How to Write a Narrative Essay That Fetches Good Grades?

Your journey through college exposes you to different types of essay assignments. Narrative writing is one of the assignments your teachers use to let you express your personal experiences. A narrative essay lets you tell a story while cultivating your writing creativity. However, this assignment follows an appropriate narrative essay structure as you express your thoughts and relive your experiences.

So, how do you compose a compelling narrative essay that stands out from the crowd? This article offers the best narrative essay ideas to help you excel in this genre of writing. It provides a simple step-by-step guide to composing a killer narrative essay.

Are you ready to roar and soar to good grades in narrative essay writing? Then, remain on this page to up your game and stay ahead of the park.

What Is a Narrative Essay?

Before proceeding to the nitty gritty of narrative essay composition, everyone needs to get a clear narrative writing definition. As the name suggests, this essay is an assignment that merely tells a story, as opposed to other assignments that present and defend positions about an issue. It’s more of a “free style” essay that lets you freely relive your life’s best or worst moments and what you learned from them.

But how long is a narrative essay? A narrative paper has no fixed length because the teacher determines how long it should be. But how many paragraphs is a narrative essay? Again, the number of paragraphs also depends on the assigned word count. Averagely, it has an opening paragraph, three body paragraphs, and a closing section.

Great Narrative Essay Topics Aren’t Hard to Find

A great narrative essay starts with a relevant and exciting topic. This section offers insights into selecting the best topics for your future narrative papers.

• Reflect on personal experiences. Start by thinking about your life’s most important moments. Can you remember any stories you share with your buddies and relatives? If you can, then you have a good head start.
• Read other narrative papers. You can also get inspiration by reading similar papers. Check out what others have written to gather ideas on how to develop a relevant topic.
• Journaling. You can also get the best topics to write about by writing about your daily feelings and experiences.
• Ask for feedback. Boost your topic selection by requesting feedback from your friends, relatives, and teachers about your ideas. These people can offer you fresh perspectives or remind you of stories you might have forgotten.
• Mind your audience. Lastly and importantly, consider your audience and write about topics that are relevant to them. Your intended stories should resonate well and offer them valuable life lessons.

Main Components of a Narrative Essay

A narrative essay has different components, which inform the writing process. Below are the main parts of a narrative assignment you should always include.

1. Characters: Characters are some of the most important components of a narrative essay. In this case, you are the main character or protagonist, while your friends, teachers, family members, and neighbors are the supporting characters that drive your story.
2. Setting: Your story’s setting centers on its location and time.
3. Plot: This is one of the most critical elements in a narrative essay because it unfolds a chain of events happening in the story.
4. Conflict: This component is the problem the protagonist faces and/or resolves.
5. Theme: This element is the moral of your story.

Composing a Narrative Essay Outline

You will need a narrative essay outline to flow well, from planning to writing. But what is a narrative outline, after all? It is a skeleton that provides a roadmap for your thoughts, sentences, and paragraphs. It’s critical to master how to format a narrative essay so that you can have an easy writing time. Your outline will focus on your paper’s three main sections, as discussed below.

Introduction

The introduction is the first part of a narrative essay and contains the following:

• A hook that sets the stage ready by capturing the reader’s attention.
• A context that briefly introduces your experience.
• A thesis statement that shows the significance of the event or experience in your life.

Body Paragraphs

Your outline will also have body paragraphs that feature the following components:

• An event that describes the initial situation.
• A turning point that shows the moment you realized the situation was vital and detected the change in your perspective.
• A climax that depicts the peak of your story.
• A resolution that shows your response to the story’s climax and how you resolved the situation.

Conclusion

Lastly, your narrative format will have a conclusion with the following elements:

• A restated thesis restatement that shows the lessons you learned.
• The moral of the story reflects on the lessons learned, offers the insights gained, and shows readers why they should care.
• Final words that may be a call to action or some food for thought.

How to Write a Narrative Essay Step by Step

Now that we know what this assignment consists of, let’s proceed to learn the step-by-step narrative essay writing algorithm. Below are the key elements of composing a great story in three main stages—prewriting, writing, and post-writing.

How to Start a Narrative Essay: Prewriting Stage

The prewriting stage is a vital element in your narrative essay writing process. This phase requires you to do the following things.

Select a Topic

First, dedicate enough time and effort to topic selection. Sometimes, your instructor can provide you with a prompt. In this case, you can map out the topics you wish to write about or think through the points you want to make based on how much they fit your word count. Other times, you may have to come up with your own themes.

In any case, think hard to determine the story you wish to tell. Generally, the best story always allows you to discuss a given topic or lesson or takes a surprising twist midway. For instance, writing about a journey where everything went smoothly may be less interesting than one where you encountered unexpected challenges and resolved them. Always select topics and experiences that surprise readers or teach them something worthwhile.

Here, you may also think about the tone you wish to utilize in your paper and stylistic choices to include, such as leaving readers with cliffhangers at the end of paragraphs. Fortunately, this stage lets you change things if they don’t fully mesh into your original draft.

Outline the Narrative Essay

Since you have all the materials at hand, proceed and outline your essay. An outline provides you with a skeleton precursor to your paper and offers a high-level preview of the components you will address. This tool will also serve as a map that guides you when you aren’t sure how to begin and assist you in transitioning between your ideas after starting.

The Narrative Essay’s Writing Stage

This phase allows you to flesh up the skeleton you created in the previous stage. Use engaging and clear language to share your experiences. When writing, always remember that your narrative assignment isn’t like other academic papers that require you to summarize it in its opening paragraph.

Also, write in the first person, and feel free to use pronouns, such as “me,” “myself,” and “I” when describing your experiences. Your language should also be creative and flow like a real story and not a science paper.

How to Conclude a Narrative Essay: The Post-Writing Phase

The last phase of your paper is post-writing. This stage has two main elements, as discussed below in detail.

Edit Your Narrative Essay

Whenever possible, always wait for a few hours before editing. Take time off and relax your brain and eyes before returning to the paper for correction. Why? Because you can see errors better when your eyes are more relaxed than when they are still tired from writing. Your editing should aim to ensure and achieve the following:

• The first copy addresses the points you planned to address.
• The draft fits the tone you chose to use.
• If you had a prompt, the copy must adequately answer it.
• The grammar and styling are correct.
• Consistency and logical flow between paragraphs and sentences.
• The language is creative and engaging enough to make your story more compelling.

The above points will assist you in making the necessary adjustments to enhance your paper.

Proofread Your Narrative Essay

After editing, you will also need to proofread your paper. Normally, you can make new spelling mistakes while editing your essay. You must reread the paper to ensure that you haven’t confused grammatically correct but misplaced spellings, such as writing “court” when you meant “coat.”

Tips for Writing a Perfect Narrative Essay

Do you want to polish your game in this essay genre? Here are narrative essay tips to accelerate your writing.

• Write from your own perspective to make it more personal.
• Use creative storytelling techniques, such as symbolism and dialogue.
• Focus on a central theme or message to make your paper more coherent and profound so you can guide readers to a meaningful conclusion.
• Avoid redundant adverbs, such as truly and very.
• Experiment with different perspectives. For instance, you can describe an event from a supporting character’s view, allowing you to write in the third person.

Types of Narrative Essays

At the college level, a narrative essay mainly takes two forms—personal and descriptive. Let’s examine the full details below.

Personal Narratives

This narrative essay focuses on your reflections, emotions, experiences, and personality. It can take a literacy or viewpoint angle.

• A literacy essay focuses on personal experiences and how they influenced your life. These may be a person you met or a book you read.
• A viewpoint story zeroes on one’s character or inner world and reflections.

Descriptive Narratives

A descriptive story focuses on other characters and places. Here, you don’t mention reflections or emotions. This narrative can be fictional or historical.

• In the historical form, you may need to write about a particular season in your life, aka memoirs.
• In a fictional essay, you can make up a story, as in books or movies.

Get Help with Your Narrative Essay Today

There you go with everything you need to write a narrative essay that fetches excellent grades and tells your story like an expert. We’ve shared everything you need to know about the narrative essay’s structure, format, and principles of topic selection.

Go ahead and use these insights to up your game in narrative essay writing. Should you need help with narrative essays or other academic assignments, don’t hesitate to contact our team. You can order an assignment from our expert scribes and rely on many years of experience and professionalism instead of walking in the dark and risking your grades. We’re waiting for your inquiries today!