The core feature of a narrative essay is that it tells a story. While it is an essay that is centered around a thesis like a traditional academic essay, writing a narrative essay requires that you use a storytelling narrative. This means that you will either be using your own first-person perspective, or the third-person perspective of a given character to support your thesis. Rather than using objective scientific information to support your thesis as is the case when writing an academic, writing your narrative essay will force you to use storytelling to support your thesis through the plot that you choose to make use of in writing your narrative essay.
Writing a narrative essay requires that you understand that your primary purpose in writing such an essay is to use a narrative formed by a story to support your thesis so as to either make a claim, prove a point, demonstrate something, or put forth a moral argument. This represents the equivalent of a thesis in a traditional academic essay. What is different in writing a narrative essay is that you will not explicitly lay out your thesis in the third person. Rather, your thesis should be part of the introduction of your essay and will represent the core element of the narrative that all of your body paragraphs will refer to. While writing a narrative essay thus involves using a thesis, as would be the case in writing a traditional academic essay, this thesis takes on a new form because of how you are using a narrative storytelling approach.
For most narrative essays, you will be advancing a thesis but your thesis might not take on its traditional form. Rather, and because writing a narrative essay often involves using personal experiences, anecdotes and other types of informal information, the thesis that you will use in writing a narrative essay will be part of the story. Unlike a traditional academic essay in which the thesis is quite obvious, the thesis of a narrative essay might be more implicit because of how the thesis is a core part of the story. Keeping this in mind when writing a narrative essay is critical to getting an A+ because of how writing a narrative essay is so saliently premised on using storytelling.
Ultimately, the narrative essay is a type of essay that diverges significantly from the traditional essay because of how it uses storytelling to support its thesis. With this involving the use of the first-person perspective, dialogue and the absence of sources, a narrative essay is a unique type of essay. Keep this in mind as you write your narrative essay because you will be making use of tools and elements that you would not even consider when writing a traditional academic essay. Writing a narrative essay is unique and the process by which you write it will reflect the fundamental difference which storytelling brings about in writing a narrative essay.
