5 Ways the Personal Narrative Will Improve Your Writing

“Write what you know” is one of the most common pieces of advice a writer will get, but it refers to more than just facts in your head. The personal narrative is a writing exercise that pulls emotional and experiential knowledge from your life. Whether you write poetry, fiction, or non-fiction, it can improve your writing. Personal narratives can take many forms, from a simple summary of an event in your day to a curse-filled, scratched-so-bad-in-heavy-pen-you-can-barely-read-it rant. Here are five ways these types of writing exercises can improve your writing.

5. It helps you build an emotional connection with readers. In the rant, for example, you write down everything that is bothering you, stressing you out, or overwhelming you. Just let it all out. When you’re done, you’ll have some impactful material other people are bound to connect with on a gut level—we’ve all been through something similar, at least on an emotional level. Keep these rants in your pocket, so to speak, and pull them out when you need them for your poems or stories.

4. It helps you find your natural voice. When you draft a personal narrative you tend to tell the story in your own voice—like you would explain it at a party. This brings out your natural storyteller voice. Practice this enough and your natural narrative voice will start to come through automatically in all your writing.

3. Asking, “What if?” can help create new stories from old experiences. If you’re struggling with creating a story, start with one you know. Maybe you’ll want to pretend you made a different choice, or roleplay to get the other person’s perspective. You’ll know where and when to change things when you get there. This can help your story branch in new directions and create new narratives from real experiences.

2. It can improve pacing and tension. When something happens to you, you know how it unfolded, what made it stressful, and what could have made it worse. In personal stories, you understand pacing and tension intuitively because you experienced it. For example, when retelling a stressful thing that happened to you, have you ever said, “Well, at least…didn’t happen”? If so, you’ve got room to make things even more tense. Run with it.

1. It will sharpen your observation and attention to important details. You know what details mattered in a story that happened to you. You know why you need to mention the coffee pot or the spoon and why it would be distracting to mention the clock. More importantly, you know the best time in the story to bring them up. Early story drafts often contain every detail a writer can think of. This helps build a tangible, real place for you and your reader, but it will be distracting if it’s excessive. Using personal narratives as exercises helps you focus on details that matter and ignore those that don’t.

Let us know in the comments if there is a type of personal narrative that inspired you in the past.