Reading

Narrative Techniques

Writing a narrative scene is different from almost all other writing you’ll do in school. Most academic writing—and most of our daily communication—is what is called “exposition.” Exposition simply means using language to communicate ideas or concepts. “It is a beautiful day” is exposition. You understand that concept. However, can you tell if the writer is thinking of a summer or winter day? Are they in Utah or China? Near a forest or a beach? You don’t know.

That’s where narrative comes in. Narrative is the means humans have developed of communicating, and creating, experience so as to be able to communicate emotion. If someone tells you “I’m happy” you understand intellectually, but it doesn’t make you feel happy. If a person writes an effective story about what it is like to experience happiness, however, you may share that emotion.

That’s your objective with the narrative assignment: to recall or create a specific, significant experience in your or someone else’s life and communicate it so your reader feels, at least to a degree, what the subject of the story felt.

Narrative writing is used in many genres, some of which you will explore later in this and other classes. But all employ similar basic narrative techniques. These techniques as you’ll use them in your assignment to write a flash narrative including at least one scene are as follows:

1) Focus on a Specific, Brief Time: Think like a movie director. A scene is where you turn the camera on and record people (characters) in a certain place (setting) doing and saying things (plot). The scene ends when the camera turns off. In a movie, you would then move to the next scene, another place and time where the same or new people are doing different things. In a short narrative, your entire story may well focus on one scene, meaning one very brief period of time. Think of something that happened in five or ten minutes, not a month or even a week. Pick the time of most significant emotional meaning and build your narrative around that.

2) Sensory Details: To re-create an experience, you can’t simply tell readers your interpretation. “It is a beautiful day” is an interpretation. I don’t know if you find snow or sunshine or rain beautiful, if you like a sandy beach or an arctic mountaintop. Instead, use language to describe the experience using sensory details: what you saw, heard, smelled, tasted, and touched. Describe the heat coming off your old computer; the tangled rat-nest of hair atop your teacher’s head; the woody smell of a brand new book’s first page, almost like a lit candle. The more sensory details you use in a story, and from the more different senses, the more vivid the experience will be for the reader.

3) Dialogue: Stories include what people say word for word, much like quotation, rather than what people mean. For example, the sentiment  I Don’t Like You could be spoken “I’m sorry but, you know, sometimes I don’t like you very much” or “If I ever see you again, I’ll stab you in the eye with an ice pick.” Both have the same basic meaning, but by letting a character speak the words readers understand the meaning with greater nuance and see much more of the speaker’s personality. In your narrative, be sure to include dialogue, literal conversations between characters, rather than just summarizing or paraphrasing what is said.

4) Thoughts and Feelings in the Moment: Every medium of story has its strengths. Film is good at scope and setting: a novelist cannot do the epic grandeur of a movie like  The Avengers, for example. Theater’s strength is small group drama because its actors are real, live, breathing people and because the audience gets a voyeuristic thrill watching. The strength of written story (or prose) is accessing the mind. Not all human thought is in language (we think in images, impressions, feelings, sometimes even sounds and other senses), but much thought is language. That means writers can smoothly dive into the thoughts of a point of view character. For example, a character could do the following:

“I love you.” I hate you.

This character says they love someone but immediately afterward thinks the truth. Our thoughts are truer than what we say and often what we do. Frequently, the things we “say” to ourselves in our own minds communicate emotion better than anything we say or do publicly.

Whatever narrative genre you chose to write, you’ll need to include a fully realized scene with plentiful sensory details, interesting dialogue, and thoughts in the moment.