Bringing Them Along: The Art of Narrating 

We are a story-telling and story-loving creature. Whether they are real or fake, long or short, funny or sad, we love stories. They can be extremely effective in teaching us new things, stimulating our minds, activating our imagination, helping us solve problems, illustrating complex ideas, and providing concrete examples and evidence.

When we tell stories in non-fiction (i.e. stories that are true) we call it narration.

Never will you find an essay or non-fiction book that is pure narrative. It will always contain some other rhetorical mode, such as analysis (when coupled with narration, I call this reflection). That's why I cringe when my students read an essay and call it a story. Essays can contain stories, but the essay itself is not a story. 

Some essays might contain one or two very short anecdotes (an anecdote is a short, true story) to set the mood or illustrate a point or grab the reader's attention, or the whole essay might be built around one long story. When that happens, we usually call it a narrative essay. But, again, don't think that just because it's a narrative essay that there is nothing but narrative within.

Many of the papers you write in school and at work will require the art of good narration: profiles, case studies, rationales, briefs, police reports, incident reports, cover letters, teaching philosophies, and personal essays--to name a few. A concise, well-written, appropriately-placed story might make all the difference in getting your proposal approved, getting accepted into a professional program, landing your dream job, or selling a product.

The art of storytelling is a difficult thing to write about. So difficult, in fact, that there are endless books, magazines, websites, and classes dedicated to nothing else than telling you how to write a good story.

My advice, at least as it pertains to telling true stories in nonfiction essays, is simply this: Keep your reader in mind as you work stories into your writing. If you are writing to a crusty, old professor, then maybe keep your stories short and extremely relevant. If you are writing to your rambunctious coworkers, then make your stories edgy and funny. If you are writing to school-aged children, then hold off on the F-bombs and sexual innuendo.

If you are writing non-fiction, such as college essays, then don't make stories up. If you want to make a story up, take a fiction-writing class (and then don’t call it an essay; call it a short story!). If you want to include a made-up story in your nonfiction essay for illustrative purposes, then be sure the reader knows it’s made-up. We call this a hypothetical situation. There’s a big difference between lying and saying, “When I was six, I ran away and lived in a cattle car,” and providing a hypothetical situation, like, “I like to imagine what it would have been like to run away as a six year old and live in a cattle car.”  It’s okay to be creative and play make-believe as long as the reader understands what’s real and what’s pretend.

When writing nonfiction stories in your essays, you might be tempted to exaggerate, especially if you are trying to get your reader to feel a particular emotion, like anger or shock. As with making up stories, it's okay to exaggerate for effect as long as the reader knows you're exaggerating. If twenty people show up to your tiny house for a party, and you say, "fifty people were there," the reader probably won’t know you're exaggerating because it's too close to the truth. If, however you say, "Three thousand people were there," then they will know you're exaggerating. And they might even chuckle. Exaggerate to emphasize the truth, not to mislead the reader. 

Framing Your Paper

One of the quickest and easiest ways to frame a paper is to use a story. I call this the “snake eating its tail.” People love stories, so starting an essay in story mode is a great way to hook the reader. And then you can pause the story to delve into the more boring stuff: thesis statements, sources, analysis, and so on. And then finish the story in the conclusion as a nice way to wrap it all up. Like a snake eating its tail, your essay will have come full circle, and the reader will be pleased by it.

In the olden days (pre-2010) when I still graded papers by hand, I had a symbol I would often jot in the margins of students’ essays:

It’s supposed to look like a snake eating its tail. I wouldn’t provide any more comment than that, and occasionally students would get the drift. One time, a student wrote a mediocre research paper about abortion. It started with the typical, “Webster’s Dictionary defines abortion as…” Halfway through the paper, however, there was a wonderful story about how the student had accompanied her pregnant teenage sister to an abortion clinic. I put the symbol next to that story, and I provided no other comments. Fortunately, that student had been paying attention, because when she revised the paper, she had ditched the dictionary-definition introduction and started, instead, with a present-tense version of the story. “I’m sitting in a brightly-lit waiting room of an abortion clinic with my sixteen-year-old sister who can’t decide if she can really go through with it.” She tells the story up until the point that the nurse calls them back, and then she goes into traditional research-paper mode, giving us her driving question and information about teenage abortion. Once or twice during the paper she refers to her sister at the clinic, and then in the conclusion, she finishes the story by telling us that her sister finally decided to keep the baby and explore her other options. It turned out to be such a minor fix—the student really didn’t need to do a whole lot of revising. She simply broke up the story and used it to frame her paper, and it went from a run-of-the-mill abortion paper with an interesting story stuck in the middle to a fantastic paper framed by a compelling story.

Occasionally, you will run into a professor who has no patience for storytelling in academic writing—especially when it comes to personal stories. Professors usually want you to look beyond yourself when considering and analyzing the world, and they often view personal stories as a cop out: an ineffectual means of avoiding proper analysis and incorporation of sources. To help prevent you from telling personal stories, they might require you to use the third-person point-of-view (avoiding words like I, me, my, or mine). If that's the case, just go along with it. As I have mentioned elsewhere, the easiest way to succeed in college is to figure out what hoops your instructor wants you to jump through, and then jump through them. But if your instructor has no beef with personal stories, try to use them to your advantage in your papers.  

Writing Exercise: Expanding the Moment 

After you have written a draft of your essay, spend a few minutes completing the following steps to help guarantee that you’ll have at least one story in your essay that is told well. This might be one small story embedded into your paper, or it might be a big story on which your entire paper is focused. 

Here is an example of what this looks like. The original version was from a blog post I wrote several years ago. I decided that since I inflict this writing exercise on my students, I should go through the motions too.  

My Original Version: 

    I didn’t play team sports growing up, so when my son brought me his jockstrap and cup before his first game, I had no idea what to tell him. I had to look it up online, and then we tried every possible combination. Ultimately, though, I think he still wore it to the game upside down. 

My Expanded Version: 

    One of the downsides of never having played team sports growing up is that when Miles, my ten-year-old son, brought me his jockstrap and cup before his game, I had no idea what to tell him. I did a Google search, making sure Miles and his little brother, Griffin, weren’t looking at the monitor, because you never know what will pop up when you type, “How to wear a jockstrap.” After reading a few contradictory testimonials, Miles, Griffin, and I went to the boys’ room and discussed our options. Miles tried a few variations: cup inside jock strap over tighty-whities; jock strap under tighty-whities; jockstrap with no tighty-whities; cup pointing up; cup pointing down.

     I can’t remember what we finally settled on, but Miles stood proudly with his fists on his hips like Superman. Griffin knelt down and went to punch him, but he stopped. “Wait,” he said. “Can I?”

     “Go ahead,” said Miles. “Punch away.”

     Griffin punched him in the cup several times, and Miles declared that it worked. But a few minutes later, in his full uniform, he danced and fidgeted and complained that the cup had slid up the other side and was wedged in his crack.