Objective: To discover how to use questioning techniques to develop narrative that supports an opinion or point of view.
Writing to Explain a Conflict and Describe a Solution Using Narrative
Narrative is used when you want to illustrate an idea using your experience or the experiences of people you know. For this reason, it has some common features:
- Often written from the writer's viewpoint, so first person (using "I") is common
- Always written in the past tense about completed actions
- Always explains how some problem or conflict was resolved
- Always is organized according to time: what happened first, next, and finally. Although, these are not transitional words used in ever narrative.
- Usually ends with a summary or conclusion that points out why the narrative is significant or important to the writer
Readers like narratives because they are like little stories, but they need help understanding why the story is important. That is where the ideas of situation, conflict, struggle, outcome and meaning become important. So let's look at these elements separately.
Situation
Explaining the background for something happens is called defining the situation. Say, for instance, you want to write about overcoming something that scared and excited you. If you are writing an essay about how to overcome scary things, and you want to use narrative to illustrate your ideas, ways to stay calm would be the topic, or first, sentences of your paragraphs. However, if you were writing as essay just using narrative, you would begin your introduction with one or two sentences that described your situation. Let's use getting your first driver's license as an example:
On my eighteenth birthday, I woke up knowing it would be a day of mixed blessings. I would get some great presents from my family and friends, but I would also have to take the practical part of my driver's license text, and that scared me.
Based on these opening lines, your reader now knows exactly what you will be writing about. This is not your thesis; it is only an explanation of your circumstances.
Conflict
Once you have given your reader the situation, you would move on to why it is important, or the conflict that it creates in you. You can think of conflict as a friction that must be resolved by some action, and in our example it would be something about the driver's test:
For six months, I had been practicing for the parallel parking part of this test, and I still had trouble getting the car straight and centered between the parking lines. I knew that I would just have to do my best, but would my best be good enough? I would soon know, because my appointment was for 7:30 AM, so I rolled out of bed and hit the ground running.
By specifically describing the conflict, you give readers a kind of thesis. They will ask themselves questions like
- Did she make it to the appointment on time?
- Could she do everything but parallel park?
- Was she successful in the parking part?
- What will she do if she fails?
The trick, for you, is to decide what questions readers will ask, as well as what they need to know, and explain those things in your next section, which is struggle.
If you were writing about passing a math test, how would you set up your paragraph? You can practice providing context and anticipating reader questions in the text box below:
Struggle
The main part of your paragraph or essay will be the narrative of what happened to resolve the conflict that you described in the beginning. Of course as part of a longer essay, it will probably be one or two paragraphs:
I planned my appointment for early because I wanted to get this challenge over quickly. I also thought that the examiner would be in a better mood at the beginning of the day. I arrived on time, and there he was waiting for me, my stomach felt like a butterfly cage. We started the test with all the simpler tasks: starting, stopping, maintaining speed, and making legal turns. I did great, I thought, and his relaxed manner confirmed this. But I knew the worst was yet to come, and those butterflies were still doing a dance in my stomach. He directed me so that we would end up back at the parallel parking testing area. As we approached this dreaded spot, he turned to me and smiled saying, "you are doing fine, and everyone worries about this part, so just relax." That was easy for him to say, and as I drove up to the parking area my heart sank as I watched the person in front of me knock over the barrier cones and fail. Now, my stomach felt like a mosh pit, as the butterflies cranked the action up a notch.
Here the writer explains the things that happened as she struggles toward the dreaded part of her test. She uses several techniques:
- Viewpoint - she tells the whole story using her own perspective, not trying to explain things she doesn't know about what the examiner is thinking
- Description - she uses images based on human senses, the butterflies, to tell the reader that she is getting more and more nervous instead of just saying she is nervous and scared
- Dialogue - she only mentions the important thing that the examiner said instead of recording every little action and word
- Transitions - her transitions move along in time as the action unfolds:
- I arrived
- We started
- He directed
- As we drove
- Now
Other useful transition words in narrative are: next, soon, after, later, then, finally, when, and following.
Of course the above paragraph would be followed by a description of the parallel parking experience itself to complete the narrative. If this were a whole essay about this one experience, it would have the same ideas but more detail. Let's take the first two sentences, which could be a whole paragraph about arriving, and see how they could be expanded:
I planned my appointment for early because I wanted to get this challenge over quickly. I also thought that the examiner would be in a better mood at the beginning of the day.
We said before, that we could develop content based on what the reader might like to know. Here are some reader question ideas for this part of the essay:
- How did she get to the examination?
- Why did she think the examiner would be in a better mood?
- What is the advantage of getting it over quickly?
Did you notice that these questions all start with those basic journalist questions: what, where, when, why, and how? These are good starting points for thinking of reader questions! Now, let's see how this writer answers them:
I planned my appointment for early because I wanted to get this challenge over quickly. There were several reasons for this, really. I knew that my mom could drive me to the office before she had to go to work, so that solved my problem of how to get there with a car I could use for the test. Second, I thought that the examiner would be in a better mood at the beginning of the day. I had visions of the examiner, after a long day of working with bad drivers, as a sweaty, frustrated, and overworked man who wouldn't give me a break for even the smallest mistake, and I certainly wanted to avoid that! And finally, if the outcome was bad, I wanted time to get used to the idea of failing before everyone showed up at my house to celebrate my birthday. So, having laid the best plans I could think of, my mom and I left for the Driver's License Office.
Our writer has now taken two sentences and turned them into a whole paragraph! Did you notice that she added a sentence at the end? That sentence leads to the next paragraph, which will be about actually arriving at the office. It is a sentence level transitional device that leads naturally to the beginning of the topic sentence in her next paragraph: "I arrived on time...."
How would you develop a paragraph about your math test exercise that discussed arriving at the classroom? Will your reader questions help you? What ways could you use the journalist's questions to make your work easier? You can use the textbox below to practice your own ideas using questions and expansion techniques:
Outcome
Once you have described the conflict, you will need to describe the outcome. This description is usually the next-to-last sentence or paragraph of your narrative. In our driving test example, it probably would briefly describe exactly what happened the few minutes after the test. By including an outcome area, you give readers what some writers call "closure." That is, you don't leave them asking the question "what happened?"
Meaning
The final section of your narrative will tell the reader what you think is important about this incident. When you are using narrative in for a paragraph in a longer paper, it should relate why the described incident is important to your overall thesis, and if it is your conclusion.
This is one place where writers sometimes forget that they are not writing a story with a moral outcome for the whole world. What did you learn from this situation? In our driver's license example, it could be several things, but one stands out: "good planning leads to success."
It is important to remember that you are writing only about your own viewpoint. In a narrative, readers seldom expect some overall advice to the world at the end of the paper. A good way to be sure that you are staying focused on yourself and your experience is to check the last paragraph for words like "people" and "you." If your find these words, you have moved from your narrative by giving advice to other people, and you will want to change that!
Summary of Narrative Techniques:
A complete narrative has five main parts: situation, conflict, struggle, outcome, and meaning. Often the images you create for your narrative will use descriptive techniques that involve the five senses: for instance, butterflies in your stomach. You might even use a little specific dialogue, but the whole narrative should not be dialogue because readers want to know what you think about the action. One tool for developing the content of your narrative is to concentrate on imagining what kinds of things readers would ask or want to know using journalists questions: who, what, where, when, why, and how.
Hint: Unless you are assigned a complete autobiography, it is best to work with a short time frame, no more than an hour or two, so that you can concentrate on developing the content of your writing.
  
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