Project Week 1 10/28/2020

Writing a Narrative Essay about Place.html

Writing a Narrative Essay about Place

A narrative essay is a story. As a writer of a narrative essay, you are simply writing a story from memory. Add to that the concept of place that you read about earlier, and you are creating a narrative that connects your own experiences to a particular place that has meaning to you.

You can respond to a place or environment in many ways, but you should always start with a subject that moves or intrigues you. (If you do not identify with or care about a place, you probably will not be motivated to say much about it.) Write from your own experiences or expertise. You know your neighborhood, your community, your favorite restaurant, or a virtual environment far better than people who have never visited it. But you also need to find a revealing angle for your analysis, a way to make a claim that reflects your own thinking and yet attracts readers. In a paper, you signal your intentions through an introductory paragraph or thesis statement.

Naturally, you will need to win an audience, deciding who they are and then how to reach them. For instance, you would surely write about Fenway Park in Boston differently for Red Sox baseball fans than you would for readers from baseball-rival, the New York Yankees. Now what could you write about the legendary ballpark that would be novel enough to win a reader’s attention? Find your answer by looking where others have not, narrowing your subject to specific features about the ballpark, whether in the grounds, the concessions, or the fans.

Narrative essays share basic characteristics with other familiar essay forms, but they can be a lot more creative and less “structured.” As you think about writing in the narrative essay form, consider:

• What is your purpose, the point of your essay? Often, you will find two different kinds of thesis statements: implicit and explicit. An implicit thesis statement is implied; often a clear statement does not point the reader to your main idea. An explicit thesis statement clearly announces the purpose of the essay. While many “stories” (narratives) are written with implied statements, the preference for this narrative essay is an explicit thesis—one that is clearly identifiable.
• Narrative writers must write almost exclusively from memory, and it can be difficult to remember some of the details exactly. What you remember as true and what is actually true can be different. If you stick only to the hard, verifiable facts, your past is as skeletal as a line drawing in a coloring book. You must color it in.
• Narrative writers rely on several techniques to create full, vivid, and meaningful stories. These strategies include selection and omission of details, elaborating, collapsing time, and dialogue.

Selection and Omission

All writers select and omit details for the sake of writing a strong, purposeful story. In a short essay, such as the one you will write this week, you want to choose details carefully because you simply cannot tell everything that happened. Select important details that convey purpose and meaning and omit details that are less or not-at-all important to the narrative.

Elaboration

How do you create the past with only skeletal details? For example, your fifth-grade teacher needs to dress a certain way, say something smart, and, of course, have a face. If you have a photo, you use it, but most readers understand that any story written from memory is a mix of imagination and factual details.

Collapsing Time

To respect a reader’s time and as a way to achieve narrative coherence, writers can compress days into hours and even weeks into days to move the story along. If writers did not collapse time in this way, an essay about a life-changing event, for example, would begin with the shrill sound of an alarm clock, a mundane showering scene, and some breakfast, before heading out the door—nothing to do with the big event. The take-away from this example? Get to the good stuff right away!

Dialogue

You will want the people in your narratives to talk on occasion, but does that mean nonfiction writers must carry voice recorders or take copious notes? No. Often you remember the gist of a conversation, or you know the way your father usually said things. The rest you create from memory.