What Are Some Narrative Writing Techniques

Here are some narrative writing techniques that will help you in writing a compelling narrative story.

Use Point of View

A great technique for writing narrative stories is to use a different point of view. When readers are reading a story, they want to relate with the characters. They want to feel as if they were a part of the story. To make it interesting and worthy for your readers, you can use a different point of view than the same old way of point of views. You can make the narrator a character from the story and only tell the events that the character experiences. You can leave the rest of the plot to emerge as a surprise during the climax. The readers will be able to relate to such a point of view.

Write Engaging Dialogues

Narrative writing should be done in a way that fulfills its purpose entirely i.e to entertain. You can make the narrative writing entertaining by developing an interesting story. Apart from that, paying immense attention to the details will also help. This includes working on the dialogues of the characters. Dialogue is an essential element of the story. It should not be written just to progress the story. Instead, the dialogues should be catchy and realistic. They should be written in a conversational tone that depicts the lifestyle of the characters. The dialogues between characters should be filled with feelings and emotions.

Create Interesting Characters

Characters are the most important part of narrative writing. The entire story is based on their behaviors, actions, and life. You must create full of life characters. This will help in the smooth progression of the story. Interesting characters have a fan following of their own. Make sure to create characters that your audience will love and admire.

How to Teach Narrative Writing

Narrative writing means to write any event, experience or an adventure following a proper chronological order. Narrative writing is used in essays, stories, and other written content. One needs to learn narrative writing as it boosts one's imagination and polishes an individual's writing skills. Given below are some techniques that are appreciated by teachers while they teach narrative writing skills to their students:

Teach the Content of Narrative

Narrative content can be fiction or nonfiction. Teach beginners about the content of narrative writing. Teach them about the characters that can be involved in their narrative writing work. Narrative writing usually revolves around one or two main characters and you must tell your students the ways to introduce those characters appealingly.

Teach Them How to The Write Body Paragraphs

Teach your students about writing the main body of their narrative content. Tell them to use figurative but easy and understandable language. Teach them to write body in three paragraphs, the first paragraph should contain the main idea, second should explain the main idea, and third must contain their concluding statements. The overall body of narrative writing should be brief but informative.

Advise Students to Read Narrative Works

As the first step to learning anything is to experience it closely, a teacher must advise his or her students to read narrative fiction and nonfiction stories, essays, and other content as much as they can. This will help the students to have a better idea regarding writing a narrative text.

Assign Narrative Topics to Students

After teaching all the necessary information regarding narrative writing, assign different topics to your students to write on them narratively. In the beginning, give students easy topics and an outline to help them as well. After a little practice, tell them to brainstorm their ideas themselves and practice with innovative outlines.

How to Plan a Narrative Writing Piece?

Narrative writing piece may include an event, experience, adventure or a story told in a proper manner and sequence. Narrative writing technique can be used in essays, stories, and in other written or spoken content. One needs to learn and practice narrative writing as it boosts one's imagination and writing skills. To write a narrative, it is crucial to first plan it. However, many people do not have much knowledge regarding how to plan narrative piece of writing. There are many steps of this planning but given below are the three most important steps that will help one a lot in planning a narrative piece of writing:

Step # 1: Defining Purpose

The first step in planning a narrative writing work is to define and explain what and why you are writing. State the purpose of what you are writing in such a manner that captures the reader's attention and helps him or her to stay focused on the narrative piece of writing.

Step # 2: Deciding, Defining Characters and Background

Next step in planning a narrative piece of writing is to decide and introduce all the characters and background information of your writing. Write about the place, time and other relevant details in your planning to make your final piece of writing efficient and flawless.

Step # 3: Writing a Rough Draft

After planning the topic, purpose and characters of the story, start planning about the body of the story. Write a rough draft and include only necessary information in it as ambiguous information can annoy the reader. Ensure that you use correct grammar, spellings, and punctuation, and try to keep it brief and simple. Out of all the steps in planning, this step is the most important one as it serves as the basis for the actual and final text.

How to Bring Your Narrative Writing to Life?

Writing a narrative text is not an easy task especially when you are not willing to compromise on quality at all. A narrative text needs to be interesting and easy to read so that a reader can read and understand it easily without being too attentive. Since too much attention and seriousness ruins the actual joy of reading a narrative work, a narrative writer needs to take a lot of care regarding certain aspects and technicalities of work while writing. Among other things, an author should know how to bring his narrative writing work to life. Some of the tips in this regards are as follows:

Write an Interactive Start

The initial part of any narrative work must be very interesting and hook the readers. The best way to make an engaging start to the narrative work is by asking a question from the readers like ‘have you ever been stuck in a situation where, in a hall with thousand people in it, all eyes were on you and yours were on the ground from shame?'. Other than this, you can also write a statement which arouses curiosity like or forces the reader to read further ‘let me share a story with you of the kind you have never heard before', etc.

Add Imagery and Details

The beauty of a narrative work lies in its ability to be clearly understood by the readers. Do not state things vaguely in your narrative work rather try to add emotions, figures, imageries, and other such details that can automatically make a picture in the mind of the readers of what you are describing. This makes the work livelier and interesting.

Avoid Complexity

Your narration must be easily understandable for it to sound interesting and the best way to do it is to use simpler sentence structure and simple vocabulary.