Writing a personal narrative essay

Writing About Your Life

Writers often record the important parts of their lives! by telling about the people, places, and events that have affected them most. By writing about their experiences, they can learn more about themselves and share their knowledge about life with others. On this page you will learn how writing about your experiences can be helpful to you.

The Narrator

When you write about your own experiences, you are the narrator. The narrator is the person who tells, or narrates, a story.

Even though you write about other people, places, and events, you are telling the story and may use the word so many times. Realizing that you are the narrator is important because you are telling the story from your point of view.

Point of view is a way of looking at someone or something and may be both physical and mental.

Physical point of view means the location from which you observe something or someone. Watching a basketball game from high in the stands gives you a very different point of view from watching it from the bottom row of the bleachers. When you are positioned at a distance from a place, you have a different viewpoint from the one you have when you move closer to it.

Mental point of view is the way you think and feel about something or someone. Many small children, for example, are afraid of the dark and often imagine strange creatures lurking in the shadows. Usually they lose this fear as they grow older and realize the monsters exist only in their minds. Age changes their point of view.

Experience may also affect a person’s mental point of view. For example, perhaps you remember your first impression of school. At that time school may have seemed a strange, frightening place, but as you had experiences there, it began to seem more comfortable. Knowledge of a person, place, or event often causes a change in viewpoint. Spectators at a soccer game who do not know the rules may see nothing more than people running around on a field kicking a ball, but people who know the rules probably see something much different.

As you mature, your point of view changes continually. Even during this past year you have probably changed some thoughts and feelings. You may have learned to like someone you did not care about earlier, or you may have decided you like a food you thought you hated.

Writing Practice: Describing an Object

Make a list of objects that were important to you when you were younger. Choose one object and write a description of it as it appeared at that time. Include your thoughts and feelings about it and tell why it was special to you.

Then write a second paragraph explaining how your point of view has changed about the object now that you are older. I the object itself has changed over time, describe it as it looks now. Explain how your thoughts and feelings toward it have also changed. Is it still as important to you as it was when you were younger?