A narrative essay can be based on one of your own experiences, either past or present, or it can be based on the experiences of someone else if his/her experience impacted you.In addition to telling a story, a narrative essay also communicates a main idea, a lesson learned.First steps for writing a narrative essay:� Identify the experience that you want to write about.� Think about why the experience is significant.Spend a good deal of time drafting your recollections about the details of the experience.Create an outline of the basic parts of your narrative.Writing about the experience:Using your outline, describe each part of your narrative.Rather than telling your readers what happened, use vivid details and descriptions to actually recreate the experience for your readers.Think like your readers. Try to remember that the information you present is the only information your readers have about the experiences.Always keep in mind that all of the small and seemingly unimportant details known to you are not necessarily known to your readers.Communicating the significance of the experience:It’s often effective to begin your narrative with a paragraph that introduces the experience and communicates the significance. This technique guarantees that your readers will understand the significance of the experience as they progress through the narrative.Another effective technique is to begin the essay by jumping directly into the narrative and then ending the essay with a paragraph communicating the significance of the experience. This approach allows your readers to develop their own understanding of the experience through the body of the essay and then more deeply connect to your expression of the significance at the end.You might also consider introducing the experience in the first paragraph but delaying your expression of the significance of the experience until the end of the essay. This approach heightens your readers’ sensitivity to the significance of the narrative.Smarthinking, an online tutoring service, suggests keeping the following steps in mind when using the narrative to help you express your viewpoint:Situation (Explain the background information)Conflict (Explain why the situation is important to you.� Explain what conflict it creates in you.)Struggle (Write about the incident in narrative form to explain what happened to resolve the conflict.)Outcome (What was the end result of what happened?)Meaning (What is important about this incident? What did you learn? What did you decide?)