Narrative Structure
Thomas Clark
There's a structure that an essay follows for this personal narrative, that you begin with just bringing us into the moment. Immediately into the story. And then the story starts to unfold and in the process, we meet you, we meet the characters, we learn what the situation is.

Geoffrey Philp
So the narrative arch would go typically, introduction, exposition, inciting incident, what are the steps along the way that lead the main character to the confrontation. In the westerns it would be the obligatory sundown scene. It's that point, that point where, the character can either go this way or that way. It's a moment of choice. And then you have the dénouement and then, the whole catharsis. In Shakespeare it ends in marriage if it's a comedy, or if it's a tragedy everybody dies.

Clark
And the conclusion may be, it may just be a surprise, or it may be inevitable.
And it may not even completely resolve. It may not have a sparkling climax like a police story chase or something like that. It may be a very quiet climax. It may just simply be a coming to terms with whatever the problem is or the concern is, or an idea that well, this is just something that I'm going to struggle with for the rest of my life. Or the rest of my child's childhood. Whatever. But, it comes to a conclusion, and that conclusion is often a realization.

Kim Stanley Robinson
There is a classic structure that I believe was described by Aristotle; the introduction of the problem, the complications, the climax, and the dénouement. And it's useful to know that structure, but you use that basic Aristotelian structure of a story as the way that a jazz musician would use a very simple melody of four notes and yet you want to do something quite complex. And, knowing those four notes are there, you can take off and maybe reverse their order entirely, I mean you can do all of the changes that a complicated piece of music will do to a very basic theme. Run it backwards, hide the climax, have the guy remember the climax after the dénouement. I mean, all of these things are interesting and if they're put to the purpose of the story that you're trying to tell, then they're more interesting than running through the same structure time after time.

Santi Buscemi
I like to teach narrative writing to beginning students especially. Because it lends, first of all, a narrative gives the student a preset structure to follow. It's one event after another as Aristotle said, "Beginning, middle, and end." So that they don't have to worry about organization. Some of the other modes of discourse, like definition, cause and effect, argumentation, demand that a student devise his or her own organizational pattern for the piece. That's not true of narration. It's built right into the story.