The Value of Friendship

1. Compose a full 3 page narrative essay based on the topic listed below. The Value of Friendship Main points for essay: I value the friendship I have with my childhood friends because they are trustworthy, loyal, respectful, and very dependable. 2. Use a sufficient number of descriptive details and include the narrative details listed below. 3. If a source is need, please use an APA format. 4. Narrative is to tell a story, if you have any questions please email me. Narration is a pattern of organization that screenwriters, television writers, speech writers, news reporters, fiction writers, and even textbook writers use to relate a series of events. Narration involves a series of different events or a series of small incidents that make up one big event. Narration is a story-telling pattern. A narrator is one who tells a story. Whether a story is a fact or fiction, certain rules apply. These rules are simply readers’ expectations. When a story begins, readers except to know who are the people involved, what happens to them, where the story takes place, when it happens, and how everyone is affected. Plot and Structure Plot, the action element in fiction, is the arrangements of events that make up a story. A story’s plot keeps us turning pages, we read to find out what will happen next. But for a plot to be effective, it must include a sequence of incidents that bear a significant causal relationship to each other. Causality is an important feature of realistic fictional plots: it simply means that one thing happens because of – as a result of – something else. Example: E.M. Forster Story: The king died and then the queen died Plot: The king died and then the queen died of grief Many fictional plots turn on a conflict, or struggle between opposing forces, that is usually resolved by the end of the story. Typical fictional plots begin with an exposition, which provides background information we need to make sense of the action, describes the setting, and introduces the major characters; these plots develop a series of complications or intensifications of the conflict that lead to a crisis or moment of great tension. The conflict may reach a climax or turning point, a moment of great tension that fixes the outcome; then, the action falls off as the plot complications are sorted out and resolved (resolution). Characters Characters in fiction can be conveniently classified as major and minor, static and dynamic. A major character is an important figure at the center of the story’s action or theme. The major character is often called the protagonist whose conflict with an antagonist may spark the story’s conflict. Supporting the major characters are one or more minor characters whose function is partly to illuminate the major characters. Minor characters are often static or unchanging: they remain the same from the beginning of a work to the end. Dynamic characters, on the other hand, exhibit some kind of change – of attitude, of purpose, of behavior – as the story progresses. Narrator (Point of View), Characters, Setting, Interaction If you decide to use narration as an organizational pattern for an essay, five choices should motivate your planning: 1. Determining the significance of an event If you write about an event, you must first decide why this event is important to you and what you learned from the experience. In other words, you must understand the significance of the event not only to yourself but to your readers. By analogy, whatever you learn from an experience, your reader should also be able to understand, either by having had a similar experience or by relating to yours. 2. Deciding what sequence to follow – Story/Plot Events take place within a time frame. Something happens first, then something happens next, then something else may occur, and finally, the event is over. You have to decide how to organize the events. You might begin with a summary and then explain in detail what happened. Transitional words and phrases are a big help in connecting ideas so that you maintain the sequence without losing coherence and so that your readers can follow your narration. 3. Choosing a point of view/narrator An author’s decisions about who is to tell the story and how it is to be told are among the most important he or she makes. In a story with an objective point of view (1st person / 3rd person), the writers show what happens without directly stating more than can be inferred from its action and dialogue. The narrator does not tell us anything about what the characters think or feel. He reports and observes from a distant perspective without being actively involved. Stories with narrators who participate in the action are presented from a first-person point of view. Narrators of such fictions tell us their stories in their own voices with their particular limitations of knowledge and vision. The limitations of a first-person narrator offer writers the opportunity to exploit the discrepancy between the writer’s vision and the narrator’s. Reading stories in the first person, we have to question the narrator’s trustworthiness and remain alert for textual signals that either ensure or undermine it. Narrators who know everything about all the characters are “omniscient.” Stories with such narrators are written from an omniscient point of view. The narrator enters the mind of each of the characters and reveals what they think or feel. 4. Selecting examples and using descriptive details When using narration, you will need to use examples to support the main idea related to the event, or you may need to descriptive details to create a clear picture of a person or a place essential to the point of your narrative. Descriptive details play an important role in bringing a narrative essay to life. With descriptive details, you can make a point about a person or place or show the relationship of person and place to the events explained in your essay. 5. Adding dialogue for accuracy and variety Dialogue adds variety to your writing. When describing actual events, you can give a reader a sense of “being there” by directly quoting what people said. Dialogue makes people come alive. Instead of just describing them, you show them in action when you let them speak for themselves. Add to your essay only those bits of dialogue that you think will improve readers’ understanding of the people and events you describe. Planning a Narrative Essay • What happened? • Who was there? • When did it take place? • Where did it happen? • Why did it happen, or what caused it? • How did it happen, or what were the details and circumstances?