How to write a personal narrative

How to write a personal narrative

The best way to explain a personal narrative is to allow other people to see the world through your eyes.

A personal narrative is meant to help you place the reader in your position and the more descriptive and detailed your writing is, the more chances you will have of being able to provide a good quality narrative for people to enjoy.

It his article, we are going to be providing some important tips on every step of the process of creating a personal narrative that is going to catch the attention of your readers.

Decide which life event you plan to talk about

This is going to be extremely important because it will allow you to decide on what you will be narrating. The best thing to do is to choose something that caused any kind of significant difference in your life. This means that you should be writing about any event in your life that made you feel an intense mix of emotions.

Narratives about tense and frightening situations seem to be the best because people can always relate and sympathize with a certain feeling of anxiety and fear. When you can make people feel what you felt, you will be doing your job as a descriptive narrator.

You are the narrator

You should stick to first person and the best way to narrate a story is to make sure that you experienced it yourself. The best descriptive narrating is done when a person is able to compare what happened to them with something that everyone can relate to experiencing.

Let’s say for example that you had a frightening encounter with a shark. You could say something like “not knowing if I was dealing with a huge white shark or just a small reef shark was a feeling that could only resemble playing

Russian roulette. I have never played that game, but just think of the anxiety level of not knowing if the bullet could land on your turn. This is what it felt like to be at sea and have no idea of what was going on underwater in the murky water”.

Give your story some structure

One problem that many narrative writers face is that they don’t have any kind of structure with their writing and this can cause for the results to be a huge mess.

You always need to make sure that your story is making sense and that it follows a structure that is going to help the person feel engaged. If you are all over the place, the reader is not going to be able to get immersed in the story and the purpose of descriptive narration would be completely lost.

There should be a beginning, middle and conclusion to your story. You can’t start with the juicy stuff and end with some abrupt narration that has no purpose at all. Make sure it all makes sense and that it follows a good structure.

Read your draft and have others read it too

When you write something, you will usually need to have someone else reading it for you too in order to get a good perspective of the work you have done. Ask the test reader to give you some feedback on what they think about the writing. You will probably find that there are some things you failed to notice, but someone else will be able to see the issue.


You need to be as descriptive and imaginative as you can when you narrate your story to people. This is going to allow you to take the reader to that moment in time and if you can make them feel those emotions, you would have done your job.