Prewriting for Personal Narratives
Prewriting is your first step in writing a personal narrative. These prewriting activities will help you select a topic to write about, gather important details about the topic, and organize your thoughts before you begin a first draft.
Prewriting to Select a Topic
Explore topic ideas.
The goal for your narrative is to share a personal experience that taught you something or left a lasting impression. To help you think of topic ideas, complete as many of the sentence starters that follow as you can. Each complete sentence could become a topic for your narrative.
- My friendship was tested one time when . . .
- My worst day in school was . . .
- I had to stand up for myself once when . . .
- I remember the time I won . . .
- I told a secret, and . . .
- My most embarrassing moment in school happened when . . .
- I wanted to be part of a certain group, but . . .
- A neighbor helped me (scared me, surprised me), and . . .
Choose your topic.
Choose a topic for your narrative. Pick from the topics suggested by the sentence starters above, or choose another topic you have in mind.
Prewriting to Gather Details
Before you can share a story, you need to remember all the important things that happened. Asking and answering the 5 W’s and H questions can activate your memory and help you record important details about your experience.
- Who was involved in the experience?
- What exactly happened? (the actions or events)
- Where did it happen?
- When did it happen?
- Why did it happen? (the background)
- How did you change because of the experience?
Answer the 5 W's and H.
Use this 5 W’s and H chart to answer the key questions (who? what? where? when? why? and how?) about your topic.
5 W’s and H Chart
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Who? |
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What? |
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Where? |
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When? |
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Why? |
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How? |
Prewriting to Organize Details
All narratives need actions. Actions are the things that happen in the story. Usually, the actions are organized in time order, or when they happened. The following transition words can help you indicate the order in which the actions take place.
Time-Order Transitions
about
after
at
before
during
first
second
third
yesterday
meanwhile
today
tomorrow
until
next
soon
later
finally
then
as soon as
when
Place actions in time order.
List the things that happened in your experience, from start to finish. Write a time-order transition before each action to show how it fits in relation to the other actions. Use a time line to organize them in time order.
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1 |
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2 |
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3 |
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4 |
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5 |
Teaching Tip
Let your students know that their time lines can have more or fewer than five actions.