Nailing the art of Narrative Writing

What is narrative writing?

Narrative writing has a story, characters, conflict, and other essential parts. Narrative writing is often synonymous to story writing. And this differs greatly compared to other forms of writing, like in fiction and certain non-fiction books. However, if you’re writing a story of some kind, where a narrator is telling the story is called narrative writing.

Parts of Narrative Writing

Narrative writing is made of specific parts. These parts, as a whole, are necessary for writing a good novel.

1) Character

The characters are an essential component. It’s extremely difficult to tell a story without them, as character development is one of the important parts in narrative writing. Think of your characters as the driving force of the narrative.

2) Conflict

This part of narrative writing is where the tension comes in. Conflict of any form, whether it’s between characters or in your plot, is essential for not only a good book, but for narrative writing also.

3) Plot

This is the main point of your story. Where is it going and what’s happening while we get there? It keeps your audience hooked to your story.

4) Setting

The setting of a story is really what determines its genre or its learning curve. The learning curve refers to how much readers need to learn about the world, i.e. how different it is from our own. The setting adds to this extensively because if your book is in a new world, more detailing is necessary.

5) Theme

These are rooted in your story even if you’re not meant to include it. Narrative writing tells a story which will become the themes of your story. Whether you mean it or not, your thoughts about the world and important values will reflect in your work.

6) Narrative Writing Arc

This is the story that will structure the whole part. This includes things like the inciting incident, key milestones like the first slap and second slap, the climax, the resolution, and even nuances like the character arc.

Important topics to keep in mind

Fantasy

1) Write a story about a woman who works the night shift at a store finding herself in the midst of what seems to be an otherworldly magical battle in her shop.

2) Create your world and write a story about a modern civilization as if magic is and has always been the norm.

Science Fiction

1) Write a story about a doctor who was just replaced by a machine to diagnose, treat, and even operate on patients.

2) In a futuristic society, the right to privacy has been abolished to keep people safe after a worldwide terrorist attack. Your main character, an engineer, has discovered how to override the “foolproof” surveillance system...what they find in the database changes everything.

Romance

1) Write a story about two people who have been friends since childhood, their families have promised them marrying to others despite them being in love.

2) Write a story focusing on a truck driver trying to outrun a jaded past as he meets someone who works in law enforcement while at a diner.

How to Master Narrative Writing

By learning a few tips about how to write narrative well, you’ll be well on your way from amateur to expert.

Learn from the experienced

Most often, the best advice comes from those who are and have been in the thick of the things you want to learn about.

They’ve got inside knowledge for the how-tos that are often far more effective than simply teaching those methods.

Read a lot

You learn storytelling by reading or listening to stories. That’s how everyone learns how to write a story. While some are better than others in nature, reading more and more can open your eyes to new methods.

Reading at least one book per month can help you improve your writing by simply immersing yourself in the words of someone else. While some people might worry that their writing will mimic the book they’re reading, this fear is often groundless. Your natural voice will always be at the forefront unless you’re intentionally trying to sound like someone else.

Practice regularly

Narrative writing is a skill the more you practice the better you get, like most other skills. As you write and craft stories about protagonists' great conflict, interesting setting, and more, you’ll learn how to make each of those elements better.

Understanding where your strengths and weaknesses are will help you know what to focus on and improve, but that can only be done through experience, aka, practicing.

Ask for feedback

It’s very hard to be unbiased with your work. We can’t often take a step back and recognize what we’re doing wrong and therefore, we can get stunted in our growth as writers.

Feedback is the key to fix this.

Other people can see what you don’t. We all notice different things and this remains true for writing also.

Making someone offer feedback on your writing is one of the best ways to improve and fix your weaknesses and becoming an overall better writer.

Watch movies and TV shows

Yes! We’re officially permitting you to watch TV instead of working on writing, but only for a very specific reason.

When you listen to writing advice, whether it’s from a friend or published author, you might hear them referring movies as examples.

The reason for this is because all movies can teach you about storytelling and a good story structure.

TV shows are much better at teaching you how to write a good chapter since each episode serves as a chapter of that particular story, the entire season is equivalent to a novel.

Here are some questions to ask after you watch a movie or TV show:

1) How did it all start?

2) What was different and engaging about how events unfolded?

3) Was there a twist? What did they use to make the twist surprising, but inevitable?

4) What were the biggest moments in the story?

5) Did the ending connect to the beginning?

Invoking all three main elements

These are character, plot/conflict, and setting. The idea behind this is that these three main components make up the entire story. When you dig further into these three, you’ll become a much better writer.

If you learn how to master invoking all three of these elements into each sentence, you will master the art of writing.

Now, this is very difficult. Not all authors do this. Only few can do this and it’s not something you can do in every sentence.

However, when you’re thinking of writing each line to show your readers more about the character, the world/setting, and the conflict all in one, you will be an incredible writer overall.