4
Our Selves, Our Stories
Human beings are fundamentally storytelling creatures. Of all the ways we use words, perhaps the most important (and most typical) is to communicate who we are, where we have been, and where we are going. Think of all the times you use words to convey what has happened to you in a single day, even a single hour! Indeed, we spend most of our lives using our words to spin stories about ourselves; even our own sense of identity is a kind of story we tell ourselves to make sense of the world!
Because using words to tell stories is so fundamental to our everyday experience, narration , a fancy word for storytelling, is the perfect place to start our composition course in earnest. For many students, a narrative essay, one which requires to writer to tell a story of some sort, is the most comfortable and enjoyable kind of assignment to tackle. This is especially true if you are interested in creative writing or have aspirations of publishing short stories, screenplays, or novels. Aside from being a familiar and creative kind of writing, narration is also a key component in many other kinds of essay writing, and as the course continues you’ll see that narration comes in handy when you are trying to come up with interesting hooks to start papers or are looking to explain specific points about a topic with examples that help your reader understand your point of view. Finally, the kind of writing we did in the last module, the translation of the senses into words, plays a key part in all types of narrative writing; after all, to tell a good story, you have to provide details that help your reader become immersed in the world you are creating.
Fiction, Nonfiction, and the Problem of Perspective
Before we begin discussing how to construct an effective narrative, we need to consider an important distinction that humans have to make when it comes to storytelling: the difference between nonfiction, or writing that purports to be true or “real,” and fiction, or writing that announces itself as a fabrication, a “made-up” story told by the author to entertain or to make a hypothetical (believable yet fictional) point.
At first glance, this distinction might seem easy to make. However, the words we use are never equivalent to the world we experience; in some sense, whenever we tell a story, we are fabricating what happened. If we could simply communicate events as they happened, we wouldn’t need words at all! This is why there are so many arguments about news stories and the meaning of current events; we all recognize that any act of recalling what has happened is fraught with the problem of perspective, the point-of-view or position of the storyteller.
As we’ll see in later modules, the problem of perspective is something that always haunts the composition classroom and writing in general, so it’s important that we recognize the issue here at the beginning.
Philosophers have argued about the problems of language and truth since the dawn of civilization, and their battles rage on to this day. For the purpose of this module, however, we will have to accept that what we mean by nonfiction writing is storytelling that presumes to adhere to the world as it happened to the author or other humans andfiction writing as storytelling that makes no such presumptions about its literal truth.
Because all storytelling, be it fiction or nonfiction writing, is always caught up in the problem of perspective, the point-of-view of the writer, it is important to clarify exactly how this positioning makes itself known in a piece of writing.
Directions: Select each example to reveal more information.
Two Elements that Make a Story Click
Every effective story has two key elements: characters and conflict. Characters are the people that populate the world a writer creates. Conflict is what happens to those characters, the catalyst for their actions. Without characters, a world would have no actors; without conflict, characters would have no reason to take action.
Though a creative writing instructor would likely take issue with this simplification, for the sake of this class characters can be broken down into three types: main characters, side characters, and extras.
Main characters are the people on which a story centers, and a writer signals their importance by providing the most details about them, including what they look like, what they say, and possibly how they think or feel (depending upon how subjective the story’s perspective is). Remember that a main character may even be the person telling the story if the writer is using the first-person perspective.
Side characters often accompany the main character as important acquaintances, friends, or enemies. Writers provide enough details about them for them to come alive, but they don’t get as much attention as the main characters. They are often essential to the conflict, however; for example, often the main character has an enemy who is a side character but whose presence forces the main character to take action.
Extras help fill out the world of a narrative, but they are just window-dressing. They appear in the background at parties or on busy city streets or in office settings. They are not important to the story’s conflict, though they may be affected by it (think of all the extras in a Hollywood movie who run screaming from a giant monster’s attack in a movie like Godzilla).
A story’s conflict is the struggle that the main character must endure as the story proceeds, the obstacle that must be overcome. This conflict could involve another character, such as in classic confrontations of heroes and villains (Batman fighting the Joker or Captain America confronting the Red Skull). However, main characters may also experience less aggressive conflicts, such as facing a fear, performing a task, surviving a hostile environment, interviewing for a job, enduring a medical issue, or winning the heart of a love interest. Before you write your narrative, you need to have a clear understanding of what this conflict is so that you can build to a climactic moment when the conflict is resolved and the story’s purpose is revealed.
Narrative Purpose: Why Readers Love It When a Plan Comes Together
A story is interesting only insofar as it has some reason to exist. Conflicts get a story moving and give characters something to do, but the overall reason behind the story reveals itself when the conflict is resolved. Maybe a writer wants to show the importance of sticking with something, no matter how hard it seems; maybe a story has been designed to emphasize the difficulty of loyalty or the insanity of the modern workplace. This purpose can be funny or moving, and a story doesn’t have to convey some deep moral message to be effective. However, a writer needs to consider how and why the conflict will resolve and what the implications of that resolution will be. This purpose is usually left unstated in narratives; readers don’t like to be told what to think, so you shouldn’t say something like, “The moral of this story is . . . .” Still, try to make it a point to write out the purpose in advance for yourself so you know what you are doing. This purpose statement might end up being slightly off the mark after the whole story comes together, especially since characters often have a way of taking on a life of their own and “doing” things the writer didn’t expect. Still, having some idea where the story is going is essential to avoiding writer’s block (when you get stuck and don’t know what else to write) and keeping your narrative focused.
Chronological Order: Tracking a Conflict through Time
Once you’ve figured out who your characters are, what your central conflict will be, and why you are telling your story (what its purpose is), you are just about ready to draft your story. However, you still need to figure out how you are going to organize your ideas into a cohesive narrative, and this crucial final step is actually a question of when: when does your story start, when does the climactic moment occur, and when does it end?
Because narratives chronicle events that happen to characters, they obviously track time. The organizational strategy that recounts a story as it occurs in time is called chronological order: typically, a narrative essay structured chronologically proceeds from the beginning of the story, the earliest important event, to its end, the final moment of the tale.
This sounds simple, but a writer must make many important decisions in order for chronological order to be an effective organizing tool, especially when writing a short essay. Perhaps most importantly, a writer must remember that a good story starts as close to the climactic moment of the conflict as possible in order to be concise and consistently interesting.
For example, imagine that you are writing a story about betrayal: in it, the main character discovers that her best friend has been seeing her boyfriend behind her back. The climactic moment of the story is to take place at a party on a Saturday night. In order to be concise, you decide to tell the story over the course of a single day, starting when the main character wakes up in the morning. Then you take the reader through the day, recounting the character’s breakfast, her morning workout, her lunch, her afternoon workout, her brief shopping excursion…
Wait! Even though this sounds reasonable, is it really concise enough? Do all of these events serve to set up the party where the conflict will resolve? Do we really need to know about the character’s breakfast and lunch? Maybe, so long as these events somehow relate to the main character’s relationship with her friend (perhaps she meets the friend for lunch or even spends the day with her). However, if these moments are disconnected from the story’s turmoil, if they just fill up space by describing moments in time, then they aren’t necessary.
Now imagine an alternate strategy. Perhaps the writer decides to start the story in the early evening on that fateful Saturday, right before the main character (let’s call her Susan) leaves for the crucial party. As Susan is getting dressed, she is recounting past moments she has spent with her best friend (let’s call her Debbie), and these moments all emphasize the intense bond the two have forged together (each moment thus relating to the purpose of the story, the betrayal that the conflict will reveal). Now the story is truly starting very close to its climax, and every part serves the larger whole.
In addition, this example introduces the concept of flashbacks, moments within a chronology that jump backwards in time. In this story, these flashbacks occur as instances of Susan’s memory and are interspersed with the linear moments she is preparing for the party. Not all flashbacks have to be memories, though; if you’ve ever seen a movie or TV show that plays around with time, such as when a serialized TV show begins by showing a beloved central character in a dangerous situation that hasn’t been explained, you know how interesting it can be for a story to start at a climactic moment and then jump back to the beginning in order to catch the audience up with the action.
Prewriting Strategies: Questioning and Freewriting
In the last module, we discussed listing as a prewriting strategy for descriptive writing, and it’s one that works very well for narrative writing, as well. However, perhaps the most natural kind of prewriting for storytelling is called questioning because it forces a writer to think about all of the important elements of a narrative by asking the classic “reporter’s questions:” who, what, when, where, why, and how. In fact, it’s impossible to put a narrative together without preliminarily asking at least some of these questions before you get started! Consider the following questions, for example:
- Who is the main character in the story?
- What is the story’s conflict?
- When does the story take place?
- Where does the action happen?
- Why are you telling the story?
(what is its main purpose) - How does the story end?
Once you’ve answered at least some of these questions, another helpful prewriting strategy that many writers use is freewriting . This is when you set a time limit (usually around ten minutes) and write whatever comes to mind about your story (it’s useful to do a bit of questioning first so you at least know who your main character is and what the conflict will be, but it’s possible to freewrite without any predetermined ideas, too, just to see what you come up with). This is also called stream-of-consciousness writing, and it’s important to note that this is not like drafting the actual story, although you may use some of the stuff you come up with when you put the paper together. This kind of writing is meant to be totally free and disorganized; you don’t worry about spelling, grammar, organization, or even logic. You just let yourself write, and when the time period is up, you look back at what you’ve come up with and see if anything useful has been created. Some writers freewrite multiple times, picking up certain ideas from one freewriting session and using them as the basis for another until they’ve come up with plenty of material that they can hammer into shape as an actual draft.
Whether you use a combination of listing, questioning, and freewriting or just one such strategy, make sure to do some initial creative work before you start planning your essay so you have a general idea of what your story is about to avoid getting stuck!
Planning Your Narrative: The Imperative of Using an Outline
Once your prewriting is finished and you’ve figured out all the primary elements of your story, you might think you are ready to draft. However, there is still one more essential step you need to follow before drafting should happen: outlining.
Many students balk at using an outline; they often complain that outlining makes them feel boxed-in or that their writing is over-determined. In the academic and professional worlds, though, organization and logic are everything. Even a paper with relatively weak, uninspiring subject matter can be elevated if all of its ideas are logically presented and connected. Outlines ensure that papers have this underlying logic and structure. What many students don’t like about outlines is that they force writers to develop a kind of skeleton for their papers that holds them together, and creating this kind of infrastructure takes concentration and a critical eye.
Outlining helps differentiate freewriting from drafting. As we just learned, freewriting is completely free-form writing. When you freewrite, you never worry about structure: you just record your thoughts. Drafting, on the other hand, is the meticulous construction of a paper based on already established ideas that have been thoughtfully joined together in advance. This thoughtfulness is articulated in the planning stage between prewriting and drafting and usually takes the form of an outline that establishes the organizational structure of the paper.
In most of the modules to come you’ll be presented with suggestions for how to develop an outline that is appropriate for the rhetorical mode (kind of writing) that you will be working on. As we have already discussed, narrative writing, this module’s focus, is organized through time chronologically. Because of the possibility of flashbacks, this doesn’t mean that a narrative essay has to proceed linearly from beginning to end, though many simple narratives do just that. Whatever the case, though, we know the following things about narrative structure:
Directions: Select the following example to reveal more information.
Before You Begin: A Note about Transitions and Connecting Ideas Together
As you draft your narrative, keep in mind that moving a story through time involves more than just placing one event after another; you need to use transitions, connecting words, to help transport your reader.
Transitions
Words like first, next, after that, later, before, during, meanwhile, upon, soon, now, finally, while, as soon as, and when are all helpful expressions that can effectively tie events together and connect your ideas.
References
Florida State College at Jacksonville. (2022). ENC1101-OER: English Composition I.
