How to start a narrative essay？A robust variety of essay types that students get assigned in college can be nothing but confusing. It might sometimes be challenging to fully comprehend all the essay format requirements and accurately distinguish between different essay types. However, essay writing is not always associated with a burden and a ton of confusion. Namely, essay writing can be a lot of fun, especially if it is a Narrative Essay. We prepared this article for you to learn how to write a narrative essay that will boost your grade and leave your reader utterly impressed. This article provides you with relevant writing narrative essay tips, steps and examples for your reference.

一．how to start a narrative essay

1.Choose a Topic for the Narrative Essay

The trouble with coming up with narrative essay topics is a rare thing. Nonetheless, it might be difficult in case you have little motivation to write an essay. Here is what you can do. First, it would be useful to refer to the definition of a narrative essay once again: this essay requires you to think of a problem and talk about it in terms of your real-life example. Is there any topic that triggers your interest, the one that you are eager to talk about? Ensure that the topic you select is not alien to you: the one you can always spontaneously discuss.

想出記敘文主題的麻煩是很少見的。盡管如此，如果你沒有寫文章的動機，這可能會很困難。以下是你可以做的。首先，再次引用敘事性文章的定義會很有用:這篇文章要求你思考一個問題，并根據你現實生活中的例子來討論它。有沒有什么話題能激發你的興趣，讓你渴望談論的話題?確保你選擇的話題對你來說不是陌生的:一個你總是可以自發討論的話題。

It is better to avoid complicated and very knowledge-specific topics; selecting one can endanger your ability to communicate a message through a story. A transparent, explicit topic makes it facile for the reader to decode your message.

2.Elements of a Narrative Essay

As a rule, a narrative essay contains the following elements: character, motif, and dialogue.

Character. When telling a story, you can use as many characters as you want – just make sure they all fit into it. Characters live their own lives and act in their way, draw readers’ attention, and so they largely contribute to a story. Also, they are roughly the reason you are writing a narrative essay.

的性格。在講故事的時候，你可以使用任意多的角色——只要確保他們都適合這個故事。角色們過著他們自己的生活，以他們自己的方式行事，吸引著讀者的注意，所以他們在很大程度上為故事做出了貢獻。同樣，它們也是你寫記敘文的原因。

Motif. The motif is a critical element of a narrative essay that isn’t typical of another essay type. The motif should convey your idea and explain the importance of your story. Figuratively, a motif is a transition from your goal to the story.

Dialogue. Dialogues are means of fitting your characters into a story. Such an important component ensures that all of the characters have their role. Besides, dialogues add some liveliness to your narrative essay.

二．how to Write a Narrative Essay Outline

There are a few recommendations that help produce a solid outline that would prove really helpful in producing narrative essay:

Choose an interesting topic and an aspect of it that is really worth addressing. For instance, your general topic could be friendship and you could specifically focus on betrayal, various types of friendship, what makes friendship last for years. If it is personal narrative outline, be sure to pick proper personal narrative topics that interest you, about which you feel you have something valuable to say.

Write short – narrative is not a novel, while an outline should be even shorter. An outline has to be helpful guide that allows to quickly overview your narrative’s skeleton, all content to be covered and its relative order, to see all ramifications of each major point, situation, etc. It could only serve such purpose if it is concise.

Make it as detailed and comprehensive as possible. List everything you intend to cover – you might even write keywords below each point of the outline to designate other minor pieces of information that need coverage. Avoid unstructured text.

After listing all content elements, revise them and rearrange ideas, scenes, action episodes to enforce a logical flow and facilitate easy reading. Think ahead about which elements could be excluded if it happens that maximum text volume is exceeded and try writing these parts last – this may save you both time and effort.

列出所有內容元素后，修改它們，重新安排思想、場景和情節，以加強邏輯流程，便于閱讀。如果超出了文本的最大容量，請提前考慮可以排除哪些元素，并嘗試最后編寫這些部分——這可以節省您的時間和精力。

Mark in your outline which scenes would be described in greater detail. A plot may unfold with different speed and with different attention to detail. Thus, there could be scenes where much sensory information and many minor details are provided in order to depict the moment in vivid colors.

三.narrative essay example

Prompt:The title of this essay is:Mental Illness: A Srime In The 19th Century.I interviewed Stephanie Carlos who is a professional psychologist from Brisbane and has special knowledge about this topic who said “There was the mishandling and misuse of powers by the experts which contributed to the abolishment of the good rights.”

If the level of tension/stress that we bear in today’s times was carried by the people in the 19th century, they were considered lunatic. With all the research, it seems like the authorities back then really made sure that the environment is calm and peaceful for everyone. Even though it meant they had to “arrest” the people causing a slight hindrance to society. Yes, that’s right – arrest. Well, according to the report, it was worse than going to jail. People captured in the mental asylum were tortured to the extent where instead of helping those people heal, their conditions were getting worse at a faster rate. Especially in Australia where Victoria has officially declared the state with the highest insanity in the world in the 1880s.

Back then, human rights weren’t officially established, and hence it was easy for the authorities to misuse their powers. Their treatment included being tied up to a chair to the extent where they couldn’t move, their legs and hands chained, and head tied with a headrest over their face. For these people, there was no returning to normal – EVER! It is vital for us to dig into the past with regards to this topic as it can suggest how things can be approached differently in the present and future.

As history states, the control of the entire of Australia was in the hands of the British in the early stages and the British themselves didn’t have a good start. Before the formation of Australia, Britain was said to be the darkest place on earth for mentally ill people. Their ruthlessness towards the unstable had crossed all limits when they were reported to treat the patients like wild beasts until a depressed patient who was also a religious Christian died due to ill-treatment.

“When people in Britain gained knowledge of mental asylums being built in Australia, many families put their lunatic relative in the boat with some pounds and sent them to Australia. All the other abandoned people who were poor and homeless roaming on the street causing troubles were locked up in asylums. With time, they built more asylums and when Victoria started becoming this proud and prosperous city, they changed the laws for lunacy which gave the doctors more freedom to determine people as lunatic as per their definition” says Carlos.

Upon asking Carlos about how were people identified as lunatics back then, she said that the doctors and the government had a lot of power as there were no human rights introduced in the 19th century. They were the hunters of the town who could decide who was lunatic as per their will. They picked up people with intellectual disability, children with any sort of disability, people with dementia, epilepsy, people who had drinking problems, etc.

With that increasing number of people admitted to the hospital, there wasn’t sufficient staff to handle the chaos, and the mental asylums started falling apart. Day by day the quality of well-being at these hospitals dropped to worse which caused degradation of humanity.

“It won’t be wrong to say that people who were first brought to Australia may have had health issues as in the early stage of country formation, people were brought to a place they can’t return from and that must have dragged them towards mental disorder.”

From most of the pictures of the 19th-century mental asylums, the walls seem to have carvings with a number of drawings, pictures, marks, scratches which all look very hideous and disturbing. The rooms are seen crowed where patients are seen doing all kinds of things that reflect their mental conditions. Some are seen sitting quietly at one corner of the room, some are seen playing with random things, some talking to themselves, some crying, some fighting. The look of the hospital is best described as muddled with broken doors and windows.

The harsh treatment received by the mentally disturbed people wasn’t a headline anymore. In the 19th and 20th centuries, the western world started to believe and accepted that the treatment of mentally ill people was similar to torture. This acceptance made it easier for doctors to experiment with new ways of harsh treatment on the existing patients. Some of these treatments gave the patients near-death experiences.

In the process of researching new treatment methods, the doctors discovered old narratives dating back to the Roman times of people who recovered from insanity by being nearly drowned.

This theory led to mental patients being locked in cages and suffocate in water till the bubbles stop rising. As soon as the patient showed almost drowning signs, they were pulled back up expecting the patient to have survived the treatment and been reinstated their senses.

Other methods included spinning the patients till they vomited and unloaded their bowels.

A restraining chair was invented which looked slightly like an electric chair. To initiate the treatment, the arms and legs of the patients were tightly roped to the chair, closed stools were placed beneath the chair in case the patients evacuated their bowels during the treatment with a padded headrest that went through the eyes and ears. This situation disabled the patients from feeling any sensations and reduced the blood flow to the brain due to the chair’s firm grip.

Coldwater was poured on the heat and hot water on the feet. This experiment was expected to draw the “insaneness” away from the patients.

Mentally ill people who weren’t yet admitted to the hospital were sometimes being ill-treated by their family members. They were often hidden from the public view as the family members were too ashamed to carry the mentally ill to social events.

The electric shock therapy in its testing days experimented on the inmates where a part of the patient’s brain was detached. They lost all rights to their own existence with no hope of living a normal life again. With all these facts, the lives of the patients can certainly be termed – almost dead while alive.

在試驗期間，電擊療法在囚犯身上進行實驗，病人的一部分大腦被分離出來。他們失去了生存的一切權利，也沒有希望再次過上正常的生活。有了這些事實，病人的生命就可以被定義為——幾乎在活著的時候就死了。

Compared to all the cities in Australia, Victoria has exhibited to have the most number of immigrants over the last 150 years. As per the 18601’s census, 71% of Victoria’s population were immigrants. In the following years, this percentage fell down to 9 by 1947 but again rose post-1945 assisted migration schemes. Hence, a significant number of immigrants have formed the population throughout Victoria’s history. But the proportion of the population was even larger of Victoria’s mental hospitals during the 19th Century.

Victoria was a booming state and its citizens of demanded decency in their flourishing colony. Hence, the law was broadened for more people to be locked away in mental asylums. The new explanation of a lunatic became anyone of an unstable mind. This dragged in children and adults with intellectual disabilities, older patients with dementia, epilepsy, drunkards, etc.

At the end of the 19th century, Victoria had more lunatic asylums and a larger asylum population compared to any other state in Australia. By 1887, Victoria had 6 overcrowding asylums with 3300+ patients. As per the estimations, 1 in every 300 Victorians was a patient at the asylum. Predictions were made by an alarmed writer in his 1880 article ‘On the Prevention of Lunacy’ that –If the lunacy trends continued, by 2043 Victoria would have a population of 60 million – all of them ‘lunatics’.

Today, historians argue that one of the reasons for the mental health of Victoria to be so poor was the structural differences in population. As the majority of Victoria’s population consisted of male residents, the mental asylums predominated of male patients who were unmarried. As per the asylum casebook, the male patients were majorly admitted due to reasons like ‘disappointment’ and ‘isolation’ as almost all the female immigrants were recorded to be married and the males weren’t.

如今，歷史學家認為，維多利亞人的心理健康狀況如此糟糕的原因之一是人口結構上的差異。由于維多利亞州的人口大多數是男性居民，精神病院的男性病人主要是未婚的。根據庇護案例手冊，男性患者主要是由于“失望”和“隔離”等原因被接納的，因為幾乎所有的女性移民記錄都是已婚的，而男性則沒有。

Most of the men were diggers and moved to Queensland, New Zealand, Western Australia when the new gold rushes occurred. Others became bush workers and swagmen. Their ‘disappointment’ was in terms of failing to fulfill their dreams due to the migration schemes and ‘isolation’ was in terms of having no family around in Australia.

Due to all the loneliness and sadness being built up over the years, a number of these male diggers ended their lives in Victoria’s lunatic asylums.

Apart from all the diggers that were mentally distorted, other major groups consisted of Chinese immigrants. In 1861, the estimated number of Chinese men who migrated to Victoria was 25000 – all of them were single. At that time, there were only 8 Chinese women in the whole colony. Some of the Chinese men found their way to the asylums in the 1850s, their main reasons- language and cultural differences. As most of the medical and nursing staff of the asylums were British or Australians, their communication with the Chinese patients was very difficult. Gradually after 1901, when Chinese immigration was restricted, many Chinese voluntarily and unwillingly returned home after which, their numbers jumped to 6000+ including 600 Chinese women by that time.

A conclusion should logically end your story and provide the reader with some key takeaways. How did your story finish, and what are the possible implications? Most importantly, restate your thesis and specify its link to your motif. Finally, check whether you haven’t accidentally added an extra piece of information – this may confuse the reader.

結論應該合乎邏輯地結束你的故事，并向讀者提供一些關鍵的收獲。你的故事是如何結束的，可能的含義是什么?最重要的是，重申你的主題，并明確它與主題的聯系。最后，檢查你是否無意中添加了額外的信息——這會使讀者感到困惑。

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