We discussed micro fiction in Monday’s post. Today we’re continuing to look at writing short works by looking at the narrative essay/article. Many will wonder just what a narrative essay is.
If you enjoy reading magazines like the New Yorker, Harper’s, or Reader’s Digest, you have read and enjoyed many narrative essays.
A narrative essay/ article is not a newspaper article, which (usually) deals in facts – who, what, why, when, and where.
The primary purpose of an essay is to offer readers thought-provoking content. Many narrative essays take an event and play fast and loose with the facts. Some elements are exaggerated, and others might be skipped over. The same is true of how the people involved are portrayed.
It might detail an actual event but will be colored and shaped by the author’s personal point of view.
The narrative essay conveys our experiences and ideas in a form that is easy to digest, so writing this kind of piece requires authors to have some idea of the craft of writing.
A list of highly regarded narrative essays and links to them can be found at 40 Best Essays of All Time (Including Links & Writing Tips) (rafalreyzer.com).
To write a good narrative essay, an author must understand the publishing industry’s grammar and mechanics standards. This is critical because the people who read this kind of work are dedicated readers.
Dedicated readers might vary in their level of formal education, but all are knowledgeable and will recognize when a writer is untrained.
I enjoy reading narrative essays when the author uses the opportunity to explore themes and subthemes.
Theme is vastly different from the subject of a work. Theme is an underlying idea, a thread woven through the story from the beginning to the end, binding the plot together. An example I regularly use is the movie franchise Star Wars.
- The subject of the first three movies is the battle for control of the galaxy between the Galactic Empireand the Rebel Alliance. That is what the story is about.
- Two of the themesexplored in those films are the bonds of friendship and the gray area between good and evil—moral ambiguity. Each character arc and every incident explores this struggle in subtle ways.
A narrative essay is a story that begins with an experience you once had. You know how that event began and ended. Just like any other form of short fiction, a narrative essay has a plot arc.
- Make an outline as you must develop both content and structure.
- Take some time to consider how you want your account to be perceived by the reader.
The arc of an essay is the same as that of a fictional story. It has
- an introduction,
- a plot,
- characters,
- a setting,
- a climax,
- a conclusion.
It’s not a memoir, so exposition must be limited. For me, the challenge is to not frontload the story. Offer the information at the moment the reader needs it. We must convey the most information with the least number of words.
If you love writing prose and choosing the right words, this might be a good medium for you.
Authors of narrative essays sometimes meet with criticism regarding the subject matter and how they present their opinions. This is because narrative essays often present profound and (sometimes) uncomfortable ideas.
A skillful writer can offer these concepts in a way that the reader feels connected to the story, even if they disagree.
Good essays express far more than mere opinion—they tell a story. The story is what keeps the reader engaged.
If you are writing about an actual event, names should be changed for your protection. This is because narrative essays are filled with information. They expose the places we go and detail the people we meet.
We don’t want to disclose too much information about ourselves or the people we have encountered. An honest narrative essay contains an author’s opinions. Sometimes those sentiments are not glowing accolades. One can lose friends if they aren’t careful.
Those who write narrative essays can make a living because literary magazines have open calls for them. Editors and publishers are seeking well-written essays/articles with fresh ideas about wide-ranging topics.
Some will pay well for first publication rights.
HOWEVER – if you want to be published by a reputable magazine, you must pay strict attention to grammar and editing.
Never submit anything less than your best work. After you have finished the piece, I suggest you set it aside for a week or two. Then come back to it with a fresh eye and check the manuscript for:
- Spelling—misspelled words, autocorrect errors, and homophones (words that sound the same but are spelled differently).
- Repeated words and cut-and-paste errors. These are sneaky and dreadfully difficult to spot. Spell-checker won’t always find them.
- Missing punctuation and closed quotes. These things happen to the best of us.
- Dropped and missing words.
As I mentioned above, don’t be afraid to use your words. Readers of narrative essays have a wide vocabulary. But there is one caveat to that:
- Never use jargon or technical terms that only people in certain professions would know unless it is a piece in a publication geared for that segment of readers.
Above all, be intentional and active with your prose, and be bold. I enjoy reading works by authors who are adventurous in their prose.
And on that note, we must be realistic. Breaking into any sort of traditional publishing is difficult. You will have trouble selling your work at first. You haven’t gained a reputation yet, and no one knows what to expect from you.
Also, you may have gauged your audience wrong, and your work might not appeal to the first editors you send it to.
Don’t be discouraged by rejection. Rejection happens far more frequently than acceptance, so don’t let fear of rejection keep you from writing pieces you’re emotionally invested in.
I have said this many times, but it is true:
How you handle critiques and rejections tells editors what kind of person you are to work with. Rejection allows you to cross the invisible line between amateur and professional.
Always take the high ground. If an editor has sent you a detailed rejection, don’t be angry or upset at their remarks. No editor sends a detailed rejection unless they see promise in the author’s work.
- Let it rest for a day or two, then respond with a simple “thank you for your time.”
Take some time to review what you submitted, keeping those comments in mind. Then form a plan to address those issues with a rewrite.
If you received a form letter rejection, don’t reply. But do look at your work critically and try to see what can be changed to improve it.
When you receive that email of acceptance, celebrate.
There is no better feeling than when someone, whose publication you respect, liked your work enough to publish it.
When a new writer decides to begin their career by embarking on writing a novel, the magnitude of the undertaking soon becomes apparent.
Writing a drabble takes less time than writing a 3,000-word story or a 70,000-word novel, but all writing is a time commitment. When writing a drabble, you can expect to spend an hour or more getting it to fit within the 100-word constraint.
I use a loose outline to break the arc of every story I write into acts, each with a specific word count. (I’ve included a graphic at the bottom of this post.)
I mentioned rewards in the title of this post. The completed story is a small gift you give yourself, and the surge of endorphins you experience in that moment of “Yes! I can write after all!” are the reward.
Strange beasts are a common trope in speculative fiction.
So, why do I feel the need to be so vague on a subject that fans are obviously interested in? The original idea for Keltin Moore’s world came from a RPG video game, which is one of the main reasons why the series shares many conventions with role-playing games, including the presence of a variety of dangerous creatures in an otherwise ‘normal’ world. While some games may give token explanations for their wandering monsters, the majority of enemy units in these games are just accepted as a part of the RPG world, no more unusual than ability cool-downs or health regenerating potions.
I am more of a planner. Like Lindsay, some of my fantasy work is RPG game-based. My mind works in a linear, logical manner. In real life, if something anomalous to the native plants and animals exists, it arrived there via external means.
Suburban coyotes, racoons, possums, deer – they all make their living in our backyards. In real life, our local fauna is there, part of the environment. Some are predators, so we keep our cats inside and work around the wildlife as a matter of course.
Here, the shoreline of Puget Sound determines the path of the interstate highway. The major cities and towns are located where there are good deepwater ports.
If you are designing a fantasy world, you might want to make a pencil-drawn map. Place north at the top, east to the right, south to the bottom, and west to the left. Those are called 
Access to water is crucial to life and prosperity. Humans have long understood the value of clean water for drinking, and you can’t count on getting that from streams or pools. Wells and the technology to make them have been around for a very long time. Cisterns have too, collecting rainwater for drinking and irrigation.
Those birch trees were nowhere near as tall as the giant cedars and Douglas firs I was familiar with. But once you were away from the road, the birch forests became dark jungles, tangled and mysterious.
We humans are tribal. We prefer an overarching power structure leading us because someone has to be the leader. We call that power structure a government.
Power structures are the hierarchies encompassing the leaders and the people with the power. Government is an overall system of restraint and control among selected members of a group. Think of it as a pyramid, a few at the top governing a wide base of citizens.
The same sort of God complex occurs among academicians and scientists. Some people are prone to excess when presented with the opportunity to become all-powerful.
Once NaNoWriMo is over, I try to shave my cast of thousands down to a reasonable level.
Take a second look at the characters in each scene and remove those with no real purpose. (Save everything you cut in a separate file—you might want to reuse these characters someday.)
What is even worse, halfway through the first draft of the second book in the series, Marta suddenly was a protagonist with a significant storyline. She actually becomes Marya’s mother-in-law in the third book. Fortunately, I was in the final stage of editing book one for publication. I immediately realized I had to make a major correction: Marta was renamed Halee.
Names are also a component of world-building. While recording Tales from the Dreamtime, a novella consisting of three fairy tales, my narrator had trouble pronouncing the names of two characters. This happened because I had written the names so they would feel foreign and look good on paper. 
Some people call this writers’ block. I think of it as a temporary lull in my creativity.
Sometimes, the problem is that your mind has seen a shiny thing, a different project that wants to be written, and you can’t focus on the job at hand. If that is the case, work on the project that is on your mind. Let that creative energy flow, and you can reconnect with the first project once the new project is out of the way.
In my real life, getting our house ready to put on the market saps my creativity, but I am muddling along. Boxes here and there, getting rid of this and that—it’s exhausting. Sometimes I don’t have the energy to write.
When we daydream, our brain is free to process tasks more effectively.
When I begin writing a first draft, I try to approach writing each scene as if I were shooting a movie. We know that each conversation is an event that must advance the story, but it must also give us glimpses of who each person is.
Having the fundamentals of the conversation to work with sharpens the scene in my mind, enabling me to frame it properly. Once I know what they are talking about and have the rudimentary dialogue straight, I add the scenery. Then, I insert the props and add the speech tags. The interaction grows, shedding more light on their relationship.
My above sample is not perfect, as it is from the first draft of a short story I never actually finished, but you get the idea. We learn more about the characters’ relationship with each other and see their place in this environment. The layers that form this scene are:
Set dressing (the props you place in the scene) shows the immediate environment. Having characters interact with props provides opportunities to insert hints that a deeper backstory exists. However, only have them interact with props that are organic or crucial to the story. This eliminates the problem of 
By beginning with the conversation and envisioning each scene as if I were filming a movie, I can flesh it out and show everything the reader needs to hang their imagination on. The reader’s mind will supply the details of the immediate setting depending on the clues I give.
Every writer knows the backstory is what tells us who the characters are as people and why they’re the way they are. At the beginning of our career, it seems logical to inform the reader of that history upfront. “Before you can understand that, you need to know this.”
But knowing this and putting it into action are two different things.
Be aware: if you are writing from an omniscient POV, this can be tricky and lead to “
Romance novels average 50,000 to 70,000 words. In shorter novels, there is no room for sweeping, epic backstories. Instead, information and backstory are meted out only as needed through conversations and internal dialogue/introspection.
Even with all the effort I apply to it, my editor will find things that don’t matter. She will gently take a metaphorical axe to it, highlighting that which doesn’t advance the story or add to the intrigue.
In many thrillers and cyberpunk novels, the faceless behemoth of corporate greed is the overarching antagonist. It can be represented by characters who are portrayed as utterly committed to doing their job and loyal to their employer. In many cyberpunk novels, the antagonists tend to be goons-in-suits, enforcers who work for the corporation.
Level 7 is a 1959 science fiction novel by the Ukrainian-born Israeli writer 
This type of psychopathic antagonist is explored exceedingly well in George Saunders’ brilliant sci-fi short story, 
When evil is a behemoth on the order of a mega-corporation or a military coup, the villains who represent it all have reasons for their loyalty. They’re like the hero; they care intensely, obsessively about something or someone. They have logical motives for supporting what we are portraying as the enemy. Our job as authors is to make those deeply held justifications the driving force behind their story.
Life in the Realm of Fantasy 
