives your narrator the ability to sidestep certain factors (pivotal or otherwise) and be misinformed or flat out wrong.
   
   Or even evil.
   
   When the narrator tells the story in first person, but details in the story lead the reader to suspect that the narrator is not reliable, the result is irony.
   
   Irony is a narrative condition in which the reader and the writer share a common judgmental attitude toward the narrator, or when the reader knows more than the narrator and characters in the story.
2. 2

   Step 2: Be suggestive

3. 3

   Step 3: not exhaustive.

4. 4

   Step 4: Be aware of your pacing.

5. 5

   Step 5: Think about your narrator.

Detailed Guide

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