How to Start a Narrative Essay Strikingly

The way you start your narrative essay defines whether you will manage to keep your audience interested to the end of your essay or not. A top-notch hook can grab the reader's attention from the very beginning. Besides, your audience will take to your narrative if they find it catchy and interesting from the start and will surely want to read it to the end.

As a rule, readers are not able to retain their attention for a long time while reading which means they will gradually lose their concentration till it disappears at all. While reading, we can retain our concentration only for a couple of minutes before we start skimming through the paper. The reason for this phenomenon is that we get easily sidetracked and absorbed in our own thoughts paying zero attention to what we are reading.

The Structure of a Narrative Essay

This sort of paper is kind of experimental, anecdotal, and personal. It is written in the form of a story where the writer is allowed to speak his/her mind and add intimate details about the topic he/she is writing about. When writing narrative essays, it is imperative to stick to the narrative essay requirements from the introduction to the conclusion.

If you are working on a story, it must contain all the obligatory elements of a story:

• Introduction
• Plot
• Characters
• Climax
• Setting
• Conclusion

How to Start a Narrative Essay

This essay may not have strict guidelines and structures to follow, but still, it is quite hard to deal with. Without doubt, students always have difficulties with it. To start your essay properly, you should, first of all, write a riveting and inviting hook.

Remember that a hook is basically the opening of your paper and its first sentence. For narrative essays, a good hook is even more significant. When you are sharing your own experience, you should start your essay in an inviting and encouraging manner to grab the readers' attention and spark their interest in your story.

Here Some Ways of how to Present Your Hook

• Inserting a good quote: if you feel powerless to hit upon a nice hook, you can resort to inserting a relevant quote from a prominent person or any other inspirational source that matters to you.

• Using statistics: giving some important statistics on the subject matter is a good way to attract your readers' attention.

• Telling an anecdote: outlining shortly your narrative in one sentence can serve as an excellent hook.

• Asking a thought-provoking question: this approach can whet readers' appetite for reading your narrative to hear the answer to your question.

• Stating a fact: stating an interesting fact is a good way of arousing readers' emotions, especially it is something they have not heard of and can help them to understand the real world better by means of your personal experience.

• Providing a definition of a word: it will be instrumental in understanding your story's plot and give an insight into your narrative while serving a good hook.

Now you know for sure how to start your narrative essay.