Narrative Craft: Help Students Write Structured, Detailed
Narratives, Memoir, and Personal Essays
Carl Anderson 10/3/2002
Personal narrative – a story where the writer tells about his or her life
Memoir – an event or series of events from a person’s life that says
something important about a person’s life
You are the main character in your memoir
Personal essay – a form of idea-based writing; a writer explores an idea and
draws upon his or her life to develop the idea
PERSONAL NARRATIVE
Look at pieces of writing that you might be getting already
Lots of bed-to-bed
Wish-they-woulds:
 Zooming in on what’s important
 Establish a purpose or a sense of where it would go
 Wish the pieces were about something – not just details, but some
meaning
Focus
Stretch it out
One moment
Tension – leads to change over time
Tension helps you focus
Need good texts with which to teach this
Jean Little – Hey World! Here I Am - Maybe a Fight
 Good for tension
 Stories that put you on the edge of your seat
 Pushes off until the end of the piece how it’s going to end
 Kind of like the kettle that is about to boil

Setting detail (kettle) that mirrors the rest of the story
Start study by reading a couple of stories to get a feel for this kind of
writing
Give time to story-telling in class
 “Typical” way to tell a story (bed to bed, boring recounting of details, no
picking and choosing the important ones, tension – if any is resolved right
at beginning)
 Then tell the same account like it is a story – with tension, attention to
the right details, keeping them on the edge of their seat, smaller focus
 Which way do you think I’m doing it better?
 Model it for kids– Anzia in park with dad
 Let them do some storytelling
 Challenge them to do it well
 Teacher confers with groups
 Then a kid might tell a story to the whole class – with the teacher
coaching – say more about that part, stretch it out there
Notebook work
Reread notebook for entries that contain a story
Show the kids an entry from your notebook that feels like it has a story in it
I read the entry and I found a story in it
Then show the kids the way you planned it out (notebook)
Your thinking about a possible lead (notebook)
Draft of the story you wrote (out of notebook)
Put kids’ entries up and look for the story in them together
Younger grades – they will write a couple personal narratives during the
study
What’s the part of the entry that puts the reader on the edge of his seat?
For kids who are developing a seed idea –
Read through entries and find one that feels most story-like
Try out important scenes in a writer’s notebook before drafting
Practicing craft of key parts
Mini-lessons
Story “arc”
Change over time
Problem/solution
Writer establishes tension at beginning and doesn’t give the show
away
Make a plan for the narrative
What are the parts of the story?
Make a plan
Circle hot spots
Writing a lead that creates tension
Establishes the focus and tension of the piece
Sometimes the lead is the whole first scene
Sometimes the first paragraph is full of setting detail and then when the
“one day” comes in the next paragraph, the tension is created
Don’t let us know until the end how it’s going to work out
[story idea – Susan calls from college, lost in SC]
When you ask them to add more detail – they just add more content – more
of the same
We must help them to know what kinds of detail they are:
 Dialogue
 Thinking
 Character gesture/movement
 Setting detail
 Physical description of character
Weave in and out using different kinds of details
Barry Lane, After the End
Snap shots
Thought shots
Exploding moments
Shrinking centuries
Hot spots – can either:
Establish tension
Build tension
Resolve tension
Can help kids by finding, identifying, planning for hot spots before they
draft
MEMOIR
Details – narrative details – still apply in memoir study
Find out about his life – tells you what it means about his life – at beginning
of piece, woven through the piece, and at the end
Look at experience in your life and extract a meaning from it – sophisticated
cognitive move
There should be a place in the text where you can point to the part that
states the meaning that the memoir has for the writer (when you are
teaching it – not true of all memoir)
Doesn’t always exist in memoir but is good to use in a touchstone text
Chapter 6 from Little by Little, Jean Little
Look at structure of one page
Memory – meaning
Memory – memory – memory - meaning (whole chapter)
Use whole chapter for more sophisticated writers
Eleven could be used to teach memoir or personal essay – really is fiction
Memoir study
 Start with immersion
 What do you notice?
 Message oriented
 Seems a little like fable writing: story – moral
Strategies for remembering memories
Process of writing to learn; meaning-making exercise
Think back to memories
Write off objects
Photos that mean something
Inside Out, Tom Kirby
Making a life map
(let kids choose if they want to try it)
Then look at map and write off of it
Seeking Diversity, Linda Reif
Positive and negative life graph
In personal narrative, the tension is the controlling idea
Memory box, heart map
Choose amongst those kinds of strategies
Key to the work comes in after they pick what they’re writing about
 How do they come up with an idea about what they have to say?
 What’s the point of the memoir?
Look over entries about topic to find meaning
Meaning helps you choose parts to include
Remember that memoir is about you, so even if another person is part of
your topic, it’s what it means to you that must be discovered
What’s the big idea – line of thinking
Figuring out the life lesson
What are you trying to say to readers?
Some writers figure out right away what it is about
Others take a while – must write to discover it
Conference question: So what’s the thing you want to tell readers about?
Try to bring out idea by nudging them towards it
Sometimes the meaning is just as simple as “I love my mom.” We don’t need
to push them to too sophisticated meanings
Amy Tan, NY Times spring 2002 memoir about her mom
Read your entries over and ask yourself, “What does this say to me?”
Focusing line – leading you to the controlling idea
Before drafting –
Structures that memoirists use
Box out parts of touchstone texts
Little by Little – scenes – put in appropriately sized boxes
Morning
Afternoon
Morning
Afternoon
meaning
Memory – meaning – memory – memory – meaning
Memory – meaning
Meaning – memory – meaning
Get kids to box out a text after you model one for them
Big idea
Example
Techniques for developing scenes
Narrative detail (same as in personal narrative)
Pick the parts that add up to the meaning – in memoir
Pick the parts that build up and resolve your tension – in personal narrative
Some memoir is not story – no tension – just an anecdote, a scene
Some memoirs are stories – help them do the story part better if they are
Looking at kids’ work
Notice where the meaning-making is and be sure that the rest of the draft
supports that – add those in – take out other places that don’t support
meaning
PERSONAL ESSAY
Idea-based writing
The writer takes you on a journey of thinking about an idea
Personal anecdote supports the thinking
What a Writer Needs – pg. 157 essay on parents by 8th grader in NY
Look in newspapers
 Newsday
Column on Monday authored by teenagers
Weekend in part two
Write-in column on Monday – often essays
A dance between ideas and personal experience
See-saw structure in American Thin
Life for everyone as teenager – life for me
Lunch for everyone – lunch for me
Journey along some line of thinking
 Sometimes at the end you come to a conclusion, but it is not necessarily
stated strongly at the beginning and supported all the way through
 More explication of idea woven through the text
Studying Personal Essay
 Read essays – immerse
 Rereading notebooks for ideas for essays – focusing lines
 Find ideas that already exist
 They might want to stay with these to explore and develop them
 Question – exploring it – entry could feel like an essay already
 You could find a line and push off from that
 Focusing line –line that develops an idea from which you can push off`
Wondrous Words – looking at touchstone text and wondering about the work
the writer did in advance
Decisions in life are sometimes difficult
Listing things about the idea
Gathering anecdotes for personal essay
Go from specifics to general
Drafting
Looking at the structure of touchstone texts – box them out
3-paragraph anecdote
Idea
Story
Idea
Story
Idea
Tiny anecdote
General/specific
General/specific
There are specific and predictable moves you make in dancing as well as in
writing an essay
Need to think of narrative details in the anecdote sections:
Dialogue
Internal story
Character detail
Setting detail
Character movement
This is done in a more painterly way than in a narrative – the painter
suggests the form with just paint
Economy of detail – moving back and forth from ideas to anecdotes –
sometimes with a new paragraph