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How to Write a Personal Narrative Essay
Elle LaMarca | June 4, 2024 | 2 Comments
A personal narrative essay is a form of creative nonfiction writers use to share compelling stories from their own lives. Through the writing of personal narrative essays, writers can examine the events of their own life, and transform their everyday experiences into essays that uncover deeper truths in the world.
There are many different reasons why a writer may choose to share their stories through personal narrative essays. In this article, I’ll define and dissect the different elements and forms of personal essays, discuss when and why this creative nonfiction form may be for you, and share an example. I will also guide you through a step-by-step process on how to write a personal narrative essay.
Note: The terms personal narrative essay and personal essay are often synonymous and will be used as such in this article.
Let’s get into it. What is a personal narrative essay?
How to Write a Personal Narrative Essay: Contents
What is a personal narrative essay?
Why choose to write a personal narrative essay, key fundamentals of the personal narrative essay, personal narrative essay example, how to write a personal narrative essay – a step-by-step guide, various styles of the personal essay, next steps for personal essay writers.
A personal narrative essay is a type of essay in which the writer shares a personal experience or story from their own life. It typically involves reflecting on a particular event, moment, or period and presenting it in a narrative form.
A personal narrative essay is a type of essay in which the writer shares a personal experience or story from their own life.
In a personal narrative essay, the writer often aims to convey a specific message, lesson, or insight gained from the experience. These essays are characterized by their first-person point of view , vivid descriptions, and emotional resonance. They often explore themes such as personal growth, overcoming challenges, or the significance of a particular event in the writer’s life. Nearly all personal essays show a transformation in the writer that occurs as a result of the experience they are writing about.
While a personal narrative essay is a form of nonfiction, it employs elements of traditional storytelling techniques , like plot, characters, conflict , and setting, which allows the writer to craft an engaging, yet factual, story. Additionally, personal essays include a thesis statement and conclusion. Through the narrative, the writer constructs a broader argument, using storytelling as a vehicle to engage the reader. By immersing the reader in vivid, impactful scenes, the writer effectively builds their argument and leads the audience through a significant transformation, which results in a compelling conclusion.
People may choose to write personal narrative essays for a variety of reasons, each driven by personal motivations, goals, and experiences. I started writing personal essays three years ago. Prior to that, most of my writing was fiction based—novels and flash fiction. However, a few years ago, I began to feel a driving desire to write about some of my life experiences. I wanted to share what I’d been through, and find deeper meaning and connection by sharing my personal stories with others.
Here are several reasons why someone might want to write a personal narrative essay:
- Self-expression: Writing a personal narrative essay allows writers to express themselves creatively and authentically. It provides a platform to share your thoughts, feelings, and experiences in words, allowing you to articulate your unique perspective on the world.
- Reflection and introspection: Writing about personal experiences can be a form of self-reflection and introspection, a deeper way to examine moments that changed you. It allows you to explore your thoughts, emotions, and motivations, while gaining and sharing insights into yourself, your relationships with others and society at large.
- The gift of storytelling: Humans are inherently drawn to stories. Readers love to invest themselves in personal essays that propel them through a compelling true story. Your stories are a gift to be shared.
- Making sense of experiences: Sometimes, you need to write about it to better understand it. Writing about personal experiences can help you make sense of complex or difficult situations. Writing a personal essay may help you process your emotions, analyze events from alternate perspectives, and find meaning in the transformation that resulted from these situations.
- Sharing learned wisdom and personal lessons: At their core, personal essays are about transformation. Personal narrative essays often convey valuable lessons, insights, or wisdom gained from lived experiences. By sharing your stories and the lessons you’ve learned along the way, you may inspire, educate, or offer guidance to others facing similar challenges or situations. This is how transformation leads to connection.
- Building connections: Writing about personal experiences can foster empathy, understanding, and connection with readers who relate to similar experiences or emotions. It creates a sense of shared humanity and can help individuals feel less alone in their struggles or triumphs. Some of the best personal essays help readers feel seen and less alone, because they connect their experiences with yours.
- Documenting personal history: Personal narrative essays can serve as a record of your personal history. These essays preserve memories, perspectives, and insights for oneself and future readers. They capture the essence of a moment in time, providing a snapshot of one’s life journey.
- Creative expression through storytelling: For writers, crafting personal narrative essays can be a form of creative expression and storytelling practice. It allows you to hone your writing skills in a multitude of ways, experiment with various narrative techniques, and develop your own unique voice and style .
Overall, writing a personal narrative essay offers writers a powerful means of self-expression, reflection, and connection with readers. Whether for personal catharsis, artistic expression, or the desire to share life lessons, the act of writing and sharing personal stories can be deeply rewarding.
Personal essays are a great means of creative expression, in part, because the form offers writers a plethora of ways to share their personal experiences. There are many different styles of and containers in which to write a personal essay, and not a lot of hard and fast rules about how to do so. We’ll discuss some of those options in a bit, but no matter the form, most personal narrative essays contain these fundamental elements:
- Thesis Statement: Don’t be alarmed! This isn’t the same kind of thesis statement that you composed for high school research papers. In a personal essay, your thesis statement is how you express to readers what you are writing about. This represents the core idea or message behind your story. The thesis statement contains the theme of your essay. While your narrative will likely focus on a specific event or set of experiences from your life, the underlying theme should be a universal truth that resonates with a broad audience.
Including a thesis statement will clarify the purpose of your story for your readers. A strong thesis in a narrative often addresses or reflects on a central conflict, so the initial step in crafting a personal narrative essay typically involves identifying the core conflict in your story. Many personal essays are about an external conflict that in turn causes an internal conflict, which must be resolved by the end of the essay.
- Honesty and personal experience: Not surprisingly, a personal essay is about your personal experiences. Effective personal essays often showcase moments of vulnerability and self-discovery. Being honest about your experiences, even when it’s difficult, adds authenticity. Often you won’t be the only “ character ” in an essay, as it will feature other people from your real life. Tell your story honestly, but be mindful of others’ privacy and consider if you need consent from family or friends before sharing sensitive information.
- Pivotal moment: Like in fiction, your personal narrative should build up to a peak moment of tension or a significant turning point. This climax is often the most intense part of your essay and may coincide with an epiphany. An epiphany is a moment of sudden realization or insight. Insight describes those “aha!” moments—places in which you come to deeper realizations about your life, the lives of others, and the world at large. Insights do not need to be massive, culture-transforming realizations. Many moments of insight are found in small interactions and day-to-day experiences. These epiphanies—whether large or small—most often lead to a transformation.
- Transformation: The goal of a personal narrative essay isn’t just to write down the details of an experience; it’s to show how that experience impacted the writer and led to a transformation. Think of it as the why of your essay; the very reason why you’re writing it. There must be a shift in mindset, values, etc. over the course of the essay. You should not start and end a personal essay as the same person.
The transformation should illustrate the change or growth you undergo as a result of your experiences. Transformation is used to show how the events and conflicts in the story lead to a significant shift in the writer’s perspective, behavior, or understanding of themselves and the world.
- Sensory details and literary devices: Personal essay writers rely on the use of vivid sensory details and literary devices to recreate pivotal moments from real life in order to bring readers inside their stories. As much as possible, you want your readers to feel your experiences. Focus on all of the senses when writing. Do not just state what happened. Instead, describe what you saw, how it felt in your body, any colors, sounds or smells that were present. The goal is to fully immerse readers into your story.
Along with sensory details, personal essays often include common literary devices, like metaphor and symbolism , to add richness and depth to the narrative, which makes for a more compelling and immersive read.
A great narrative essay example is the piece “Flow” by Mary Oliver, which you can read for free on Amazon .
The essay dwells on, as Mary Oliver puts it, the fact that “we live in paradise.” At once both an ode to nature and an urge to love it fiercely, Oliver explores our place in the endless beauty of the world.
Throughout the essay, Oliver weaves in her thoughts about the world, from nature’s noble beauty to the question “What is the life I should live?” Yet these thoughts, however profound, are not the bulk of the essay. Rather, she arrives at these thoughts via anecdotes and observations: the migration of whales, the strings of fish at high tide, the inventive rescue of a spiny fish from the waterless shore, etc.
What is most profound about this essay, and perhaps most amusing, is that it ends with Oliver’s questions about how to live life. And yet, the stories she tells show us exactly how to live life: with care for the world; with admiration; with tenderness towards all of life and its superb, mysterious, seemingly random beauty.
Such is the power of the narrative essay. By examining the random facts of our lives, we can come to great conclusions.
As I previously mentioned, there aren’t many concrete rules to writing personal essays. However, there are general methods you can use to begin writing your first or your one-hundredth essay. Here is a step-by-step guide for you to try.
1. Choose a Topic
- What seemingly small life events transformed me in a significant way?
- When I think of the person I am today, which moments come to mind first that helped form the foundation of who I am?
- When did something alter my worldview, personal philosophy, or political beliefs?
- What moment of adversity did I overcome and grow stronger from?
- What is something that I believe to be very important, that I want other people to value as well?
- What life event of mine do I not yet fully understand, yet know I was altered by?
- What is something I am constantly striving for?
- What is something I’ve taken for granted, but am now grateful for?
- Select a Central Conflict: Once you’ve identified the experience you’d like to write about, identify a specific conflict or challenge that forms the heart of your story. Remember, a personal essay should show a transformation in the form of growth or change. Ask yourself, how the experience changed you and list the conflict(s) you had to overcome in order to change.
2. Brainstorm and Outline
- Free Write: Spend time writing about your chosen topic without worrying about structure. Capture memories, emotions, and significant details. Think about the other people involved, and the setting of your narrative. First, write down everything you remember about the experience. Second, make a sensory list of how you felt during this time. What did you see, hear, smell, feel?
- Create a Narrative Outline: Reread your free write, and highlight the key material you’d like to use and expand on. Next, organize your thoughts into a preliminary outline that details how you’d like to structure your essay. If it’s helpful to get you focused on a structure, your outline should include an introduction, rising action, climax, falling action, and conclusion.
For more advanced essay writers, this may be the stage where you decide on the specific container in which you’d like to tell your story, and/or the style of personal essay you plan to use. More on containers and styles of personal essays a bit later.
3. Draft Your Essay
Here is some advice to consider when drafting each section:
- Introduction: Compose an opening that hooks the reader. Start with a captivating opening sentence that grabs the reader’s attention. Set the scene by providing any pertinent background information, and introduce the main characters, setting, and the initial situation. State your thesis by clearly articulating the central conflict or the main point of your narrative.
- Develop the Body Paragraphs: Consider how you’ll relay the sequence of events. Will they follow a chronological order or an alternative time structure? Think about what you want to say and the best option for how to develop your story to maintain a clear narrative flow.
While describing key events be sure to use vivid descriptions. This will help bring significant events to life and immerse your readers inside your experience.
As much as possible, remember to show, don’t tell . Use descriptive language and dialogue to illustrate your experiences and emotions rather than just describing them.
- Build to the Climax: Highlight moments of conflict and build tension as your story unfolds. The climax is the peak of the story, where the conflict reaches its highest point. This should be a moment of transition for the writer. Make this moment impactful and vivid.
- Write the Falling Action and Conclusion: Describe the events that follow the climax, leading towards a resolution. Show how the conflict is resolved, and how the narrator, you, were transformed by the experience. Reflect on the outcomes and summarize the impact of the events on your life. Reflect on what you learned or how you changed.
The conclusion should reinforce the central conflict or theme of your essay, showing how your story illustrates this point and relates back to your thesis. End with a lasting impression—a thought-provoking statement, a question, or a reflection that leaves the reader thinking about your essay.
4. Revise and Edit
- Review for Clarity and Flow: Ensure your narrative is clear and logically structured. Make sure each paragraph transitions smoothly to the next. Consider if the structure you’ve selected is working for or against your essay. Do you need to change it? Have you included any unnecessary details that do not move your narrative toward the conclusion?
- Check for Descriptive Details and Balance: Revision is a great time to enhance your essay with descriptions and sensory details that you may have left out. You may also realize you’ve overloaded on descriptions. Too many colorful or overly written descriptions may detract from the poignancy the story. If so, make cuts to those that are not essential.
- Refine Your Language: Check for varied sentence structure and precise word choice. Avoid clichés and overly complex language.
- Proofread for Errors: Look for grammatical, spelling, and punctuation errors. Reading your essay aloud can help catch mistakes you might miss when reading silently.
5. Seek Feedback
- Consider Sharing with Others: Have trusted friends, family members, or critique partners read your essay. Ask them to highlight the areas of your essay they appreciate the most. If you’re up for it, ask for constructive feedback on content and style.
- Revise Based on Feedback: Consider the feedback you receive and make necessary revisions to improve your essay. Remember, you are the author and this is your story. You get the final say on how you use feedback from others to revise your essay. Use what resonates most and that you believe will improve your personal essay, then revise. It’s normal to go through many rounds of feedback and revisions to make your essay shine.
6. Finalize Your Essay and Decide if You’d Like to Submit for Publication
- Polish the Details: Make final adjustments to ensure your essay is clear, engaging, and free of errors.
- Follow Submission Guidelines: If you plan to submit your essay for publication, follow any specific formatting and submission guidelines required, such as word count, font size, margins, and spacing. Be sure to read these guidelines carefully and follow all of them exactly as stated. ( Here are some literary journals to submit to! )
- Self-publish: If you’re planning to publish the essay yourself on a personal blog or website, think of a title that suits your story and will attract readers.
As you become more advanced and invested in writing personal essays, you may want to try other styles beyond the standard narrative essay. Alternatively, you may still be a beginner but have an experience you’d like to write about in a more experimental style of personal essay.
Here are four examples of unique styles of the personal essay:
1. The Braided Essay
A braided personal essay weaves together multiple strands or storylines to create a cohesive whole. Each strand or thread of story may be different in terms of subject matter, time period, or perspective, but they are interconnected and work together to explore a common theme or idea. At first, the threads of a braided essay may seem mismatched or disjointed, but a central thread will always braid the strands together.
For more on the braided personal essay, check out our guide by instructor Zining Mok:
Braided Essays and How to Write Them
2. The Hermit Crab Essay
A hermit crab is a form of the personal essay where the writer adopts an external structure or container to tell a personal story. Just as a hermit crab inhabits a shell that was not originally its own, a hermit crab essay uses an existing form—such as a list, recipe, instruction manual, quiz, or any other non-narrative format—to present the writer’s narrative. This approach allows for a unique and often surprising exploration of personal experiences.
3. The Segmented Essay
A segmented personal essay is broken into distinct sections or segments, each focusing on different aspects of the central theme or story. These segments can vary in writing styles, length, and content, allowing the writer to explore a topic from multiple angles or perspectives. The segmented structure can create a mosaic-like effect, where each piece contributes to a fuller understanding of the whole.
4. The Lyric Essay
A lyric essay is a hybrid form of writing that combines the figurative language elements of poetry with the autobiographical details of the personal essay. It often blurs the boundaries between prose and poetry, incorporating lyrical language, fragmented structure, and emotional resonance to explore an experience or theme. The lyric essay is characterized by its emphasis on language, rhythm, mood and the exploration of personal and philosophical ideas, often in a non-linear and associative manner.
Learn more about writing the lyric essay here:
Writing Without Limits: Understanding the Lyric Essay
Personal narrative essays offer readers an engaging look into a writer’s innermost thoughts, feelings, and experiences, which provides a unique and intimate perspective on the chosen subject matter. It’s a truthful and revealing method of storytelling, where the reader is not just an observer but an active participant in the writer’s unfolding transformation. Writing a personal essay is never an easy endeavor, but it can surely be a rewarding one. (You can also have some fun with it, too!)
When you have a completed essay, what’s next? You might be interested in submitting to some literary journals. Here are 24 literary journals you can submit to—we hope you find a great home for your writing!
If you’re looking for additional feedback on your work, feel free to join our Facebook group . You can also take a look at our upcoming nonfiction courses , where you’ll learn the fundamentals of essay writing and make your story even more compelling.
Questions? Thoughts? Please leave any comments below. I’d love to hear from you!
Elle LaMarca
Thank you Elle. A most interesting topic. A just completed a poem that falls very closely to what you categorise as the lyrical narrative essay. I never realised at the time that this is what I actually did. What a joy to learn something new everyday.
Thank you, Philip. What a lovely discovery!
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How to Write a Personal Narrative Essay
by Sue Weems | 0 comments
Learning how to write a personal narrative essay is a core skill in most middle and high school writing classes, but narrative essays are great practice for so much more! If you've ever wanted to nail an assignment, an interview, or just be a more interesting person, this practice is for you!
As an award-winning teacher, I always begin my courses with a personal narrative essay, whether I'm teaching beginning composition to college freshmen or English to eighth graders.
Why? Because you know the most about yourself and your own experience. Most students find they don't know what to write about when they get assigned an essay. A personal narrative doesn't require any research.
Plus, learning to tell a story about yourself and your experiences is so valuable for more than school assignments. Let's break down this type of essay, so you can learn to write a terrific one.
What is a personal narrative essay?
At the most basic level, this kind of creative writing essay recounts a personal experience with a point or lesson. it is not your entire life story, but a small slice of life that was significant.
The goal of a personal narrative is to entertain and sometimes to share wisdom or offer tribute to someone who's made a significant impact on you.
These essays are often compelling narratives of human experience, but they don't have to be about a flashy, newsworthy moment. Any life event or experience that changed you or helped you understand yourself or the world in a new way can be a terrific topic!
Why learn to write a personal narrative?
The first question I always address when I assign this type of essay is why it's even something you need to learn. At first glance, students question whether or not learning to write about themselves really matters. But it does!
Sure, you want to do well on your school assignments, and it's helpful to know that college essay applications require one or more types of personal essay for admissions.
But beyond your educational goals, learning to tell a focused story about yourself will serve you well in cover letters, interviews, and even an author biography.
Additionally, the personal narrative essay is a staple of memoir writing. If you're hoping to write a memoir, a shorter essay is perfect practice for the type of storytelling skills you need to produce a book length memoir. (And it's the type of writing you would likely produce to promote a memoir once your book is published!)
What are the key elements of a personal essay?
I tell students you need a story from your life that recounts a meaningful experience. It will be a personal experience with one central idea.
You'll likely need all the elements of good storytelling, like a main character (that will be you!) with a goal, conflict, action, a crisis, and a choice or epiphany that results in change. You'll want to use vivid details, a setting, and some dialogue when appropriate.
So here's your (very short!) personal narrative checklist:
a story from your life (think one scene or one focused experience)
the one sentence lesson or wisdom you learned from that experience
If you need help figuring out a story or deciding which one to choose, let's discuss what makes for a great essay topic.
How to choose a personal narrative topic
Many students don't feel they have anything to write about. They claim to have a boring life and can't possibly have lived anything worth an entire essay.
They're wrong.
Your life is worth writing about because you're you. No one else has had the exact same experience you have–not even if you grew up in the same household.
No one has your voice. And only you can articulate what made an encounter life-altering.
Sometimes you will get a list of narrative essay topics to choose from. Other times you have to develop your own from a life event or life lesson. But either way, you can create a short list of ideas based on the moments that matter most for you. Here are some ideas to get you started:
Tell about a moment that left a mark. It can be a physical mark, like a scar or an emotional mark—positive or negative. Think about the activity you love most. Make a list of the three most memorable moments doing that activity (could be when you first started, a time you were successful or failed, etc.) When was a time you won or lost (or felt you did), but the experience was as gratifying as the outcome?
Whatever you choose, make it something that you care about that showcases your personality, voice, or strengths. For a full set of possible personal narrative writing prompts, check out our article here.
How to start a personal narrative
Once you have an idea about the story you want to tell, along with the statement of what it meant to you (the lesson or wisdom you learned), you're ready to begin writing.
Some assignments will ask you to write an introduction. If they require it, then write one. It might start with something related to the prompt or the lesson you learned.
For example, if the prompt is “Write a personal narrative about a favorite childhood memory,” you can use words from the prompt to begin your essay. “One of my favorite childhood memories happened in [time and setting] when I learned about the [hint at lesson].”
I prefer to jump in with the story and grab the reader from the first line. In this case, it will begin more like a story, where your first job is to show us a character in a setting with a problem.
The wind whipped my coat open on the middle school activity field. It was January and if the group of kids swinging on the soccer goal post was any indication, no teachers were on duty yet. “Come play with us on the goal!,” my friend Katie shouted, as she lifted another student to grab the bar.
Notice how an opening like this is straightforward. We know where we are (middle school activity field in winter)and what the initial problem is (friends inviting me to swing on a goal that's likely against the rules).
How to organize a personal narrative essay in 8 steps
When you tell the story, you can use a simple structure to guide the writing and then finish with the lesson. Here are eight steps to guide you:
- Begin with a character (that's you!) in a setting with a problem.
- Expand by helping us see who else is there and why (use sensory details here!).
- Then show us how you try (and possibly fail) to solve the problem or reach the goal.
- Repeat the try/fail cycle as needed, and remember to tell the story using dialogue where appropriate and details to make the scene vivid to readers.
- Build to a crisis point–the moment when a decision is presented (think about what you stand to gain and lose and the cost of either choice).
- The climax is the choice or high point–show what you chose or what happened.
- The denouement is what happened as a result of your choice in the climax.
- Finish by using a few sentences to explain the significance of the experience.
How to end a personal essay
You don't have to summarize the story or repeat the lesson over and over as you finish. Connect the story to the lesson or epiphany or significance, then turn toward the purpose of the essay.
Let's say you wrote about a person who inspired you–maybe a coach from your soccer team who stayed after one game to show you how to do something you'd failed at over and over. You could close your essay with a sentence or two about what the coach taught and why it still matters today.
Coach Wall taught me so much more than dribbling that day. She taught me what it meant to persevere and showed me that failure didn't have to be final. As I approach new situations that feel overwhelming at first today, I often think back to Coach Wall and that phrase she taught me: “It's hard because it's new. Keep at it.”
Write your own personal essay
Whether you're writing for school, family, or personal fun, practicing a personal narrative is valuable storytelling practice. These are the stories our parents and grandparents tell us around the table. They are the stories we tell each other as friends.
Learn to tell a great personal story and enjoy the connections you make.
What are your best tips for personal narrative? Share in the comments .
Set the timer for fifteen minutes . Choose one of the prompts above and collect your list of ideas, including a story and lesson for each. With the time left, start writing one of the stories.
When finished, share in the Pro Practice Workshop and leave feedback for a few other writers.
Sue Weems is a writer, teacher, and traveler with an advanced degree in (mostly fictional) revenge. When she’s not rationalizing her love for parentheses (and dramatic asides), she follows a sailor around the globe with their four children, two dogs, and an impossibly tall stack of books to read. You can read more of her writing tips on her website .
Work with Sue Weems?
Award-winning instructor and writer of 20+ years, book coach, and editor. Sue Weems specializes in working with Children's, Memoir, Middle Grade, Mystery, Nonfiction, Romance, and Thriller books. Sound like a good fit for you?
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