Is my story interesting enough?

A lot of students come to this question at some point in the process of writing their essay. Not everyone has had amazing adventures or traveled to exotic places or made heroic plays that won the state championship, and that is really okay. In order for a story to be interesting, you simply need to help us feel that it is important to you. Tell your story earnestly—you shouldn’t go overboard with excessively heroic vocabulary or an over-the-top tone or exaggerated treatment of a simple experience just to try and make it into something incredible. Look back at “Rebel Music”—the experience that Felsenfeld relates is the simple discovery of a kind of music that he had not really heard before and how that caused a massive change in the trajectory of his life. He didn’t save a life, he didn’t climb Mt. Kilimanjaro, and he certainly didn’t cure cancer. However, that moment was important to him, and you can sense that in the way he tells the story and reflects on its effects towards the end. That’s all you have to do for your own narrative.

Where should I put my reflection?

You have several options here that I mentioned earlier. Most often, students reflect on their story in the conclusion. It’s a natural place to pause, after relating all the events of the experience, to think and talk about what it all means to you and how it changed you. You could also pause somewhere in the middle of the story—probably most of the way through—to do the same before revealing how everything settled down after you had changed. You might also split your reflection up into small chunks throughout the tale to help your reader notice important touch points when you started to change or began to take notice of things in a new light.

Wherever you choose to do it, make sure that your reflection helps us understand why this is a significant event in your life in terms of how it affected your literacy or your ability to make sense of some part of the world.

Won’t my reader just get how much I’ve changed?

In a word, no. It is your job, as the writer, to help your reader see everything that you want them to know. If you want them to really understand how much this experience changed you,^[1] then you have to help them get there. If you don’t show them what you were like before the experience, it’s unlikely they will understand how much you changed because they don’t know where you started.

Consider the following as an example of what not to do in your literacy narrative. In your intro, you talk about how you’ve always loved baseball. The body of your essay talks about how you got started, how hard you worked to get on the varsity team in high school, how difficult it was to help your team come together, and how awesome it was when you hit the walk-off home run in the state championship. You win! This is how you learned you could do anything you set your mind to.

However, in this example, where is the gestalt shift? You loved sports as a kid and went into sports as an adolescent. There’s no shift there. You worked hard and you achieved your goal. There’s no shift there, either. So, while this might be a great story, it’s not a great one for a literacy narrative. It might be a great literacy narrative only if you spend some time at the beginning of your essay talking about how as a kid you had very little confidence in yourself, didn’t believe that you could achieve anything, and had a lot of anxiety, and then at the end you talked about how winning the state championship changed how you saw yourself and what you could accomplish with hard work. That would be a great gestalt shift for a literacy narrative because you showed the reader what you were like before and then how you saw yourself differently after this experience.

How do I organize my literacy narrative?

You have a few options here. As with most stories, you can certainly start at the beginning of the story and tell it from start to finish. It’s functional, it’s expected, and it works.

You can also start in the middle of the action, throwing your reader into something exciting or interesting without explaining what’s going on first. That can be a fun way to start, but then you also have to figure out how to introduce the setting, the characters, and the purpose, and that can get complicated. So, it’s a little challenging, but the payoff is usually a much more interesting start.

A third option is to start at the end of the story. Start by taking the reader through where you ended up, or in the awards ceremony, or just before the final decision.^[2] Then, before taking the reader through the entire ending, take them back to the beginning so that you can explain what led up to the point you started them with. This is also a fun but challenging way to set up and tell your story.

How do I start my literacy narrative?

Well, I’ll start with a blunt answer and then expound: start with your main idea. Now, that doesn’t mean that your main idea should be the very first thing in your paper. It really shouldn’t. The very first thing in your paper should be something to get your reader’s attention and focus them on the topic of your story. The main idea should be the last thing you put into your introduction, right before you start the body of your essay.

How you start your actual paper is largely up to you. As I mentioned before, you could start your story at the beginning, and if you do that, you’ll want to come up with some way of connecting your reader to the story. Look back at the “Rebel Music” essay we read in class to see how Felsenfeld starts his essay, and that’s a good example of what you might do.

If you choose to start your story in the middle of the action or at the end, then you’ll probably start with the action or moment itself to really get the reader immediately involved and interested in the story. You’ll still want to pull back at some point and let the reader know what your main idea is, but the action itself is a good start all on its own.

How much vivid detail do I need to include?

In terms of vivid detail, you definitely want to make sure you have at least one moment that feels alive. In other words, we need to be able to live at least one moment with you and experience what you did and felt.

Beyond that, it’s really up to you. It is, of course, entirely possible to include too many details. When you start on a lengthy description of your toothbrush at the start of a story about breaking your leg on a hiking trip, then you’ve gone too far.^[3]

However, what I’ve found is that most students need more details, not fewer, so if you make a mistake, aim to put too many details into your paper. Then, if it turns out that there really is too much, you can cut some out in revisions.

Do I really have to tell the reader my main idea? Isn’t it better to surprise them with my story?

Yes, you have to tell them. No, it isn’t better to surprise them.

This is an essay, not just a story, and in an essay, we guide the reader through our thoughts and ideas and help them see what our main point is. That doesn’t mean you have to give away all the surprising details or interesting information in the introduction, but it does mean that the reader should have some sense of what you are going to be talking about by the time they finish reading your introduction. If they don’t know where you are going, you’re really going to confuse them when they get there.

As an example, I read a student’s paper that started with an introduction full of how much they loved gymnastics. They started loving it as a young kid, they got into it early, they worked really hard, they trained and trained and trained, and they had visions of what their life would be like centered around gymnastics. The body of the paper shared stories of triumph and overcoming difficulties to push ahead in their sport. They talked about their coaches and how much they influenced their life. Then, in the last paragraph, the author talked about breaking their leg and not being able to do gymnastics ever again. The end.

WHAT?! There was nothing in the introduction about a career-ending injury coming up. The only thing the student talked about was how dedicated they were to the sport, so the last paragraph was a complete surprise and left me confused, not interested. Don’t do that to your reader.