How to Write a Great Narrative Essay Outline?
There’s always this burning question – how to write a narrative essay outline? A narrative essay is the known, simplest and most exciting type of essay that allows you to share your story. It works with pathos, ethos, and logos to help the readers comprehend the story. Like other essays, it also has an introduction, the middle part, and an end. Thus, when it comes to choosing a good narrative essay topic, there are few things that you need to be careful about as your teacher wants to know how well you understand the narrative essay format, which is why they expect you to follow the requirements.
Some crucial characteristics a teacher may look for:
A Challenge/Conflict – A provoking incident that creates the tone and set your story in motion.
Protagonist – A relatable character that faces a challenge or conflict against devastating odds.
Growth/Change – Killing the challenge or conflict triggers some change in the protagonist; it is likely that realization may have triggered this change. This realization can be an after-effect of the character’s development while the entire story.
Thus, writing a narrative essay will take some time to brainstorm to develop an excellent piece of writing. To stay on the right track, these techniques are useful to follow:
- Think about what bothers you the most and the stories you want to share with people.
- Past experiences and memories can help you find something exciting.
- Use the internet to benefit yourself, such as online magazines, social media, blogs and other resources allows you to discover what stories others have shared and what kind of topic they want to discuss and are interested in.
- Refresh your mind by coffee or walk and generate some new ideas.
- Try freewriting; it is a handy strategy to help you get your story flow; jot down the ideas that come into your mind first.
You can consider following these tips and choose the narrative essay topic that seems most compelling to you.
What Is a Narrative Essay?
A narrative essay is a kind of essay in which the writer narrates a story. The story can be fictional or real as it often deals with the writer’s personal development. These essays can be written in the first person. Writing a narrative essay is much easier than any other form of essay. Thus, the writing process becomes convenient and easier when you create an outline for a narrative essay before the actual write-up. It is a blueprint that gives a glimpse of what you’re about to write.
Developing an essay outline is a great way as it is likely to benefit your essay and writing skills in many different ways, such as:
- It helps in organizing your thoughts and logically connect the information
- Provides appropriate structure to the essay
- Narrative outlines can help in rearranging the information, which is much easier than editing a whole essay
- It also includes all the suitable information
- It helps in maintaining the logical flow of the essay
A narrative essay definition refers to a short story with a central point around which the entire story spins. These essays are usually written from a definite point of view. Consequently, some particular sensory details are provided to get the reader engaged in the story’s sequence.
This type of essay is like an expository or descriptive essay, where a writer narrates a story about a specific event. It allows writers a chance to think and write about themselves.
Elements of Narrative Essay
Narrative essays are completely dependent on personal experiences, so a narrator uses the convention of storytelling in these essays. However, the crucial five elements of narrative essays are:
- Character: People in your story
- Plot: The main event that happened in the story
- Setting: Where and when the event happened
- Conflict: The issues faced by the characters
- Theme: The moral of the story
These elements collectively create a strong narrative essay.
Ways to Write Outline For Narrative Essay
Now you know what is a narrative essay? So, creating an outline is the first part of every essay writing process. Therefore, these are the steps to understand the outlining process:
- Pick a topic
- Brainstorm
- Write an engaging introduction
- Compose an interesting body
- Drafting a compelling conclusion
Whether you compose your own narrative essay outline or use a template for it, you’ll have to follow the same steps. Narrative essays tell a story and share the moral, using a chronological format. A narrative essay outline is the simplest way is to draft a winning narrative essay. Thus, let’s start with these steps.
1. Narrative Essay Topic
The topic of every assignment of the essay plays a significant role in composing a perfect essay. When writing your narrative essay, keep in mind that you are telling a story, and you need to catch the attention of the readers in the beginning. Therefore, pick a topic that interests you and gets the reader’s attention instantly.
2. Brainstorm
Before getting into the writing process, brainstorm for multiple ideas that can enhance your narrative essay. Think of the events that happened in your story and recall the exact sequence. The brainstorming session enables you to remember every significant aspect related to your story. Ensure to not missing out on anything.
3. An Engaging Introduction
You need to keep in mind these three significant things while writing your college narrative essay outline.
- Get the reader to involve in the essay with the eye-catchy statement.
- Set the scene and provide a glimpse of what happened in the story.
- State the thesis statement the gives an insight into what the story is about.
4. Compose the Main Body
The body paragraphs of your essay include the primary sections. In addition, it explains the characters, presents the setting and discusses the conflicts. Therefore, here are some crucial elements of body paragraphs.
- Mention a clear description and present relevant details.
- Incorporate dialogues efficiently to make readers involved in the story.
- Use the exact sequence of events.
- Write in the first person while writing your personal story, and write in the third person if you’re writing someone else’s story.
5. Draft a Conclusion
In conclusion, you have to write a compelling climax of your essay. Following are the things that need to be included.
- Mention the climax of the story
- Restate some key details
- Don’t mention any new details
- Share the lesson that you’ve learned (If any)
How to Write a Narrative Essay?
Initially, students struggle with how to write a great narrative essay outline? And then with what to write. Now, we have seen how to compose a narrative essay outline; it’s time to know how to write your narrative essay.
So, here is a step-by-step guide to it!
1. Prepare
Before starting with a creative process, you must learn more about the general requirements inherent in this type of paper, pick a topic, and gather appropriate information to use as the reference.
o What to Write?
The theme of your essay needs to be interesting for both you and your audience. The topic of your narrative essay often refers to the writer’s experience, and there is always no need to use any data from external sources. Thus, there are three signs of the best title of your essay.
- It’s barely available on the internet
- It would be narrow rather than wide
- Your topic will encourage readers to read further
o What Is Required?
Usually, professors don’t demand strict rules like other writing assignments, and they only –provide them with a basic structure of the narrative essay. The idea is simple; you need to take a story from a real-life and stay on the most vibrant points as far as events unfold. Therefore, every part of your narrative essay needs to be coherent and convey a specific mood or situation.
2. Writing Process
The writing process is undoubtedly the most time-consuming stage as it needs to cover different aspects of the essay.
o Structuring and Outlining
As discussed earlier, students struggle with writing a narrative essay outline; thus, there is a simple process: split your essay into three essential parts.
- A setup
- The main part and a climax
- A thrilling conclusion
In the Introduction, you need to hook readers and make them read with the same attention as in the beginning. Allocate the essay’s key points, explain each of them, and add some punch lines and unpredictable twists to keep engaging the readers. Your personal narrative essay outline can help you find the details of the disclosed issues. Then conclude your essay in a form that makes readers praise your work.
o Be a First Person
The narrative is a personal narration; therefore, you need to emphasize the importance of the ongoing events, so it is crucial to use ‘I’ statements without turning a perspective in favor of another person.
3. Editing
Don’t ever submit your first draft directly. After composing your first draft, revise it thoroughly and check if there is any need for changes. Check the phrasing and structure of your essay, plus the formatting. You need to be sure that your essay is compelling before submitting it.
4. Proofreading
Proofreading is a process to detect grammar errors and grammar. It helps you check the structure, style, tone, content and more. Proofreading is usually the final phase of every writing process, and till this phase, you already know how to write a narrative essay.
How Long Is a Narrative Essay?
There’s a question that’s asked; how long is a narrative essay? Two key points need to be followed before starting your narrative essays and considering how many paragraphs it must include. First, it is usually the major concern of several students that how long a narrative essay they are supposed to write.
- Follow your professor’s instructions, as they always tell you the length of your writing piece.
- Try to keep your essay as short and informative as you can.
You need to write enough to completely unpack your topic and create an engaging story with an appropriate structure that the audience would love.
How to Make Narrative Essay Format?
- In the introduction, consider it a warm-up for your audience and give them the key idea of what your story is about in 3-5 lines.
- Then comes the main body of your essay, where you need to gather a supportive argument for your story and practically mention every detail. Every new idea needs to be in a new paragraph. So 3-5 paragraphs would be enough for your main body.
- There comes a conclusion where you sum up and prove the claim you initiated in the introduction. 3-5 lines here would also be enough to succeed.
This narrative essay format can help you produce a good piece of writing.
Few Narrative Essay Examples
Usually, you teachers look for the following abilities through narrative essays in their students.
- Ability to adapt to multiple situations
- Ability to solve issues efficiently
- Ability to learn from mistakes
With this, here are some of the narrative essay examples for you.
- My most valuable memory of childhood.
- The most difficult decision I have taken
- The rebellious act of my life
- The embarrassing moment of my life
- An unpleasant experience
- Your first experience that helped me grow
- A random act of kindness
- The embarrassing event of my life
In addition, you can also search for narrative essay topics online; this way, you can have more exposure to multiple factors such as different topics, people’s writing style, their experiences and more.
Get Assistance from Our Expert Writers
UK Writing Experts has a team of professional writers who provide top-notch essay writing services at affordable rates. Our skilled team never compromise the quality of work and deliver you high-quality work with detailed information. You can reach us out anytime easily online.