In this paper, you’ll write a personal narrative with a specific point, something you want to convey to your reader about your life. 

“Memoir is how writers look for the past and make sense of it. We figure out who we are, who we have become, and what it means to us and to the lives of others: a memoir puts the events of a life in perspective for the writer and for those who read it. It is a way to validate to others the events of our lives — our choices, perspectives, decisions, responses.”
                   — Nancy Atwell

Our first paper, a personal narrative, includes many of the elements of writing that you will need in all your academic work, description, narrative, analysis, and persuasion. As you write a narrative about some focused incident in your life, you will also prove something over the course of your paper with supporting detail from your life. 

This paper will be autobiographical in nature, since it’s based on your own life and history, but it is not an autobiography.  Even if you’d had the most boring life in the universe, you couldn’t possibly convey anything of importance about your life in just three to four pages. You’re not going to write about your life from start to finish—absolutely do not start with where you were born—instead, you need to focus on some particular aspect of your life that is important.

An effective personal narrative conveys your sense about how the events you relate are important, to you and to the reader as well. What did you learn from this experience? And what can the reader learn? How did these events change your life, or clarify your sense of self, or your goals?  Think about something important to you or your family that you’d like to describe to someone, or a story you’d like to tell.  You may also choose to think about your life history from a larger perspective, as well.  What can you tell us about your life that will give us a new perspective on American life? 

A personal narrative may cover a brief episode in a person’s life, a matter of an hour or two, or it may cover a longer period of time. If you do write about events spread out over time, choose only the most important moments of those events to narrate. It’s particularly important that you choose a subject that truly matters to you, something you’re interested in enough that you can make it vivid for the class.  You should also keep in mind, though, that these papers will be read by the entire class, so you shouldn’t choose something that’s too personal to share with the group. No matter what you decide to work on, ask yourself to define your thesis—ask yourself why this story you want to tell matters. 

When faced with writing an autobiographical narrative, many students immediately want to choose the most important events of their life to narrate—a story about a terrible car accident, the death of a beloved family member, a night drinking that went wrong. Certainly these kind of dramatic moments can be excellent subjects for a personal narrative. But remember that it doesn’t have to be an epic event to be life-changing; a story about a woman who nearly divorces her husband over things like his leaving the toilet seat up can be both ordinary and hilarious. Think about the smaller moments in your life that are also important to you, and see if you can’t find the drama in those events.

When you recollect events, or when you attempt to write dialogue for events that occurred some time ago, you are necessarily going to be reconstructing those events—unless you have perfect recall, you have to recreate what someone said as best you can. You want to convey the truth of the incident, even if it is not the absolute literal words someone spoke.

Sometimes writers want to tell their stories from beginning to end, including events that aren’t really crucial to understanding the point for the sake of telling the whole story. Personal narratives are often more effective when organized and focused in less traditional ways, however. Try not to get trapped into a traditional straightforward chronological approach to your narrative, unless that truly best suits your purpose.  Ask yourself if every person who was actually involved in those events is essential for the point you’re making—don’t feel so wedded to authenticity that you include a whole cast of minor characters that just confuse the reader who’s trying to keep up with a bunch of people they don’t know. Do you need to tell every single part of the story, or can you focus more closely on one or two of the most important elements of it?

Personal narratives also aren’t generally organized like traditional papers, with an introduction and long body paragraphs complete with topic sentences. Paragraphs may vary in length, particularly if you’re using dialogue, and often a very short paragraph, just a sentence or two, is a good way to draw attention to an especially important moment in the narrative. Many personal narratives start literally in the middle of the action—in media res—jumping right into the story and saving the explanations for after the reader is hooked.

Because, however, the personal narrative doesn’t usually have a thesis stated in the last sentence of the introductory paragraph and topic sentences to guide the reader along towards the point, conclusions are especially crucial. You will need to devote considerable time to making the conclusion significant; it will probably be longer than many of the body paragraphs within the paper, and it should make clearly your point about the importance of the event. You should also prepare your readers for the conclusion as the paper develops, so that when they reach the ending of the paper, everything is pulled together. Readers should not be surprised by a completely new idea in the final paragraph—no getting religion all of a sudden!

Find a creative way to use the events in your life to show your readers who you are or what matters to you.  Remember to show what you want us to feel or think—don’t tell.  Don’t say that your life was changed—show us the ways in which it was changed.  Look at the difference between these two sentences:

It had rained all afternoon, and because I’d forgotten she was outside, the cat was wet.

All afternoon, rain slapped against the windows, louder and louder, and when I finally realized I’d left the cat outside and let her in, she was soaking, her fur plastered to her shivering body.

The first tells, the second shows, using clear descriptions and vivid words to say the exact same thing. But which would you rather read? Dialogue is another important way to make the characters in your life as vivid to your reader as they are to you. 

I loved my grandfather, who always took me fishing.

Every Sunday afternoon my grandfather took me fishing, he would call me over to his tackle box, whispering so my mother couldn’t hear, “Guess what I’ve got for you?” Every week the answer was the same, a Snickers buried below an unopened pack of rubber worms, and every time I taste a Snickers now, I remember the smell of those worms and our Sundays together.

We all love our grandfathers (hopefully!), so rather than telling the reader that, explain why you loved him.

One possible problem to avoid when including detail is just throwing in any old detail, including things that don’t add to the narrative. If, for example, your paper is about someone close to you who had died, you may want to include some details about the funeral, or about finding out about the death.  But you probably don’t need to spend the entire paper narrating all the details about the visitation and then the funeral itself, and finally what happened later when you got home.  It might be more successful to flash back to a memory of you spending time with the person who’s now dead, as a way of showing how important that person was to you.  If your paper’s about something that happened on a trip, do you really need to spend a whole page describing driving to get there?  What detail do you need to help make your point?

Finally, avoid ending with a heavy handed moral to the story, an ending you bludgeon the reader over the head with. As you conclude, you want to explore why these events are significant to you—why do they matter? How have they changed you? Don’t make generalizations about everybody in the world based on your experience, though; keep the focus on how you are different now. If you’ve written a narrative that really makes a point, instead of just describing a series of events, you’ll learn something about yourself, and so will your reader.