<p> Narrative Essay</p><p>Your Assignment: Compose a 1 ½ to 3 page narrative essay about a climatic event from your life that takes place in no more than a few hours. </p><p>The primary focus here is to pick one specific incident from your life to write about. You will then need to focus your paper on that incident. Strong topics are small and unique. We read stories and watch television shows because we find them entertaining; they share things that are a bit out of the ordinary. When you are choosing your topic, avoid events that happen to pretty much everyone: births, deaths, graduations, sporting events of any kind, weddings, first dates etc…</p><p>We aren’t writing about life-changing events here, since those are the kinds of things they make entire Lifetime movies out of. Instead, we’re focusing on small stories, the kinds of things you call your sister about because there’s no way she’ll believe it, or the kinds of stories our parents tell about us when all the family is gathered. I might write about:  the time I set my bed on fire,  the time my uncle thought it’d be hilarious to feed my nephew nothing but cheese balls,  the time my brother got kicked off the waterslide in Mexico, </p><p>Each of these event contains a series of events that lead up to a punch line of some kind, the point of the story. As I tell the events, the reader KNOWS that trouble is coming. This is what makes narrative different from description. It’s not just a listing of the sequence of events (a report) but a building of tension to a climax followed by resolution (the narrative arc). </p><p>Here are a few guidelines to keep in mind:</p><p> Your event can take no longer than 2 hours  The event should comprise at least 2-3rds of your paper (the rest is background and resolution)  Tell your story in the past tense  Use ACTION VERBS  Begin and end with sensory detail  Use dialogue at least twice  Drop clues about what is going to happen to build tension  Avoid telling a moral of the story</p>