Your Words Create a World

(An Introduction to Narrative Writing)

• “What’s your story? It’s all in the telling. Stories are compasses and
architecture; we navigate by them, we build our sanctuaries and our
prisons out of them, and to be without a story is to be lost in the
vastness of a world that spreads in all directions like arctic tundra or sea
ice. To love someone is to put yourself in their place, we say, which is to
put yourself in their story, or figure out how to tell yourself their story.”
~Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby
Narration
• Storytelling
• It is a sequence of events, not necessarily arranged in chronological
order, told by a narrator, happening in a particular place at a
particular time
• Vivid description of details
• Consistent point of view
• Consistent verb tense
• Well-defined point or significance
Vivid Description of Details
• Description is appealing to the five senses of the human body. Take
the reader into the narrative by letting him/he feel how it is like in the
world of your story.
“… A boy and a girl sat on the floor holding two bamboo poles by their
ends flat on floor, clapping them together, then apart, and pounding
them on boards, while dancers swayed and balanced their lithe forms,
dipping their bare brown leg in and out of the clapping bamboos, the
pace gradually increasing into a fury of wood in a counterpoint of panic
among the dancers and in harmonious flurry of toes and ankles
escaping certain pain – crushed bones, and bruised flesh, and
humiliation…”
Rule of thumb
“show rather than tell”
Consistent Point of View (POV)
• Point of view is essentially the eyes through which a story is told. It is
the narrative voice through which readers follow the story's plot,
meet its characters, discover its setting, and enter into its
relationships, emotions, and conflicts. Point of view allows readers to
experience the story as it unfolds
First Person Point of View

• In the first person point of view, one of the story's characters serves
as a narrator and readers watch the story unfold through that
character's eyes. First person point of view is easy to identify because
the character or narrator speaks to readers in his or her own voice,
frequently using the pronoun 'I'.
Second Person Point of View

• Second person is a point of view (how a story is told) where the

narrator tells the story to another character using the word 'you.' The
author could be talking to the audience, which we could tell by the
use of 'you,' 'you're,' and 'your.'
Third Person Point of View