Your Life As Story:
Writing Narrative Nonfiction
Understanding Narrative Arc in Nonfiction

Last month when I introduced the various forms of Narrative Nonfiction, I referred to narrative arc as a defining element of craft. This is what I said: “What sets journal writing apart from a more formal piece of Narrative Nonfiction is narrative arc, an element of writerly craft you’ll hear me speak of often in this space, and one which I will focus on again and again, because without it stories don’t work; they are just snippets of narrative.”

So what is narrative arc and why doesn’t Narrative Nonfiction work without it?

Think of it this way: every story is about trouble. There’s got to be some kind of problem, you might say, a question that drives both writer and reader forward toward the end of the story.

As readers we want to find out what happened; we want to understand how the writer dealt with the question, so we keep reading. It’s like in a murder mystery when there is a dead body on the first page. We read on to find out who the murderer is.

"We need to have something pushing us forward, something we care about. . ."
—Norton

Same thing in Narrative Nonfiction. We need to have something pushing us forward, something we care about. But in Narrative Nonfiction, in an essay for example, it it can be small and contemplative. It doesn’t have to be sensational. It could be as quiet as pondering what happened to all the birdseed in the feeder in your back yard. Why! you filled it in the morning, but by mid-afternoon it was empty, and the seed wasn’t on the ground. What happened? In the personal essay, you write to figure it out. What you learn along the way you reflect back to the reader, moving toward some conclusion that hopefully dovetails with a larger insight into life.

Or in memoir, let’s say you are presented with a little girl orphaned at the age of six. She doesn’t whine. She’s spunky, and you begin to care about her, so you read on to find out how she makes it through all those tough years. There’s an element of trouble that drives the narrative, a problem, a question that nags. “What will happen,” you ask? And so you read on.

That nagging question becomes the engine for the narrative. It catapults the story forward into an arc that moves toward a conclusion. The conclusion brings satisfaction of the question.

How we make that journey from question to conclusion is the stuff of writing, and I’ll be talking about more and more of that as the months progress.