Narrative Writing Style #2: The Non-Linear Form The story can be compelling, even if that something is simply for a character to get back home to the life they knew. This narrative style is timeless because we can all relate to wanting something. You can find examples of quests all over classic literature, from Odysseus’ perilous voyage to his home of Ithaca to Dante’s sojourn through the afterlife. The most straightforward narrative style is to take a character, give them a purpose, and then watch events unfold as the character struggles for that purpose.
Elements of style blog how to#
Let’s explore some of the most common narrative writing styles so you can figure out how to proceed with the story that’s been in your head: Narrative Writing Style #1: The Quest So far, you have a list of ingredients, but you don’t have a recipe.
If you can describe your characters in vivid detail, and they feel real, even the smallest disturbance in events will have us on the edge of our seats. No matter what you’re writing-poetry, screenplays, novels, essays-we need a sense of the unique personalities to whom the narrative is happening. He’s a unique individual with a background painted in vivid detail. In two sentences, we know that Malcolm X’s father isn’t an ordinary preacher. How he lost the other one I have never known.” Look at how Malcolm X, in his autobiography, vividly paints the character of his father: Captain Ahab, Emma Woodhouse, Atticus Finch-we remember the people just as much as we do the stories.īut you don’t have to be writing a novel to make character important, either. Great fiction is made up of all sorts of memorable characters. That’s why vividly developed characters drive some of the best narrative writing. We’ll only connect with a narrative if we can see it through someone’s eyes. Fitzgerald elevates Gatsby’s green light into a metaphor for the unrealized American dream of the 1920s. These last few paragraphs don’t just wrap up the story’s events-they reveal the theme. “It eluded us then, but that’s no matter,” says narrator Nick Carraway. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and the “green light at the end of Daisy’s dock.” To Gatsby, that light represents a future that always seems to elude him. What are you trying to say? What should your readers take away from the experience?ĭone well, you won’t have to explain your theme you can simply let the events of the plot point in its direction. This is essentially the point of your story. If you’re writing an essay, your theme might rise from your narrative writing prompt. In the classic film Jaws, the climax is the confrontation between three men on a boat and the destructive shark plaguing Amity Island. Climax: The highest point of drama, wherein the fates of the characters are decided.Even in a character-driven work like The Catcher in the Rye, there is an element of this when Holden Caufield learns he won’t be allowed back at boarding school. This should set our character on a new journey. Rising action: Something happens to disturb the context we’ve established.In Cinderella, a classic narrative, our first-act exposition is that Cinderella finds herself downtrodden by her evil step-sisters. Exposition: The background world and context for the characters.
To get more specific, plot is made up of these essential narrative writing techniques: A king dying, and then the queen dying of grief? That becomes a plot. Consider our opening example of the death of a queen and a king.Ī king dying, followed by the queen? That’s a chronology. Your plot is the basic narrative writing structure that drives the events of the story. The Basic Elements of Narrative Writing Plot What is our bottom line narrative writing definition? Narrative writing is the use of every writing tool at your disposal to create a cogent story. Citizen Kane is a biographical film of a fictional character. Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Raven” is a narrative poem with a specific story. But anything that tells a story becomes a narrative. We’ve tackled some examples of narrative writing before, especially personal narrative essays. If you’ve had an introduction to narrative writing, you can structure any tale to hold people spellbound. That’s true no matter what you’re writing: a novel, a biography, an article, or an essay. To learn about narrative writing is to learn about the art of storytelling. Narrative writing is all about providing story structure to any form of writing.
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