Narrative writing
Narrative writing, often referred to as story writing, encompasses a written account of interconnected events and can take the form of both fiction and nonfiction. Fictional narratives include genres like novels, short stories, and plays, while nonfiction narratives encompass biographies, memoirs, and news articles. Key elements of narrative writing include characters, a plot, a setting, conflict, climax, resolution, theme, and point of view. Characters can be real or imaginary, and the setting provides the context of time and place for the story.
Narrative structure can be linear, presenting events in chronological order, or nonlinear, jumping between different times and perspectives. Historical narratives focus on events in the past with a linear sequence, while viewpoint narratives center on the narrator's perspective. Descriptive narration emphasizes sensory details, providing deeper insights into the setting and characters. Through these various styles, narrative writing serves as a powerful tool for storytelling, conveying themes and emotional depth that resonate with diverse audiences.
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Narrative writing
Also called story writing, narrative writing refers to a written account of a series of related events. This type of writing can be fiction or nonfiction. Novels, fables, short stories, and plays are examples of fictional narration. Nonfictional narration includes biographies, autobiographies, memoirs, and news reports.
Background
Narrative fiction, as well as some types of narrative nonfiction, has characters, a plot, a setting, a conflict, a climax, a resolution, a theme, and a point of view. Characters are the people in the story. In works of fiction, such as novels and short stories, the characters are imaginary. In works of nonfiction, such as biographies and autobiographies, the characters are real people. For example, a biography of Martha Washington would include Martha as a character as well as her husband and children.
A story takes place somewhere and at a certain time. This is called the setting. In fiction, the setting is imaginary, so it can be a fictional city three hundred years into the future. The setting is also important in nonfiction. For example, a memoir may be about a person’s childhood, which might have been fifty years in the past. Then the setting is wherever and whenever the person’s childhood took place.
Where and when a story takes place may change as the story progresses. For example, a memoir might begin during a person’s childhood but will be in a different time and place when the person is an adult. For example, it may begin in a small country town in 2000 and end in New York City in 2030.
Fictional narration also has a plot, a conflict, a climax, and a resolution. The plot is simply the events being narrated—it’s what happens in the story. In O. Henry’s short story “The Gift of the Magi” (1905), a young couple wants to give each other a holiday gift, but they do not have any money. The wife sells her long hair after it is cut short. She gets enough money to buy a chain for her husband’s pocket watch. Ironically, he sells his pocket watch to buy her combs for her long hair.
The conflict is a problem that the characters face. In “The Gift of the Magi,” the conflict is that the husband and wife do not have enough money to buy each other a gift. The climax of a narrative occurs when the main character confronts the conflict. The resolution is the result of the climax. For example, the conflict of a short story may be that a woman’s new job requires her to travel, but she is afraid to fly. The climax occurs when she confronts her fear and boards the plane. The resolution is that she no longer fears flying. The theme of narrative writing is the author’s underlying message or central idea. “While family members may disagree, they will always love one another” is an example of a theme.
Point of view refers to who is telling the story and their perspective on what is happening. If a story is written in the first person, one of the characters tells the story and the pronoun “I” is used. If a story is in the third person, the narrator is someone outside the story and the pronouns “he,” “she,” and “they” are used.
Overview
Narration may be linear, nonlinear, historical, viewpoint, or descriptive. With linear narration, the events in the story are told in chronological order, which is the order in which they actually occurred. Most narrative writing is linear. However, a writer may skip over years from one chapter to the next. Stories using linear narration may be told in the present, the past, or even the future as long as one event leads to the next. Daniel Defoe’s famous novel, Robinson Crusoe (1719), uses linear narration, beginning with the main character’s birth:
I was born in the year 1632, in the city of York, of a good family, though not of that country, my father being a foreigner of Bremen, who settled first at Hull. He got a good estate by merchandise, and leaving off his trade, lived afterwards at York, from whence he had married my mother . . .
Nonlinear narration, on the other hand, jumps from one time to another. The novel Of Women and Salt (2021), by Gabriela Garcia uses this type of narration. The story is told from the perspectives of the women in a family. It begins in the present and weaves back and forth between the present and the past. The past includes cigar factories in Cuba in the nineteenth century, while the present describes ICE detention facilities in the United States.
A historical narrative has a linear structure but takes place in the past. For example, the narrative may be about an event that begins in 1765 and ends in 1792. A historical narrative must portray the people and events of its time as accurately as possible.
In The Last of the Mohicans (1826), by James Fenimore Cooper, a narrator details the French and Indian War in the 1750s:
According to the orders of the preceding night, the heavy sleep of the army was broken by the rolling of the warning drums . . . In an instant the whole camp was in motion; the meanest soldier arousing from his lair to witness the departure of his comrades, and to share in the excitement and incidents of the hour.
A viewpoint narrative focuses on the narrator’s perspective rather than on a timeline. J. D. Salinger’s famous novel The Catcher in the Rye (1951) uses this type of narration. Sixteen-year-old Holden Caulfield, the novel’s protagonist, tells the story by revealing his frustrations and feelings regarding the adults in his world and his grief over the death of his younger brother. By using this type of narration, Salinger lets the reader into Holden’s inner world.
Descriptive narration focuses more on how objects look and feel than on characters’ actions. It gives readers an intimate look at the characters’ surroundings. A famous example of descriptive narration is Edgar Allen Poe’s short story “The Tell-Tale Heart” (1843). In these lines, a narrator describes an old man’s eye:
I think it was his eye! yes, it was this! One of his eyes resembled that of a vulture—a pale blue eye, with a film over it. Whenever it fell upon me, my blood ran cold; and so by degrees—very gradually—I made up my mind to take the life of the old man, and thus rid myself of the eye forever.
Bibliography
“Five Narrative Writing Examples.” Skill Share, 15 May 2023, www.skillshare.com/en/blog/narrative-writing-examples/. Accessed 24 May 2024.
Hart, Jack. Story Craft: The Complete Guide to Writing Narrative Nonfiction. University of Chicago Press, 2021.
Hillocks, George, Jr. Narrative Writing. Heinemann, 2006.
Jennings, Terrill M. and Charles W. Haynes. From Talking to Writing: Strategies for Supporting Narrative and Expositive Writing. Landmark Outreach, 24 May 2024.
Kramer, Lindsay. “What Is Narrative Writing?” Grammarly, 4 Aug. 2021, www.grammarly.com/blog/narrative-writing/. Accessed 24 May 2024.
The Learning Network. “Teach Narrative Writing with The New York Times.” The New York Times, 1 Aug. 2023, www.nytimes.com/2019/08/22/learning/personal-narrative-writing-unit.html. Accessed 24 May 2024.