Narrative writing is something that many of my students find particularly difficult because they believe that they do not have a creative person in their body.
However, creativity is something that doesn’t occur naturally but something that we craft and perfect over time. You will find that some of the best writers in the world often have the same self-doubt that you do when you’re writing a narrative text. The good thing about this situation though is that they have time to research ruminate and consider elements of the plot structure.
You, however, have one hour to complete this, which can be particularly difficult. The first thing that you must do when you are writing a story is to consider brainstorm. The brainstorm is a very important part of story writing particularly when you receive a prompt that you need to respond to. When you look at the image or the phrase write down the first words that jump into your mind and do that process for a few minutes or 30 seconds so that you can work through all the ideas that you have in your head.
What you must then do is follow a very precise process that will be laid out here.
1. Planning.
Planning is the most important part of your story writing and most people miss this part because they believe it takes too much time to plan. However, by creating a story arc you will be able to tell where you were going to take the first part of your exposition right through the rising action through to the climax, the falling action and then the resolution. Down below you will find a typical plan for a story that you should follow every time you start writing.
2. Choosing a Narrator.
The second most important decision that you need to make when you are starting to write a story is to decide who will tell the story. The author is the person who writes the story and the narrator is the person who will tell the story. You are the author who is the narrator. You can either tell the story or you can either have a first-person narrator who says “I, we, our, us” or a third-person narrator who says “he, she, they”.
3. Tense.
Choosing the tense in which you write your story is fundamentally important for the story itself and one of the biggest mistakes that students make when they are writing a story is that they change between tenses. If you start your story with “I jumped, I ran, I flew” then you cannot switch to “I run, I jump, I fly”. Make sure you stick to your tense.
4. Keep it short.
When you only have one hour to write a narrative please do not attempt to write a narrative that takes place over days, weeks, months or even years. Your story should take place over one hour, one day or one set in order to make sure that you can address each of the parts of the text in detail. When you are planning your story ensure that the point of climax happens within that same setting day or hour.
For more help on how to write a narrative, contact Perth English Tutor.
