See also Chapter 1:

LITERACY NARRATIVE

Allegra Goodman,

O.K., You’re Not Shakespeare. Now Get Back to Work,

MEMOIR/REFLECTION

Miles Pequeno,

Check. Mate?

GRAPHIC NARRATIVE (EXCERPT)

Marjane Satrapi,

From Persepolis,

GENRE MOVES: LITERACY NARRATIVE

Amy Tan, From Mother Tongue

NARRATIVE

Patton Oswalt, Zombie Spaceship Wasteland

GRAPHIC NARRATIVE (EXCERPT)

Lynda Barry, Lost and Found

REFLECTION

Naomi Shihab Nye, Mint Snowball

MEMOIR

Ira Sukrungruang, Chop Suey

LITERACY NARRATIVE

Jonathan Franzen, The Comfort Zone: Growing Up with Charlie Brown

GENRE MOVES Literacy Narrative

AMY TAN

From “Mother Tongue”

I later decided I should envision a reader for the stories I would write. And the reader I decided upon was my mother, because these were stories about mothers. So with this reader in mind — and in fact she did read my early drafts — I began to write stories using all the Englishes I grew up with: the English I spoke to my mother, which for lack of a better term might be described as “simple”; the English she used with me, which for lack of a better term might be described as “broken”; my translation of her Chinese, which could certainly be described as “watered down”; and what I imagined to be her translation of her Chinese if she could speak in perfect English, her internal language, and for that I sought to preserve the essence, but neither an English nor a Chinese structure. I wanted to capture what language ability tests can never reveal: her intent, her passion, her imagery, the rhythms of her speech and the nature of her thoughts.

Use lists.

Though we might think that lists should only be included in genres like reports or proposals, lists in narrative essays can be very powerful. Lists allow writers to create a sense of rhythm and momentum; they allow us to acknowledge many possibilities within a story, even if we can’t explore all of them; they can mirror the stream of our thoughts. In the passage above, Amy Tan concludes her essay with two lists, one divided by semicolons, one divided by commas. Importantly, because this is a literacy narrative about “Englishes,” the lists allow her to catalog and honor the diversity of the language as she knows it. By ending the essay with these lists, she offers more than one conclusion or lesson.

Try ending your own narrative with a list of things you learned from experiencing your story or a list of things you hope your readers learned from reading it. Experiment with long lists, short lists, and different styles of punctuation. Reread your list and look back to make sure your narrative has effectively communicated all the things you have listed — this is a good test to see if your narrative is as complete as you’d intended. Then you may choose to use this list as part of your conclusion, or you might cut it. Regardless, developing the ability to effectively write lists can help you write in nearly any genre.