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Essay Samples on Life Lesson

The most important lesson i learned in life: embracing resilience.

The journey of life is an intricate tapestry woven with threads of experiences, each contributing to the canvas of our growth and wisdom. Among these experiences, one lesson stands out as the most profound: the art of embracing resilience. In the mosaic of life, resilience...

• Life Lesson

Life Experiences That Taught a Lesson: How Experience Contributes to Our Growth

Life is a journey filled with countless experiences that shape who we are and how we navigate the world around us. Some of these experiences are simple and joyful, while others are challenging and transformative. This essay explores several life experiences that have taught valuable...

A Life Lesson I Have Learned and How It Continues to Shape Me

Life is a continuous journey of learning, filled with moments that impart wisdom and shape our perspectives. Some lessons are gentle whispers, while others are profound experiences that leave an everlasting imprint. In this narrative essay, I will share a significant life lesson that I...

• Life Changing Experience

Rising Above Negativity: A Journey in Music and Self-Belief

My Early Music Career Let me inform you about a time when I realized a life lesson. A couple of weeks ago, I started out producing music; I was once just starting as a producer, and I had no prior expertise in song theory. I...

Traveling Through Life: Learning, Evolving, and Reflecting

Life Lessons Learned on a Journey What is a journey. A journey is an act of traveling from one place to another and the time in between that act. We took a look at many texts relating to people going on a journey such as...

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"Made In Heaven": An Analysis of Relationships and Life Lessons

Introduction The web series "Made In Heaven" on Amazon Prime has captivated the attention of the younger Indian audience. Created by Zoya Akhtar and Reema Kagti, the series has received both acclaim and criticism for its explicit depiction of sex, abusive dialogues, and portrayal of...

• Marriage and Family

Best topics on Life Lesson

1. The Most Important Lesson I Learned in Life: Embracing Resilience

2. Life Experiences That Taught a Lesson: How Experience Contributes to Our Growth

3. A Life Lesson I Have Learned and How It Continues to Shape Me

4. Rising Above Negativity: A Journey in Music and Self-Belief

5. Traveling Through Life: Learning, Evolving, and Reflecting

6. “Made In Heaven”: An Analysis of Relationships and Life Lessons

• Perseverance
• Career Goals
• Personality

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Essays About Life Lessons: Top 5 Examples and 7 Prompts

Read our guide to see the top examples and prompts on essays about life lessons to communicate your thoughts effectively.

Jordan Peterson once said, “Experience is the best teacher, and the worst experiences teach the best lessons.” The many life lessons we’ll accumulate in our life will help us veer in the right direction to fulfill our destinies. Whether it’s creative or nonfiction, as long as it describes the author’s personal life experiences or worldview, recounting life lessons falls under the personal or narrative essay category. 

To successfully write an essay on this topic, you must connect with your readers and allow them to visualize, understand, and get inspired by what you have learned about life. To do this, you must remember critical elements such as a compelling hook, engaging story, relatable characters, suitable setting, and significant points. 

See below five examples of life lessons essays to inspire you:

1. Life Lessons That the First Love Taught Me by Anonymous on GradesFixer.Com

2. the dad’s life lessons and the role model for the children by anonymous on studymoose.com, 3. studying history and own mistakes as life lessons: opinion essay by anonymous on edubirdie.com, 4. life lessons by anonymous on phdessay.com, 5. valuable lessons learned in life by anonymous on eduzaurus.com, 1. life lessons from books, 2. my biggest mistake and the life lesson i learned, 3. the life lessons i’ve learned, 4. life lessons from a popular show, 5. using life lessons in starting a business, 6. life lessons you must know, 7. kids and life lessons.

“I thought I knew absolutely everything about loving someone by the age of fourteen. Clearly I knew nothing and I still have so much to learn about what it is like to actually love someone.”

The author relates how their first love story unfolds, including the many things they learned from it. An example is that no matter how compatible the couple is if they are not for each other, they will not last long and will break up eventually. The writer also shares that situations that test the relationship, such as jealousy, deserve your attention as they aid people in picking the right decisions. The essay further tells how the writer’s relationship became toxic and affected their mental and emotional stability, even after the breakup. To cope and heal, they stopped looking for connections and focused on their grades, family, friends, and self-love.

“I am extremely thankful that he could teach me all the basics like how to ride a bike, how to fish and shoot straight, how to garden, how to cook, how to drive, how to skip a rock, and even how to blow spitballs. But I am most thankful that could teach me to stand tall (even though I’m 5’3”), be full with my heart and be strong with my mind.”

In this essay, the writer introduces their role model who taught them almost everything they know in their seventeen years of life, their father. The writer shares that their father’s toughness, stubbornness, and determination helped them learn to stand up for themselves and others and not be a coward in telling the truth. Because of him, the author learned how to be kind, generous, and mature. Finally, the author is very grateful to their father, who help them to think for themselves and not believe everything they hear.

“In my opinion, I believe it is more important to study the past rather than the present because we can learn more from our mistakes.”

This short essay explains the importance of remembering past events to analyze our mistakes. The author mentions that when people do this, they learn and grow from it, which prevents them from repeating the same error in the present time. The writer also points out that everyone has made the mistake of letting others dictate how their life goes, often leading to failures. 

“… I believe we come here to learn a valuable lesson. If we did not learn this lesson through out a life time, our souls would come back to repeat the process.” 

This essay presents three crucial life lessons that everyone needs to know. The first is to stop being too comfortable in taking people and things for granted. Instead, we must learn to appreciate everything. The second is to realize that mistakes are part of everyone’s life. So don’t let the fear of making mistakes stop you from trying something new. The third and final lesson is from Frank Sinatra’s “My Way.” People learn and grow as they age, so everyone needs to remember to live their life as if it were their last with no regrets.

“Life lessons are not necessarily learned from bad experiences, it can also be learned from good experiences, accomplishments, mistakes of other people, and by reading too.”

The essay reminds the readers to live their life to the fullest and cherish people and things in their lives because life is too short. If you want something, do not let it slip away without trying. If it fails, do not suffer and move on. The author also unveils the importance of travelling, keeping a diary, and maintaining a healthy lifestyle.

7 Prompts for Essays About Life Lessons

Use the prompts below if you’re still undecided on what to write about:

As mentioned above, life lessons are not only from experiences but also from reading. So for this prompt, pick up your favorite book and write down the lessons you learned from it. Next, identify each and explain to your readers why you think it’s essential to incorporate these lessons into real life. Finally, add how integrating these messages affected you. 

There are always lessons we can derive from mistakes. However, not everyone understands these mistakes, so they keep doing them. Think of all your past mistakes and choose one that had the most significant negative impact on you and the people around you. Then, share with your readers what it is, its causes, and its effects. Finally, don’t forget to discuss what you gained from these faults and how you prevent yourself from doing them again.

Compile all the life lessons you’ve realized from different sources. They can be from your own experience, a relative’s, a movie, etc. Add why these lessons resonate with you. Be creative and use metaphors or add imaginary scenarios. Bear in mind that your essay should convey your message well.

Popular shows are an excellent medium for teaching life lessons to a broad audience. In your essay, pick a well-known work and reflect on it. For example, Euphoria is a TV series that created hubbub for its intrigue and sensitive themes. Dissect what life lessons one can retrieve from watching the show and relate them to personal encounters. You can also compile lessons from online posts and discussions.

If the subject of “life lessons” is too general for you, scope a more specific area, such as entrepreneurship. Which life lessons are critical for a person in business? To make your essay easier to digest, interview a successful business owner and ask about the life lessons they’ve accumulated before and while pursuing their goals.

Use this prompt to present the most important life lessons you’ve collected throughout your life. Then, share why you selected these lessons. For instance, you can choose “Live life as if it’s your last” and explain that you realized this life lesson after suddenly losing a loved one.

Have you ever met someone younger than you who taught you a life lesson? If so, in this prompt, tell your reader the whole story and what life lesson you discovered. Then, you can reverse it and write an incident where you give a good life lesson to someone older than you – say what it was and if that lesson helped them. Read our storytelling guide to upgrade your techniques.

Maria Caballero is a freelance writer who has been writing since high school. She believes that to be a writer doesn't only refer to excellent syntax and semantics but also knowing how to weave words together to communicate to any reader effectively.

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Telling the Story of Yourself: 6 Steps to Writing Personal Narratives

Jennifer Xue

Table of Contents

Why do we write personal narratives, 6 guidelines for writing personal narrative essays, inspiring personal narratives, examples of personal narrative essays, tell your story.

First off, you might be wondering: what is a personal narrative? In short, personal narratives are stories we tell about ourselves that focus on our growth, lessons learned, and reflections on our experiences.

From stories about inspirational figures we heard as children to any essay, article, or exercise where we're asked to express opinions on a situation, thing, or individual—personal narratives are everywhere.

According to Psychology Today, personal narratives allow authors to feel and release pains, while savouring moments of strength and resilience. Such emotions provide an avenue for both authors and readers to connect while supporting healing in the process.

That all sounds great. But when it comes to putting the words down on paper, we often end up with a list of experiences and no real structure to tie them together.

In this article, we'll discuss what a personal narrative essay is further, learn the 6 steps to writing one, and look at some examples of great personal narratives.

As readers, we're fascinated by memoirs, autobiographies, and long-form personal narrative articles, as they provide a glimpse into the authors' thought processes, ideas, and feelings. But you don't have to be writing your whole life story to create a personal narrative.

You might be a student writing an admissions essay , or be trying to tell your professional story in a cover letter. Regardless of your purpose, your narrative will focus on personal growth, reflections, and lessons.

Personal narratives help us connect with other people's stories due to their easy-to-digest format and because humans are empathising creatures.

We can better understand how others feel and think when we were told stories that allow us to see the world from their perspectives. The author's "I think" and "I feel" instantaneously become ours, as the brain doesn't know whether what we read is real or imaginary.

In her best-selling book Wired for Story, Lisa Cron explains that the human brain craves tales as it's hard-wired through evolution to learn what happens next. Since the brain doesn't know whether what you are reading is actual or not, we can register the moral of the story cognitively and affectively.

In academia, a narrative essay tells a story which is experiential, anecdotal, or personal. It allows the author to creatively express their thoughts, feelings, ideas, and opinions. Its length can be anywhere from a few paragraphs to hundreds of pages.

Outside of academia, personal narratives are known as a form of journalism or non-fiction works called "narrative journalism." Even highly prestigious publications like the New York Times and Time magazine have sections dedicated to personal narratives. The New Yorke is a magazine dedicated solely to this genre.

The New York Times holds personal narrative essay contests. The winners are selected because they:

had a clear narrative arc with a conflict and a main character who changed in some way. They artfully balanced the action of the story with reflection on what it meant to the writer. They took risks, like including dialogue or playing with punctuation, sentence structure and word choice to develop a strong voice. And, perhaps most important, they focused on a specific moment or theme – a conversation, a trip to the mall, a speech tournament, a hospital visit – instead of trying to sum up the writer’s life in 600 words.

In a nutshell, a personal narrative can cover any reflective and contemplative subject with a strong voice and a unique perspective, including uncommon private values. It's written in first person and the story encompasses a specific moment in time worthy of a discussion.

Writing a personal narrative essay involves both objectivity and subjectivity. You'll need to be objective enough to recognise the importance of an event or a situation to explore and write about. On the other hand, you must be subjective enough to inject private thoughts and feelings to make your point.

With personal narratives, you are both the muse and the creator – you have control over how your story is told. However, like any other type of writing, it comes with guidelines.

1. Write Your Personal Narrative as a Story

As a story, it must include an introduction, characters, plot, setting, climax, anti-climax (if any), and conclusion. Another way to approach it is by structuring it with an introduction, body, and conclusion. The introduction should set the tone, while the body should focus on the key point(s) you want to get across. The conclusion can tell the reader what lessons you have learned from the story you've just told.

2. Give Your Personal Narrative a Clear Purpose

Your narrative essay should reflect your unique perspective on life. This is a lot harder than it sounds. You need to establish your perspective, the key things you want your reader to take away, and your tone of voice. It's a good idea to have a set purpose in mind for the narrative before you start writing.

Let's say you want to write about how you manage depression without taking any medicine. This could go in any number of ways, but isolating a purpose will help you focus your writing and choose which stories to tell. Are you advocating for a holistic approach, or do you want to describe your emotional experience for people thinking of trying it?

Having this focus will allow you to put your own unique take on what you did (and didn't do, if applicable), what changed you, and the lessons learned along the way.

3. Show, Don't Tell

It's a narration, so the narrative should show readers what happened, instead of telling them. As well as being a storyteller, the author should take part as one of the characters. Keep this in mind when writing, as the way you shape your perspective can have a big impact on how your reader sees your overarching plot. Don't slip into just explaining everything that happened because it happened to you. Show your reader with action.

You can check for instances of telling rather than showing with ProWritingAid. For example, instead of:

"You never let me do anything!" I cried disdainfully.

"You never let me do anything!" To this day, my mother swears that the glare I levelled at her as I spat those words out could have soured milk.

Using ProWritingAid will help you find these instances in your manuscript and edit them without spending hours trawling through your work yourself.

4. Use "I," But Don't Overuse It

You, the author, take ownership of the story, so the first person pronoun "I" is used throughout. However, you shouldn't overuse it, as it'd make it sound too self-centred and redundant.

ProWritingAid can also help you here – the Style Report will tell you if you've started too many sentences with "I", and show you how to introduce more variation in your writing.

5. Pay Attention to Tenses

Tense is key to understanding. Personal narratives mostly tell the story of events that happened in the past, so many authors choose to use the past tense. This helps separate out your current, narrating voice and your past self who you are narrating. If you're writing in the present tense, make sure that you keep it consistent throughout.

6. Make Your Conclusion Satisfying

Satisfy your readers by giving them an unforgettable closing scene. The body of the narration should build up the plot to climax. This doesn't have to be something incredible or shocking, just something that helps give an interesting take on your story.

The takeaways or the lessons learned should be written without lecturing. Whenever possible, continue to show rather than tell. Don't say what you learned, narrate what you do differently now. This will help the moral of your story shine through without being too preachy.

GoodReads is a great starting point for selecting read-worthy personal narrative books. Here are five of my favourites.

Owl Moon by Jane Yolen

Jane Yolen, the author of 386 books, wrote this poetic story about a daughter and her father who went owling. Instead of learning about owls, Yolen invites readers to contemplate the meaning of gentleness and hope.

Night by Elie Wiesel

Elie Wiesel was a teenager when he and his family were sent to Auschwitz concentration camp in 1944. This Holocaust memoir has a strong message that such horrific events should never be repeated.

The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank

This classic is a must-read by young and old alike. It's a remarkable diary by a 13-year-old Jewish girl who hid inside a secret annexe of an old building during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands in 1942.

The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

This is a personal narrative written by a brave author renowned for her clarity, passion, and honesty. Didion shares how in December 2003, she lost her husband of 40 years to a massive heart attack and dealt with the acute illness of her only daughter. She speaks about grief, memories, illness, and hope.

Educated by Tara Westover

Author Tara Westover was raised by survivalist parents. She didn't go to school until 17 years of age, which later took her to Harvard and Cambridge. It's a story about the struggle for quest for knowledge and self-reinvention.

Narrative and personal narrative journalism are gaining more popularity these days. You can find distinguished personal narratives all over the web.

Curating the best of the best of personal narratives and narrative essays from all over the web. Some are award-winning articles.

Narratively

Long-form writing to celebrate humanity through storytelling. It publishes personal narrative essays written to provoke, inspire, and reflect, touching lesser-known and overlooked subjects.

Narrative Magazine

It publishes non,fiction narratives, poetry, and fiction. Among its contributors is Frank Conroy, the author of Stop-Time , a memoir that has never been out of print since 1967.

Thought Catalog

Aimed at Generation Z, it publishes personal narrative essays on self-improvement, family, friendship, romance, and others.

Personal narratives will continue to be popular as our brains are wired for stories. We love reading about others and telling stories of ourselves, as they bring satisfaction and a better understanding of the world around us.

Personal narratives make us better humans. Enjoy telling yours!

Write like a bestselling author

Love writing? ProWritingAid will help you improve the style, strength, and clarity of your stories.

Jennifer Xue is an award-winning e-book author with 2,500+ articles and 100+ e-books/reports published under her belt. She also taught 50+ college-level essay and paper writing classes. Her byline has appeared in Forbes, Fortune, Cosmopolitan, Esquire, Business.com, Business2Community, Addicted2Success, Good Men Project, and others. Her blog is JenniferXue.com. Follow her on Twitter @jenxuewrites].

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Home — Essay Samples — Psychology — Adolescence — Personal Narrative Essay: My Experience In My Life

Personal Narrative Essay: My Experience in My Life

• Categories: Adolescence

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Words: 620 |

Published: Mar 13, 2024

Words: 620 | Page: 1 | 4 min read

Table of contents

Early childhood, adolescence, young adulthood.

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The Ultimate Narrative Essay Guide for Beginners

A narrative essay tells a story in chronological order, with an introduction that introduces the characters and sets the scene. Then a series of events leads to a climax or turning point, and finally a resolution or reflection on the experience.

Speaking of which, are you in sixes and sevens about narrative essays? Don’t worry this ultimate expert guide will wipe out all your doubts. So let’s get started.

Table of Contents

Everything You Need to Know About Narrative Essay

What is a narrative essay.

When you go through a narrative essay definition, you would know that a narrative essay purpose is to tell a story. It’s all about sharing an experience or event and is different from other types of essays because it’s more focused on how the event made you feel or what you learned from it, rather than just presenting facts or an argument. Let’s explore more details on this interesting write-up and get to know how to write a narrative essay.

Elements of a Narrative Essay

Here’s a breakdown of the key elements of a narrative essay:

A narrative essay has a beginning, middle, and end. It builds up tension and excitement and then wraps things up in a neat package.

Real people, including the writer, often feature in personal narratives. Details of the characters and their thoughts, feelings, and actions can help readers to relate to the tale.

It’s really important to know when and where something happened so we can get a good idea of the context. Going into detail about what it looks like helps the reader to really feel like they’re part of the story.

Conflict or Challenge 

A story in a narrative essay usually involves some kind of conflict or challenge that moves the plot along. It could be something inside the character, like a personal battle, or something from outside, like an issue they have to face in the world.

Theme or Message

A narrative essay isn’t just about recounting an event – it’s about showing the impact it had on you and what you took away from it. It’s an opportunity to share your thoughts and feelings about the experience, and how it changed your outlook.

Emotional Impact

The author is trying to make the story they’re telling relatable, engaging, and memorable by using language and storytelling to evoke feelings in whoever’s reading it.

Narrative essays let writers have a blast telling stories about their own lives. It’s an opportunity to share insights and impart wisdom, or just have some fun with the reader. Descriptive language, sensory details, dialogue, and a great narrative voice are all essentials for making the story come alive.

The Purpose of a Narrative Essay

A narrative essay is more than just a story – it’s a way to share a meaningful, engaging, and relatable experience with the reader. Includes:

Sharing Personal Experience

Narrative essays are a great way for writers to share their personal experiences, feelings, thoughts, and reflections. It’s an opportunity to connect with readers and make them feel something.

Entertainment and Engagement

The essay attempts to keep the reader interested by using descriptive language, storytelling elements, and a powerful voice. It attempts to pull them in and make them feel involved by creating suspense, mystery, or an emotional connection.

Conveying a Message or Insight

Narrative essays are more than just a story – they aim to teach you something. They usually have a moral lesson, a new understanding, or a realization about life that the author gained from the experience.

Building Empathy and Understanding

By telling their stories, people can give others insight into different perspectives, feelings, and situations. Sharing these tales can create compassion in the reader and help broaden their knowledge of different life experiences.

Inspiration and Motivation

Stories about personal struggles, successes, and transformations can be really encouraging to people who are going through similar situations. It can provide them with hope and guidance, and let them know that they’re not alone.

Reflecting on Life’s Significance

These essays usually make you think about the importance of certain moments in life or the impact of certain experiences. They make you look deep within yourself and ponder on the things you learned or how you changed because of those events.

Demonstrating Writing Skills

Coming up with a gripping narrative essay takes serious writing chops, like vivid descriptions, powerful language, timing, and organization. It’s an opportunity for writers to show off their story-telling abilities.

Preserving Personal History

Sometimes narrative essays are used to record experiences and special moments that have an emotional resonance. They can be used to preserve individual memories or for future generations to look back on.

Cultural and Societal Exploration

Personal stories can look at cultural or social aspects, giving us an insight into customs, opinions, or social interactions seen through someone’s own experience.

Format of a Narrative Essay

Narrative essays are quite flexible in terms of format, which allows the writer to tell a story in a creative and compelling way. Here’s a quick breakdown of the narrative essay format, along with some examples:

Introduction

Set the scene and introduce the story.

Engage the reader and establish the tone of the narrative.

Hook: Start with a captivating opening line to grab the reader’s attention. For instance:

Example:  “The scorching sun beat down on us as we trekked through the desert, our water supply dwindling.”

Background Information: Provide necessary context or background without giving away the entire story.

Example:  “It was the summer of 2015 when I embarked on a life-changing journey to…”

Thesis Statement or Narrative Purpose

Present the main idea or the central message of the essay.

Offer a glimpse of what the reader can expect from the narrative.

Thesis Statement: This isn’t as rigid as in other essays but can be a sentence summarizing the essence of the story.

Example:  “Little did I know, that seemingly ordinary hike would teach me invaluable lessons about resilience and friendship.”

Body Paragraphs

Present the sequence of events in chronological order.

Develop characters, setting, conflict, and resolution.

Story Progression: Describe events in the order they occurred, focusing on details that evoke emotions and create vivid imagery.

Example: Detail the trek through the desert, the challenges faced, interactions with fellow hikers, and the pivotal moments.

Character Development: Introduce characters and their roles in the story. Show their emotions, thoughts, and actions.

Example: Describe how each character reacted to the dwindling water supply and supported each other through adversity.

Dialogue and Interactions: Use dialogue to bring the story to life and reveal character personalities.

Example: “Sarah handed me her last bottle of water, saying, ‘We’re in this together.'”

Reach the peak of the story, the moment of highest tension or significance.

Turning Point: Highlight the most crucial moment or realization in the narrative.

Example:  “As the sun dipped below the horizon and hope seemed lost, a distant sound caught our attention—the rescue team’s helicopters.”

Provide closure to the story.

Reflect on the significance of the experience and its impact.

Reflection: Summarize the key lessons learned or insights gained from the experience.

Example: “That hike taught me the true meaning of resilience and the invaluable support of friendship in challenging times.”

Closing Thought: End with a memorable line that reinforces the narrative’s message or leaves a lasting impression.

Example: “As we boarded the helicopters, I knew this adventure would forever be etched in my heart.”

Example Summary:

Imagine a narrative about surviving a challenging hike through the desert, emphasizing the bonds formed and lessons learned. The narrative essay structure might look like starting with an engaging scene, narrating the hardships faced, showcasing the characters’ resilience, and culminating in a powerful realization about friendship and endurance.

Different Types of Narrative Essays

There are a bunch of different types of narrative essays – each one focuses on different elements of storytelling and has its own purpose. Here’s a breakdown of the narrative essay types and what they mean.

Personal Narrative

Description: Tells a personal story or experience from the writer’s life.

Purpose: Reflects on personal growth, lessons learned, or significant moments.

Example of Narrative Essay Types:

Topic: “The Day I Conquered My Fear of Public Speaking”

Focus: Details the experience, emotions, and eventual triumph over a fear of public speaking during a pivotal event.

Descriptive Narrative

Description: Emphasizes vivid details and sensory imagery.

Purpose: Creates a sensory experience, painting a vivid picture for the reader.

Topic: “A Walk Through the Enchanted Forest”

Focus: Paints a detailed picture of the sights, sounds, smells, and feelings experienced during a walk through a mystical forest.

Autobiographical Narrative

Description: Chronicles significant events or moments from the writer’s life.

Purpose: Provides insights into the writer’s life, experiences, and growth.

Topic: “Lessons from My Childhood: How My Grandmother Shaped Who I Am”

Focus: Explores pivotal moments and lessons learned from interactions with a significant family member.

Experiential Narrative

Description: Relays experiences beyond the writer’s personal life.

Purpose: Shares experiences, travels, or events from a broader perspective.

Topic: “Volunteering in a Remote Village: A Journey of Empathy”

Focus: Chronicles the writer’s volunteering experience, highlighting interactions with a community and personal growth.

Literary Narrative

Description: Incorporates literary elements like symbolism, allegory, or thematic explorations.

Purpose: Uses storytelling for deeper explorations of themes or concepts.

Topic: “The Symbolism of the Red Door: A Journey Through Change”

Focus: Uses a red door as a symbol, exploring its significance in the narrator’s life and the theme of transition.

Historical Narrative

Description: Recounts historical events or periods through a personal lens.

Purpose: Presents history through personal experiences or perspectives.

Topic: “A Grandfather’s Tales: Living Through the Great Depression”

Focus: Shares personal stories from a family member who lived through a historical era, offering insights into that period.

Digital or Multimedia Narrative

Description: Incorporates multimedia elements like images, videos, or audio to tell a story.

Purpose: Explores storytelling through various digital platforms or formats.

Topic: “A Travel Diary: Exploring Europe Through Vlogs”

Focus: Combines video clips, photos, and personal narration to document a travel experience.

How to Choose a Topic for Your Narrative Essay?

Selecting a compelling topic for your narrative essay is crucial as it sets the stage for your storytelling. Choosing a boring topic is one of the narrative essay mistakes to avoid . Here’s a detailed guide on how to choose the right topic:

Reflect on Personal Experiences

• Significant Moments:

Moments that had a profound impact on your life or shaped your perspective.

Example: A moment of triumph, overcoming a fear, a life-changing decision, or an unforgettable experience.

• Emotional Resonance:

Events that evoke strong emotions or feelings.

Example: Joy, fear, sadness, excitement, or moments of realization.

• Lessons Learned:

Experiences that taught you valuable lessons or brought about personal growth.

Example: Challenges that led to personal development, shifts in mindset, or newfound insights.

Explore Unique Perspectives

• Uncommon Experiences:

Unique or unconventional experiences that might captivate the reader’s interest.

Example: Unusual travels, interactions with different cultures, or uncommon hobbies.

• Different Points of View:

Stories from others’ perspectives that impacted you deeply.

Example: A family member’s story, a friend’s experience, or a historical event from a personal lens.

Focus on Specific Themes or Concepts

• Themes or Concepts of Interest:

Themes or ideas you want to explore through storytelling.

Example: Friendship, resilience, identity, cultural diversity, or personal transformation.

• Symbolism or Metaphor:

Using symbols or metaphors as the core of your narrative.

Example: Exploring the symbolism of an object or a place in relation to a broader theme.

Consider Your Audience and Purpose

• Relevance to Your Audience:

Topics that resonate with your audience’s interests or experiences.

Example: Choose a relatable theme or experience that your readers might connect with emotionally.

• Impact or Message:

What message or insight do you want to convey through your story?

Example: Choose a topic that aligns with the message or lesson you aim to impart to your readers.

Brainstorm and Evaluate Ideas

• Free Writing or Mind Mapping:

Process: Write down all potential ideas without filtering. Mind maps or free-writing exercises can help generate diverse ideas.

• Evaluate Feasibility:

The depth of the story, the availability of vivid details, and your personal connection to the topic.

Imagine you’re considering topics for a narrative essay. You reflect on your experiences and decide to explore the topic of “Overcoming Stage Fright: How a School Play Changed My Perspective.” This topic resonates because it involves a significant challenge you faced and the personal growth it brought about.

Narrative Essay Topics

50 easy narrative essay topics.

• Learning to Ride a Bike
• My First Day of School
• A Surprise Birthday Party
• The Day I Got Lost
• Visiting a Haunted House
• An Encounter with a Wild Animal
• My Favorite Childhood Toy
• The Best Vacation I Ever Had
• An Unforgettable Family Gathering
• Conquering a Fear of Heights
• A Special Gift I Received
• Moving to a New City
• The Most Memorable Meal
• Getting Caught in a Rainstorm
• An Act of Kindness I Witnessed
• The First Time I Cooked a Meal
• My Experience with a New Hobby
• The Day I Met My Best Friend
• A Hike in the Mountains
• Learning a New Language
• An Embarrassing Moment
• Dealing with a Bully
• My First Job Interview
• A Sporting Event I Attended
• The Scariest Dream I Had
• Helping a Stranger
• The Joy of Achieving a Goal
• A Road Trip Adventure
• Overcoming a Personal Challenge
• The Significance of a Family Tradition
• An Unusual Pet I Owned
• A Misunderstanding with a Friend
• Exploring an Abandoned Building
• My Favorite Book and Why
• The Impact of a Role Model
• A Cultural Celebration I Participated In
• A Valuable Lesson from a Teacher
• A Trip to the Zoo
• An Unplanned Adventure
• Volunteering Experience
• A Moment of Forgiveness
• A Decision I Regretted
• A Special Talent I Have
• The Importance of Family Traditions
• The Thrill of Performing on Stage
• A Moment of Sudden Inspiration
• The Meaning of Home
• Learning to Play a Musical Instrument
• A Childhood Memory at the Park
• Witnessing a Beautiful Sunset

Narrative Essay Topics for College Students

• Discovering a New Passion
• Overcoming Academic Challenges
• Navigating Cultural Differences
• Embracing Independence: Moving Away from Home
• Exploring Career Aspirations
• Coping with Stress in College
• The Impact of a Mentor in My Life
• Balancing Work and Studies
• Facing a Fear of Public Speaking
• Exploring a Semester Abroad
• The Evolution of My Study Habits
• Volunteering Experience That Changed My Perspective
• The Role of Technology in Education
• Finding Balance: Social Life vs. Academics
• Learning a New Skill Outside the Classroom
• Reflecting on Freshman Year Challenges
• The Joys and Struggles of Group Projects
• My Experience with Internship or Work Placement
• Challenges of Time Management in College
• Redefining Success Beyond Grades
• The Influence of Literature on My Thinking
• The Impact of Social Media on College Life
• Overcoming Procrastination
• Lessons from a Leadership Role
• Exploring Diversity on Campus
• Exploring Passion for Environmental Conservation
• An Eye-Opening Course That Changed My Perspective
• Living with Roommates: Challenges and Lessons
• The Significance of Extracurricular Activities
• The Influence of a Professor on My Academic Journey
• Discussing Mental Health in College
• The Evolution of My Career Goals
• Confronting Personal Biases Through Education
• The Experience of Attending a Conference or Symposium
• Challenges Faced by Non-Native English Speakers in College
• The Impact of Traveling During Breaks
• Exploring Identity: Cultural or Personal
• The Impact of Music or Art on My Life
• Addressing Diversity in the Classroom
• Exploring Entrepreneurial Ambitions
• My Experience with Research Projects
• Overcoming Impostor Syndrome in College
• The Importance of Networking in College
• Finding Resilience During Tough Times
• The Impact of Global Issues on Local Perspectives
• The Influence of Family Expectations on Education
• Lessons from a Part-Time Job
• Exploring the College Sports Culture
• The Role of Technology in Modern Education
• The Journey of Self-Discovery Through Education

Narrative Essay Comparison

Narrative essay vs. descriptive essay.

Here’s our first narrative essay comparison! While both narrative and descriptive essays focus on vividly portraying a subject or an event, they differ in their primary objectives and approaches. Now, let’s delve into the nuances of comparison on narrative essays.

Narrative Essay:

Storytelling: Focuses on narrating a personal experience or event.

Chronological Order: Follows a structured timeline of events to tell a story.

Message or Lesson: Often includes a central message, moral, or lesson learned from the experience.

Engagement: Aims to captivate the reader through a compelling storyline and character development.

First-Person Perspective: Typically narrated from the writer’s point of view, using “I” and expressing personal emotions and thoughts.

Plot Development: Emphasizes a plot with a beginning, middle, climax, and resolution.

Character Development: Focuses on describing characters, their interactions, emotions, and growth.

Conflict or Challenge: Usually involves a central conflict or challenge that drives the narrative forward.

Dialogue: Incorporates conversations to bring characters and their interactions to life.

Reflection: Concludes with reflection or insight gained from the experience.

Descriptive Essay:

Vivid Description: Aims to vividly depict a person, place, object, or event.

Imagery and Details: Focuses on sensory details to create a vivid image in the reader’s mind.

Emotion through Description: Uses descriptive language to evoke emotions and engage the reader’s senses.

Painting a Picture: Creates a sensory-rich description allowing the reader to visualize the subject.

Imagery and Sensory Details: Focuses on providing rich sensory descriptions, using vivid language and adjectives.

Point of Focus: Concentrates on describing a specific subject or scene in detail.

Spatial Organization: Often employs spatial organization to describe from one area or aspect to another.

Objective Observations: Typically avoids the use of personal opinions or emotions; instead, the focus remains on providing a detailed and objective description.

Comparison:

Focus: Narrative essays emphasize storytelling, while descriptive essays focus on vividly describing a subject or scene.

Perspective: Narrative essays are often written from a first-person perspective, while descriptive essays may use a more objective viewpoint.

Purpose: Narrative essays aim to convey a message or lesson through a story, while descriptive essays aim to paint a detailed picture for the reader without necessarily conveying a specific message.

Narrative Essay vs. Argumentative Essay

The narrative essay and the argumentative essay serve distinct purposes and employ different approaches:

Engagement and Emotion: Aims to captivate the reader through a compelling story.

Reflective: Often includes reflection on the significance of the experience or lessons learned.

First-Person Perspective: Typically narrated from the writer’s point of view, sharing personal emotions and thoughts.

Plot Development: Emphasizes a storyline with a beginning, middle, climax, and resolution.

Message or Lesson: Conveys a central message, moral, or insight derived from the experience.

Argumentative Essay:

Persuasion and Argumentation: Aims to persuade the reader to adopt the writer’s viewpoint on a specific topic.

Logical Reasoning: Presents evidence, facts, and reasoning to support a particular argument or stance.

Debate and Counterarguments: Acknowledge opposing views and counter them with evidence and reasoning.

Thesis Statement: Includes a clear thesis statement that outlines the writer’s position on the topic.

Thesis and Evidence: Starts with a strong thesis statement and supports it with factual evidence, statistics, expert opinions, or logical reasoning.

Counterarguments: Addresses opposing viewpoints and provides rebuttals with evidence.

Logical Structure: Follows a logical structure with an introduction, body paragraphs presenting arguments and evidence, and a conclusion reaffirming the thesis.

Formal Language: Uses formal language and avoids personal anecdotes or emotional appeals.

Objective: Argumentative essays focus on presenting a logical argument supported by evidence, while narrative essays prioritize storytelling and personal reflection.

Purpose: Argumentative essays aim to persuade and convince the reader of a particular viewpoint, while narrative essays aim to engage, entertain, and share personal experiences.

Structure: Narrative essays follow a storytelling structure with character development and plot, while argumentative essays follow a more formal, structured approach with logical arguments and evidence.

In essence, while both essays involve writing and presenting information, the narrative essay focuses on sharing a personal experience, whereas the argumentative essay aims to persuade the audience by presenting a well-supported argument.

Narrative Essay vs. Personal Essay

While there can be an overlap between narrative and personal essays, they have distinctive characteristics:

Storytelling: Emphasizes recounting a specific experience or event in a structured narrative form.

Engagement through Story: Aims to engage the reader through a compelling story with characters, plot, and a central theme or message.

Reflective: Often includes reflection on the significance of the experience and the lessons learned.

First-Person Perspective: Typically narrated from the writer’s viewpoint, expressing personal emotions and thoughts.

Plot Development: Focuses on developing a storyline with a clear beginning, middle, climax, and resolution.

Character Development: Includes descriptions of characters, their interactions, emotions, and growth.

Central Message: Conveys a central message, moral, or insight derived from the experience.

Personal Essay:

Exploration of Ideas or Themes: Explores personal ideas, opinions, or reflections on a particular topic or subject.

Expression of Thoughts and Opinions: Expresses the writer’s thoughts, feelings, and perspectives on a specific subject matter.

Reflection and Introspection: Often involves self-reflection and introspection on personal experiences, beliefs, or values.

Varied Structure and Content: Can encompass various forms, including memoirs, personal anecdotes, or reflections on life experiences.

Flexibility in Structure: Allows for diverse structures and forms based on the writer’s intent, which could be narrative-like or more reflective.

Theme-Centric Writing: Focuses on exploring a central theme or idea, with personal anecdotes or experiences supporting and illustrating the theme.

Expressive Language: Utilizes descriptive and expressive language to convey personal perspectives, emotions, and opinions.

Focus: Narrative essays primarily focus on storytelling through a structured narrative, while personal essays encompass a broader range of personal expression, which can include storytelling but isn’t limited to it.

Structure: Narrative essays have a more structured plot development with characters and a clear sequence of events, while personal essays might adopt various structures, focusing more on personal reflection, ideas, or themes.

Intent: While both involve personal experiences, narrative essays emphasize telling a story with a message or lesson learned, while personal essays aim to explore personal thoughts, feelings, or opinions on a broader range of topics or themes.

A narrative essay is more than just telling a story. It’s also meant to engage the reader, get them thinking, and leave a lasting impact. Whether it’s to amuse, motivate, teach, or reflect, these essays are a great way to communicate with your audience. This interesting narrative essay guide was all about letting you understand the narrative essay, its importance, and how can you write one.

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How to Write a Perfect Narrative Essay (Step-by-Step)

By Status.net Editorial Team on October 17, 2023 — 10 minutes to read

• Understanding a Narrative Essay Part 1
• Typical Narrative Essay Structure Part 2
• Narrative Essay Template Part 3
• Step 1. How to Choose Your Narrative Essay Topic Part 4
• Step 2. Planning the Structure Part 5
• Step 3. Crafting an Intriguing Introduction Part 6
• Step 4. Weaving the Narrative Body Part 7
• Step 5. Creating a Conclusion Part 8
• Step 6. Polishing the Essay Part 9
• Step 7. Feedback and Revision Part 10

Part 1 Understanding a Narrative Essay

A narrative essay is a form of writing where you share a personal experience or tell a story to make a point or convey a lesson. Unlike other types of essays, a narrative essay aims to engage your audience by sharing your perspective and taking them on an emotional journey.

• To begin, choose a meaningful topic . Pick a story or experience that had a significant impact on your life, taught you something valuable, or made you see the world differently. You want your readers to learn from your experiences, so choose something that will resonate with others.
• Next, create an outline . Although narrative essays allow for creative storytelling, it’s still helpful to have a roadmap to guide your writing. List the main events, the characters involved, and the settings where the events took place. This will help you ensure that your essay is well-structured and easy to follow.
• When writing your narrative essay, focus on showing, not telling . This means that you should use descriptive language and vivid details to paint a picture in your reader’s mind. For example, instead of stating that it was a rainy day, describe the sound of rain hitting your window, the feeling of cold wetness around you, and the sight of puddles forming around your feet. These sensory details will make your essay more engaging and immersive.
• Another key aspect is developing your characters . Give your readers an insight into the thoughts and emotions of the people in your story. This helps them connect with the story, empathize with the characters, and understand their actions. For instance, if your essay is about a challenging hike you took with a friend, spend some time describing your friend’s personality and how the experience impacted their attitude or feelings.
• Keep the pace interesting . Vary your sentence lengths and structures, and don’t be afraid to use some stylistic devices like dialogue, flashbacks, and metaphors. This adds more depth and dimension to your story, keeping your readers engaged from beginning to end.

Part 2 Typical Narrative Essay Structure

A narrative essay typically follows a three-part structure: introduction, body, and conclusion.

• Introduction: Start with a hook to grab attention and introduce your story. Provide some background to set the stage for the main events.
• Body: Develop your story in detail. Describe scenes, characters, and emotions. Use dialogue when necessary to provide conversational elements.
• Conclusion: Sum up your story, revealing the lesson learned or the moral of the story. Leave your audience with a lasting impression.

Part 3 Narrative Essay Template

• 1. Introduction : Set the scene and introduce the main characters and setting of your story. Use descriptive language to paint a vivid picture for your reader and capture their attention.
• Body 2. Rising Action : Develop the plot by introducing a conflict or challenge that the main character must face. This could be a personal struggle, a difficult decision, or an external obstacle. 3. Climax : This is the turning point of the story, where the conflict reaches its peak and the main character must make a critical decision or take action. 4. Falling Action : Show the consequences of the main character’s decision or action, and how it affects the rest of the story. 5. Resolution : Bring the story to a satisfying conclusion by resolving the conflict and showing how the main character has grown or changed as a result of their experiences.
• 6. Reflection/Conclusion : Reflect on the events of the story and what they mean to you as the writer. This could be a lesson learned, a personal realization, or a message you want to convey to your reader.

Part 4 Step 1. How to Choose Your Narrative Essay Topic

Brainstorming ideas.

Start by jotting down any ideas that pop into your mind. Think about experiences you’ve had, stories you’ve heard, or even books and movies that have resonated with you. Write these ideas down and don’t worry too much about organization yet. It’s all about getting your thoughts on paper.

Once you have a list, review your ideas and identify common themes or connections between them. This process should help you discover potential topics for your narrative essay.

Narrowing Down the Choices

After brainstorming, you’ll likely end up with a few strong contenders for your essay topic. To decide which topic is best, consider the following:

• Relevance : Is the topic meaningful for your audience? Will they be able to connect with it on a personal level? Consider the purpose of your assignment and your audience when choosing your topic.
• Detail : Do you have enough specific details to craft a vivid story? The more detail you can recall about the event, the easier it’ll be to write a compelling narrative.
• Emotional impact : A strong narrative essay should evoke emotions in your readers. Choose a topic that has the potential to elicit some emotional response from your target audience.

After evaluating your potential topics based on these criteria, you can select the one that best fits the purpose of your narrative essay.

Part 5 Step 2. Planning the Structure

Creating an outline.

Before you start writing your narrative essay, it’s a great idea to plan out your story. Grab a piece of paper and sketch out a rough outline of the key points you want to cover. Begin with the introduction, where you’ll set the scene and introduce your characters. Then, list the major events of your story in chronological order, followed by the climax and resolution. Organizing your ideas in an outline will ensure your essay flows smoothly and makes sense to your readers.

Detailing Characters, Settings, and Events

Taking time to flesh out the characters, settings, and events in your story will make it more engaging and relatable. Think about your main character’s background, traits, and motivations. Describe their appearance, emotions, and behavior in detail. This personal touch will help your readers connect with them on a deeper level.

Also, give some thought to the setting – where does the story take place? Be sure to include sensory details that paint a vivid picture of the environment. Finally, focus on the series of events that make up your narrative. Are there any twists and turns, or surprising moments? Address these in your essay, using vivid language and engaging storytelling techniques to captivate your readers.

Writing the Narrative Essay

Part 6 step 3. crafting an intriguing introduction.

To start your narrative essay, you’ll want to hook your reader with an interesting and engaging opening. Begin with a captivating sentence or question that piques curiosity and captures attention. For example, “Did you ever think a simple bus ride could change your life forever?” This kind of opening sets the stage for a compelling, relatable story. Next, introduce your main characters and provide a bit of context to help your readers understand the setting and background of the story.

Part 7 Step 4. Weaving the Narrative Body

The body of your essay is where your story unfolds. Here’s where you’ll present a series of events, using descriptive language and vivid details.

Remember to maintain a strong focus on the central theme or main point of your narrative.

Organize your essay chronologically, guiding your reader through the timeline of events.

As you recount your experience, use a variety of sensory details, such as sounds, smells, and tastes, to immerse your reader in the moment. For instance, “The smell of freshly brewed coffee filled the room as my friends and I excitedly chattered about our upcoming adventure.”

Take advantage of dialogue to bring your characters to life and to reveal aspects of their personalities. Incorporate both internal and external conflicts, as conflict plays a crucial role in engaging your reader and enhancing the narrative’s momentum. Show the evolution of your characters and how they grow throughout the story.

Part 8 Step 5. Creating a Conclusion

Finally, to write a satisfying conclusion, reflect on the narrative’s impact and how the experience has affected you or your characters. Tie the narrative’s events together and highlight the lessons learned, providing closure for the reader.

Avoid abruptly ending your story, because that can leave the reader feeling unsatisfied. Instead, strive to create a sense of resolution and demonstrate how the events have changed the characters’ perspectives or how the story’s theme has developed.

For example, “Looking back, I realize that the bus ride not only changed my perspective on friendship, but also taught me valuable life lessons that I carry with me to this day.”

Part 9 Step 6. Polishing the Essay

Fine-tuning your language.

When writing a narrative essay, it’s key to choose words that convey the emotions and experiences you’re describing. Opt for specific, vivid language that creates a clear mental image for your reader. For instance, instead of saying “The weather was hot,” try “The sun scorched the pavement, causing the air to shimmer like a mirage.” This gives your essay a more engaging and immersive feeling.

Editing for Clarity and Concision

As you revise your essay, keep an eye out for redundancies and unnecessary words that might dilute the impact of your story. Getting to the point and using straightforward language can help your essay flow better. For example, instead of using “She was walking in a very slow manner,” you can say, “She strolled leisurely.” Eliminate filler words and phrases, keeping only the most pertinent information that moves your story forward.

Proofreading for Typos

Finally, proofread your essay carefully to catch any typos, grammatical errors, or punctuation mistakes. It’s always a good idea to have someone else read it as well, as they might catch errors you didn’t notice. Mistakes can be distracting and may undermine the credibility of your writing, so be thorough with your editing process.

Part 10 Step 7. Feedback and Revision

Gathering feedback.

After you’ve written the first draft of your narrative essay, it’s time to gather feedback from friends, family, or colleagues. Share your essay with a few trusted people who can provide insights and suggestions for improvement. Listen to their thoughts and be open to constructive criticism. You might be surprised by the different perspectives they offer, which can strengthen your essay.

Iterating on the Draft

Once you have collected feedback, it’s time to revise and refine your essay. Address any issues or concerns raised by your readers and incorporate their suggestions. Consider reorganizing your story’s structure, clarifying your descriptions, or adding more details based on the feedback you received.

As you make changes, continue to fine-tune your essay to ensure a smooth flow and a strong narrative. Don’t be afraid to cut out unnecessary elements or rework parts of your story until it’s polished and compelling.

Revision is a crucial part of the writing process, and taking the time to reflect on feedback and make improvements will help you create a more engaging and impactful narrative essay.

Frequently Asked Questions

How can i create an engaging introduction.

Craft an attention-grabbing hook with a thought-provoking question, an interesting fact, or a vivid description. Set the stage for your story by introducing the time, place, and context for the events. Creating tension or raising curiosity will make your readers eager to learn more.

What strategies help develop strong characters?

To develop strong characters, consider the following:

• Give your characters distinct traits, strengths, and weaknesses.
• Provide a backstory to explain their actions and motivations.
• Use dialogue to present their personality, emotions, and relationships.
• Show how they change or evolve throughout your story.

How can I make my story flow smoothly with transitions?

Smooth transitions between scenes or events can create a more coherent and easy-to-follow story. Consider the following tips to improve your transitions:

• Use words and phrases like “meanwhile,” “later that day,” or “afterward” to signify changes in time.
• Link scenes with a common theme or element.
• Revisit the main characters or setting to maintain continuity.
• Introduce a twist or an unexpected event that leads to the next scene.

What are some tips for choosing a great narrative essay topic?

To choose an engaging narrative essay topic, follow these tips:

• Pick a personal experience or story that holds significance for you.
• Consider a challenge or a turning point you’ve faced in your life.
• Opt for a topic that will allow you to share emotions and lessons learned.
• Think about what your audience would find relatable, intriguing, or inspiring.

How do I wrap up my narrative essay with a strong conclusion?

A compelling conclusion restates the main events and highlights any lessons learned or growth in your character. Try to end on a thought-provoking note or leave readers with some food for thought. Finally, make sure your conclusion wraps up your story neatly and reinforces its overall message.

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How to Write a Narrative Essay

Essay writing comes in many forms, not all of which require extensive research. One such form is the narrative essay, which blends personal storytelling with academic discussion. Authors of these essays use their own experiences to convey broader insights about life.

This genre offers writers a unique chance to connect with readers on a personal level. By sharing experiences and reflections, authors engage their audience emotionally while conveying important messages or lessons. In the following sections, our custom term paper writing experts will explore various aspects of narrative writing, from choosing a topic to effectively structuring your essay!

What Is a Narrative Essay

A narrative essay is a piece of writing that tells a story, often based on personal experiences. Unlike academic or journalistic writing, which sticks to facts and a formal style, narrative essays use a more creative approach. They aim to make a point or impart a lesson through personal stories. These essays are commonly assigned in high school or for college admissions. An effective narrative essay typically follows a chronological order of events and has three main traits:

• Has one main idea.
• Uses specific facts to explain that idea.
• Follows a clear order of events.

A narrative essay resembles short stories in structure, with vivid illustrations, plots, characters, and discussion. However, there are key differences. These essays are focused on a central theme or argument and conclude decisively, while short stories often have a more abstract moral or message.

A narrative essay is usually written in the first person and follows a standard structure with an introduction, body, and conclusion. Short stories, on the other hand, can take various formats.

What is the Purpose of a Narrative Essay

When tasked with writing, you might wonder what the exact purpose of a narrative essay is. Here are various scenarios where you might need to write one:

• School Assignments: Teachers often assign them to help students improve their writing and storytelling skills. Sharing personal experiences lets students get feedback and improve.
• Reflective Writing: They offer a chance to think about personal achievements. Whether it's winning an award or reaching a goal, writing about these experiences helps people understand their importance and share them with others. Meanwhile, if you wish to describe your life in greater depth, you might look at how to write an autobiography .
• Application Requirements: They're often needed for job, internship, or scholarship applications. These essays let applicants show their experiences and goals, standing out from others.
• Literary Analysis : In literature classes, you might write them to analyze stories or poems. You'll explore themes, characters, and how the story is told.
• Historical Reflection : In history or social studies, you'll use these essays to think about events in the past. By imagining the experiences of people in different times, you can understand history better.
• Cultural Exploration : These essays help you explore different cultures. In classes like anthropology or sociology, you might write about your own culture or learn about others by telling their stories.

How to Write a Narrative Essay in 5 Steps

Crafting a narrative essay is a whole different ball game compared to other school essays. Instead of analyzing topics, it's about sharing personal experiences through storytelling. By walking through a few easy steps below, you can turn your ideas into a gripping narrative. And, if sharing your personal stories is not your cup of tea, you can buy essays online from our expert writers, who will customize the paper to your particular writing style and tone.

Step 1: Start with a Topic Selection

When writing a narrative essay, start by choosing a topic that either relates to your own experiences or matches a given prompt. If there's a prompt, think about what it asks for and brainstorm ideas that fit.

As you brainstorm, write down key points or moments you want to include. Think about how each point fits into your essay's structure and if it meets any word count limits.

Consider the tone and style you want for your writing. Will it be reflective or humorous? Are there specific stylistic choices you want to use, like repeating phrases or leaving cliffhanger endings? These choices shape your narrative and keep your reader engaged. And, stay flexible as you explore ideas. You can always tweak your topic, tone, and style as you write.

Read more on Narrative Essay Topic to skip the brainstorming and choose a ready-made option!

Step 2: Make a Clear Outline

Once you've picked your topic, make a narrative essay outline. It acts as a roadmap for telling your story effectively. Identify the key points you want to cover, like important events or lessons learned, and assign each to a paragraph, ensuring a logical flow of ideas.

The outline will plan the progression of your narrative, letting you map out events and decide how much detail to give each point. For example, if you're writing about overcoming a challenge, your outline might have a paragraph for background, then paragraphs detailing your perseverance and the obstacles you faced. Finally, if you're wondering how to write an essay conclusion , you'll just summarize the experience and its lessons.

Step 3: Write Your Narrative Essay

Now, it's time to start writing a narrative essay! Use your outline as a guide, and write each section with clear and engaging language.

Remember, narrative essays are about expressing yourself creatively, so don't worry about sticking to formal academic writing rules. Focus on captivating your reader and bringing your story to life.

Tip 💡 Use first-person : Write from your perspective using pronouns like 'I' and 'me' to make your narrative essay personal and engaging.

Tip 💡 Employ storytelling techniques : Use techniques from fiction and creative nonfiction, like dialogue and symbolism, to enhance your narrative and engage readers.

Tip 💡 Show, don't tell : Instead of just stating facts, use vivid descriptions and sensory details to let the reader experience the story with you.

Tip 💡 Be authentic : Stay true to your own voice and experiences. Share your thoughts and feelings honestly to make your narrative essay genuine and relatable.

Step 4: Don't Forget to Revise

After finishing your essay, it's crucial to revise and refine it. But first, take a break after your first draft to return with fresh eyes and a clear mind. This is one of the most important tips for writing a narrative essay, making it easier to identify areas that need improvement.

When you return, read through your essay carefully to ensure logical flow and coherence. Check for any inconsistencies or gaps in the narrative and make revisions as needed to improve clarity. Pay attention to details such as tense, point of view, and narrative voice throughout your essay.

Step 5: Proofread Your Writing

As you consider ending a narrative essay, it's important to carefully proofread it for any remaining errors or typos. Pay attention to details such as formatting and citation style, if necessary. Sharing your essay with trusted friends, family, or teachers and seeking their feedback can provide valuable insights and help you identify areas for improvement that you may have overlooked. Based on the feedback received and your own observations during the revision process, make changes to strengthen the impact and effectiveness of your essay. Remain open to making significant changes if necessary to enhance the quality of your narrative.

Narrative Essay Format

The narrative essay format is crucial for captivating readers and creating memorable stories. Whether it's a personal essay or fiction, these guidelines will help you take readers on a journey, making them feel immersed in the action:

• Introduction : Set the scene and introduce the characters and setting. Use a hook to grab readers' attention.
• Plot : Have a clear beginning, middle, and end, with each part building on the last. Include a conflict or problem for the protagonist to overcome.
• Characters : Develop well-rounded characters with distinct personalities and motivations. Ensure the protagonist has a clear goal, and the antagonist provides a challenge.
• Setting : Describe the time and place effectively to set the mood and support the story's themes.
• Dialogue : Use realistic dialogue to reveal characters' traits and move the plot forward.
• Climax : Reach the highest point of tension or conflict, leading to resolution.
• Resolution : Provide a satisfying conclusion that ties up loose ends.

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Narrative Essay Examples

If you need inspiration for your next essay, check out these excellent samples from our essay writer . Use them as a guide to craft your own narrative, and let your unique voice and experiences shine.

Narrative Essay Example for College

College professors search for the following qualities in their students:

• the ability to adapt to different situations,
• the ability to solve problems creatively,
• and the ability to learn from mistakes.

Your work must demonstrate these qualities, regardless of whether your narrative paper is a college application essay or a class assignment. Additionally, you want to demonstrate your character and creativity. Describe a situation where you have encountered a problem, tell the story of how you came up with a unique approach to solving it, and connect it to your field of interest. The narrative can be exciting and informative if you present it in such fashion.

Narrative Essay Example for High School

High school is all about showing that you can make mature choices. You accept the consequences of your actions and retrieve valuable life lessons. Think of an event in which you believe your actions were exemplary and made an adult choice. A personal narrative essay example will showcase the best of your abilities. Finally, use other sources to help you get the best results possible. Try searching for a sample to see how others have approached it.

Final Recap

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What Is A Narrative Essay?

How to start a narrative essay, how to write a good narrative essay, related articles.

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October 21, 2016

Life Lessons in College Essays

It’s important to have a life lesson in college essays, right? A great Personal Statement wouldn’t be compelling if it didn’t wrap up with a story about a life lesson learned, right? Maybe it’s about understanding the value of hard work. Maybe it’s about understanding the importance of perseverance and overcoming adversity in pursuit of your goals. Maybe it’s about realizing that all people are, in many ways, more alike than different. These are the kinds of life lessons that make for compelling storytelling not only in the Common Application’s Personal Statement but in the unique supplemental essays for the schools to which students apply, right?

One of these things doesn’t belong in college essays: a life lesson, great storytelling, and colloquial writing. Which one is it, you ask?

No, not right. But the regular readers of our college admissions blog know that the entire introductory paragraph above was one big setup. Life lessons have no place in college admissions essays to highly selective schools. Life lessons are cliche. You pulled your hamstring but nursed your way back from injury to compete in the 100 meter dash again? You may not have won but you tried your best? Cliche. You realized that the folks in Soweto, South Africa are just the same as you and your neighbors in Greenwich, Connecticut? Cliche. You learn about the importance of love and family from your wise grandfather? Cliche.

Life lessons have no place in college essays. Let’s say it again. Life lessons have no place in college essays. When admissions officers are reading hundreds upon hundreds of essays, how many come-from-behind races can they possibly enjoy? The answer is zero. “Full House” was a terrific television show on ABC. And its sequel “Fuller House” is a nice followup on Netflix. For those not familiar with “Full House,” Danny, Jesse, and Joey often imparted life lessons on D.J., Stephanie, Michelle at the end of each episode. But college admissions essays are not episodes of “Full House.” So leave the life lesson out and don’t think twice about it.

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15 Inspiring Personal Narrative Examples for Writers

Reveal a part of yourself in your essay.

Students start writing personal narratives at a young age, learning to use descriptive language to tell a story about their own experiences. Try sharing these personal narrative examples for elementary, middle, and high school to help them understand this essay form.

What is a personal narrative?

Think of a narrative essay like telling a story. Use descriptive language, and be sure you have a beginning, middle, and end. The essay should recount your personal experiences, including your thoughts, feelings, and actions.

Learn more about personal narrative essays here:

• What Is Narrative Writing, and How Do I Teach It in the Classroom?
• Engaging Personal Narrative Ideas for Kids and Teens
• Best Mentor Texts for Narrative Writing in Elementary School

Elementary School Personal Narrative Examples

In elementary school, personal narratives might be quite short, just a paragraph or two. The key is to encourage kids to embrace a personal style of writing, one that speaks in their own voice. Take a look at these elementary school personal narrative essay examples for inspiration.

The Horrible Day

“next i fell asleep in my cereal and my brother stole my toast”—anonymous student.

In this short personal narrative written by a 2nd grader, the author describes a bad day with lots of details and an informal tone. It’s a great model for your youngest writers.

Read the full essay: The Horrible Day at Thoughtful Learning

Keep an Eye on the Sky!

“as we made our way out to the field, my stomach slowly turned into a giant knot of fear.” —anonymous student.

Any student who dreads gym class will connect with this essay, which turns a challenge into a triumph. This narrative from Time for Kids is annotated, with highlighted details and tips to help kids write their own essay.

Read the full essay: Keep an Eye on the Sky! at Time for Kids

Grandpa, Chaz, and Me

“i really miss grandpa, and so does my brother, even though he never met him.” —cody, 4th grade student.

Written by a 4th grader, this essay relates the author’s loss of a grandfather at a very young age. Using simple, personal language, they tell a compelling story in a few short paragraphs.

Read the full essay: Grandpa, Chaz, and Me at Thoughtful Learning

Surviving an Embarrassing Situation

“i had made the shot in the wrong basket, giving the green shirts the win” —anonymous student.

Personal narratives tell a story, with a beginning, middle, and end. This annotated essay outlines those parts, making it easier for young writers to do the same in their own writing.

Read the full essay: Surviving an Embarrassing Situation at Sopris West Educational Services

“Do you have a friend who loves you?” —Kendra, 4th grade student

Writing about friends gives writers the chance to describe someone’s physical characteristics and personality. This 4th grade essay uses personal details to bring a beloved friend to life.

Read the full essay: Ann at Thoughtful Learning

Middle School Personal Narrative Examples

By middle school, personal narratives are longer and more involved, telling more detailed stories and experiences. These middle school personal narrative essay examples model strong writing skills for this age group.

“As thoughts of certain death run through my mind, the world appears a precious, treasured place.” —Amy, student

Describing an opportunity to overcome your worst fears makes an excellent personal narrative topic. The vivid descriptions of the landscape and the author’s feelings help the reader make a strong connection to the author.

Read the full essay: The Climb at Thoughtful Learning

The Best Friend Question

“i’ve often wondered, does not having a best friend make me defective” —blanche li, age 13, diablo vista middle school, danville, california.

When her Spanish teacher asked students for an essay describing their best friend, 13-year-old Blanche Li fell back on her standard story: that of a made-up person. Here, she explains why she made up “Haley” and wonders what having an imaginary best friend says about her.

Read the full essay: The Best Friend Question at The New York Times

The Racist Warehouse

“i didn’t know racism was still around; i thought that situation had died along with dr. king.” —alicia, 8th grade student.

Strong personal narratives often relate the way the author learned an important life lesson. Here, an 8th grader describes her first experience with racism, in an essay that will sadly ring true with many readers.

Read the full essay: The Racist Warehouse at Thoughtful Teaching

“For the first time, we realized that we didn’t know how to express our voice, and we always suppressed it.” —Jocelyn C., 7th grade student, Texas

Seventh-grader Jocelyn C. describes the unique experience of spending two years living in an RV with her family, traveling the country. She relates the ups and downs of their trip, illustrating the way her family learned to live together in close quarters and embrace the adventure.

Read the full essay: RV Journey at Write From the Heart

An Eight Pound Rival

“i’m trying to accept that he didn’t mean to dominate the center stage all the time, that’s just one of the many lovable assets of his personality.”.

A new sibling can change everything in a family, especially when you’ve always been the baby. This middle schooler explains her challenging relationship with a little brother that she loves, even when he drives her a bit crazy. (Find this essay on page 42 at the link.)

Read the full essay: An Eight Pound Rival at Teaching That Makes Sense

High School Personal Narrative Examples

High school students have more complex stories to tell, though they’re sometimes reluctant to do so. Reading personal narrative essay examples like these can encourage them to open up and get their thoughts, feelings, and ideas down on the page.

Sorry, Wrong Number

“when i received the first text, i was a playful sixth grader, always finding sly ways to be subversive in school and with friends.” —michelle ahn, high school student.

When Michelle Ahn was 11, she started getting texts for a wrong number, a man named Jared. Rather than correcting the error, she spends the next few years occasionally engaging with his texters as “Jared,” learning more about him. Though she finally comes clean, her time as “Jared” exposes her to a way of life very different from her own, and opens her eyes to the inner lives of others.

Read the full essay: Sorry, Wrong Number at The New York Times

Caught in the Net

“little does everyone else know how often i’m not doing school research or paper writing; instead i’m aimlessly writing emails or chatting with internet friends and family hundreds of miles away.” —kim, college student.

Even before social media and smartphones swept the world, internet addiction had become a problem. Here, a student shares her experiences in AOL chat rooms, meeting people from around the globe. Eventually, she realizes she’s sacrificing life in the real world for her digital friends and experiences, and works to find the right balance.

Read the full essay: Caught in the Net at Thoughtful Learning

Nothing Extraordinary

“an uneasy feeling started to settle in my chest. i tried to push it out, but once it took root it refused to be yanked up and tossed away.” —jeniffer kim, high school student.

During an ordinary shopping trip, high schooler Jenniffer Kim suddenly realizes she’s ashamed of her mother. At the same time, she recognizes all the sacrifices her mom has made for her, and gladly takes the chance to make a tiny sacrifice of her own.

Read the full essay: Nothing Extraordinary at The New York Times

The Pot Calling the Kettle Black

“at this point in life, i had not yet learned to be gentle with myself, or others.” —anonymous student.

A teen who lives with bipolar disorder recounts a difficult conversation with her parents, in which her mother dismisses her as “crazy.” A few years later, this same teen finds herself in the emergency room, where her mother has just tried to die by suicide. “Crazy!” the daughter thinks. After her mother also receives a bipolar disorder diagnosis, the author concludes, “‘Crazy’ is a term devised to dismiss people.”

Read the full essay: The Pot Calling the Kettle Black at Pressbooks

What a Black Woman Wishes Her Adoptive White Parents Knew

“i know that i am different, but do not have the words to understand how.” —mariama lockington.

Though not written by a high schooler, this essay by Mariama Lockington makes an excellent mentor text for this age group. Lockington dives deep into her feelings about being adopted by parents of a different race, and shares her challenges in poignant language that speaks directly to the reader.

Read the full essay: What a Black Woman Wishes Her Adoptive White Parents Knew at Buzzfeed News

Do you use personal narrative examples as mentor texts in your classroom? Come share your experiences and ask for advice in the We Are Teachers HELPLINE group on Facebook !

Plus, strong persuasive writing examples (essays, speeches, ads, and more) ..

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Some Lessons I’ve Learned From Reflecting On Life In 150 Essays

As I look back over my last 149 essays, I see memories, heartbreaks, and joys, all poured into my essays of size 12 font. I see times I was feeling high on life, and simultaneously, times I was struggling and felt as though I was stuck in the dark.. But even more than a simple timeline of moments and checkpoints, I see someone trying desperately to make sense of a messy world full of complicated emotions. I see someone a little bit lost at times, a little bit curious, and also a bit hopeful – someone just trying her best to seek meaning, inspiration, and above all, healing. 

It is an understatement to say that writing has been therapeutic for me. When I have felt lonely, or afraid, or let down, I have often sought comfort in writing. Words have been magical – they have been a way to gain a new perspective on my life and on the lives of all of the people around me. Writing has unfailingly encouraged me to look twice at life – to examine what lies beneath the surface, rather than accepting things at face value. 

And when I look back at all of these thoughts I have spilled across the white pages of my MacBook, I see many themes that seem to pop into my life over and over again, with each passing year. These themes are mainly lessons – those that I have learned, and those that I am still learning (or relearning).  Looking over my writing, I can’t help but notice how as human beings, we are constantly learning. We never seem to stop changing, growing, or healing.  

While I do not have all of the answers (or any answers with certainty), I do hope that some of the thoughts I have gathered and the lessons I have learned through examining the world through words may resonate with you as well. I hope they can bring you some comfort or reassurance in the midst of the mountains and valleys of your own life. 

1. It can feel comforting to seek home in nostalgia – to live in our memories, to replay them over and over again, like little film strips that continue to roll on. But at some point, we have to remember that life is still happening and the earth is still spinning, right here, right now. At some point, we have to be here for ourselves and for our hearts in the present. We have to be brave enough to hope that the present and the future will be just as good, if not better, than the old memories we are living in.

2. I’m learning that joy doesn’t necessarily mean the absence of sadness, and grief doesn’t necessarily imply the absence of joy. Though we often want to choose an either o r, life is not quite as binary as we make it out to be.

3. I’m realizing that being at peace with life doesn’t mean that everything is perfect, or that we don’t have any troubles or tribulations or low energy nagging at our hearts. Being at peace doesn’t mean that life is wonderful, or that we aren’t stressed, or facing anxiety. More so, being at peace means finding some form of “okayness” amidst all of the parts of life that are not (yet) “okay.” It means sitting amidst the chaos and making the conscious decision to remain calm. To be okay. Ultimately, finding peace means acknowledging the storm and coexisting with it, rather than sitting in the eye of the tornado.

4. It’s the hardest lesson in the world, but sometimes, the best thing we can do is let them go. Sometimes we have to say goodbye to someone good and wait patiently for someone better. 

5. Something odd about life is that the right choices don’t always feel right in our bodies. Sometimes, though difficult, we have to find the courage within us to pursue what we need, rather than what we want in the present. We have to take care of ourselves by honoring what we know is best for us in the long run. And oftentimes, in the present, it really does hurt a lot. The pain doesn’t mean the decision is wrong. Sometimes the best choices can leave us let down and hurt. But later on, we will be thankful.  

6. I don’t believe that everything happens for a reason. I don’t believe in fate. But I do believe that we can give meaning to some of our hardest most heartbreaking moments. We don’t need to build an identity that is rooted in our grief or in our trauma or pain, but if or when we want to, we can allow the healing process to bring out our best. We can grow new, fresh roots, and we can choose to define ourselves by how we rise back up again.

7. We can’t expect others to heal us – no one can love us so much that we automatically love ourselves. But maybe, when someone does love us, they can remind us what love feels like. They can help us to believe that we are loveable. And this can be the first step of loving ourselves – knowing that we deserve to be loved.

8. Grief is ugly and painful and devastating. Grief is dark swollen eyes and tear-stained cheeks. Grief hurts.  But we cannot deny the sheer beauty that grief holds. We cannot deny that grief is, in some ways, a gift. To grieve means that we are blessed enough to have loved and to have been loved by someone special – and this is remarkable. Grief means we are missing someone – someone who touched our lives in an irreplaceable way. And thus, I’d like to believe that the sadness and grief we endure when we lose someone close to us is simply the price we pay for loving them. And there’s something so dear and precious about this.

9. As hard as it is to hear, some people aren’t meant to stay in our lives forever. They are passerbys, like boats in the night. And though they may only stay for a short while, they stay safely in our hearts indefinitely.  Temporary people can leave permanent footprints.

10. Anxiety and overthinking do not change the situation. They only turn a gentle rain shower into a hurricane.

11. We can miss someone, but we can’t lose ourselves when we lose them. We can miss them, but we can’t let our lives be over when they are gone. Because we still have our lives to live. And we still have so much love left in us to give. 12. We don’t need a reason to have hope – we don’t need evidence or logic, as much as we think we do. We don’t even need to fully understand or grasp what hope is. We just have to find it in our hearts to believe that hope exists. We have to bravely decide to give in to hope, even when we can’t see it or touch it – even when we don’t know if it is there. When life is dark, we have to believe that there is something still worth living for around the corner. And this belief – this hope – this is what will help us move forward. 

13. It’s okay to find home in another person. It’s one of the sweetest, purest parts of life. But somewhere along the way, we must also find home within ourselves.

14. We know we are healing when we piece back together our broken parts and turn them into something greater than what we had before.

15. Perhaps, when someone doesn’t love us or doesn’t fight for us, it isn’t actually a reflection of us. Perhaps their inability to love us does not mean that we are unloveable, or hard to love. Maybe it means that they have been hurt one too many times before and that their walls are now built high of concrete and stone. Or maybe it means that they have been defeated by love one too many times – maybe love continues to let them down, time and time again. And maybe, even if they want to love us, they simply cannot. And we can keep trying and trying to knock down those walls. But perhaps when they don’t love us, the very best thing we can do is to hug them close, wish them the best, and then walk away.  Because even if they were special, we each deserve someone who is ready to let us in fully.

16. Most of the time, when we think we need closure from someone else, what we truly need is closure from ourselves – permission from ourselves to let things be. To accept the ending and to understand that it’s time to let the ending stay an ending. We must find the strength to seek peace and healing on our own. Healing is our responsibility, not the responsibility of the person who hurt us.

17. Sometimes growth is quiet and subtle and doesn’t look like growth. Sometimes growth is simply viewing a situation from a fresh perspective. Sometimes growth is trying something new, despite whether or not it ends up being a good experience. Sometimes growth just means making it through each day and noticing one small good thing about the world each night. Some seasons are for making leaps and bounds, while others are simply for surviving and just being. Both seasons are important. Both are needed. 

18. How do we know when we are healing? I think we know that we are coming close when we feel immense gratitude that something happened, rather than devastated by the fact that it ended. 

19. We don’t always need to find the silver lining. Sometimes really crappy, awful things happen, and there is much more bad than good in the world. Sometimes we go through devastating, heartbreaking experiences that don’t have a silver lining, and the idea of trying to find one only hurts us further. In these really rough moments, we don’t need to search for the light. But maybe, when we are ready, we can remind ourselves that there is still light in the world. Maybe there’s no shining light in our situation, but there is still goodness somewhere out there. And hopefully knowing this will help us make it to the other side

Perhaps the secret isn’t avoiding pain or numbing ourselves from pain, but rather, putting our energy into cultivating joy and peace. Perhaps when we value joy over pain, life becomes a little bit easier. 

Colleen George

“there can be magic in the messes” @apeaceofwerk

Keep up with Colleen on Instagram , Amazon and linktr.ee

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Narrative Essay About A Lesson Learned

Crafting a narrative essay on the theme of "A Lesson Learned" poses a unique set of challenges. The difficulty lies not merely in recounting an event but in weaving a compelling story that not only captivates the reader's attention but also imparts a meaningful lesson. The process involves delving deep into personal experiences, reflecting on the emotions attached to the lesson, and articulating those insights in a coherent and engaging manner.

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The teaching of narratives is not new but it has taken a number of different shapes. In order to appreciate the myriad of approaches one must also decide on the productive focus (written, or spoken) since the language choices and complexity varies in each. Whether it is a story to be told or a story to be read, however, creating a good structure seems to be a universally agreed upon requirement. Furthermore, most agree that story creation works well as a collaboration whether at the planning stage or later at the editing stage. This chapter is an exhaustive compilation of the various approaches available for the teaching of how to write and perform narratives.

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1.1: Assignment- Narrative Essay—Prewriting and Drafting

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For this assignment, you will begin working on a narrative essay. At this stage, you will work through the prewriting and drafting steps of the writing process.

Narrative Essay Prompt

Choose one of the following topics to write your own narrative essay. The topic you decide on should be something you care about, and the narration should be a means of communicating an idea that ties to the essay’s theme. Remember in this essay, the narration is not an end in itself.

• Gaining independence
• A friend’s sacrifice
• A significant trip with your family
• A wedding or a funeral
• An incident from family legend

The World Around You

• A storm, a flood, an earthquake, or another natural event
• A school event
• The most important minutes of a sporting event

Lessons of Daily Life

• A time you confronted authority
• A time you had to deliver bad news
• Your biggest social blunder
• Your first day of school
• The first performance you gave
• A first date

Getting Started on Your Narrative Essay

STEP 1 : To get started writing, first pick at least one prewriting strategy (brainstorming, rewriting, journaling, mapping, questioning, sketching) to develop ideas for your essay. Write down what you do, as you’ll need to submit evidence of your prewrite.

Remember that “story starters” are everywhere. Think about it—status updates on social media websites can be a good place to start—you may have already started a “note” to post on social media, and now is your chance to develop that idea into a full narrative. If you keep a journal or diary, a simple event may unfold into a narrative. Simply said, your stories may be closer than you think!

STEP 2: Next, write an outline for your essay. Organize the essay in a way that:

• Establishes the situation [introduction] ;
• Introduces the complication(s) [body] ; and
• States the lesson you learned [conclusion]

STEP 3: Lastly, write a first draft of your essay. Remember, When drafting your essay:

• Develop an enticing title—but don’t let yourself get stuck on the title! A great title might suggest itself after you’ve begun the prewriting and drafting processes.
• Use the introduction to establish the situation the essay will address.
• Avoid addressing the assignment directly. (For example, don’t write “I am going to write about my most significant experience,” because this takes the fun out of reading the work!)
• Think of things said at the moment this experience started for you—perhaps use a quote, or an interesting part of the experience that will grab the reader.
• Let the story reflect your own voice. (Is your voice serious? Humorous? Matter-of-fact?)
• To avoid just telling what happens, make sure your essay takes time to reflect on why this experience is significant.

Assignment Instructions

• Choose a writing prompt as listed above on this page.
• Review the grading rubric as listed below this page.
• Create a prewrite in the style of your choice for the prompt.
• Create an outline for your essay.
• Minimum of 3 typed, double-spaced pages (about 600–750 words), Times New Roman, 12 pt font size
• MLA formatting
• Submit your prewriting and draft as a single file upload.

Requirements

Be sure to:

• Decide on something you care about so that the narration is a means of communicating an idea.
• Include characters, conflict, sensory details.
• Create a sequence of events in a plot.
• Develop an enticing title.
• Use the introduction to pull the reader into your singular experience.
• Avoid addressing the assignment directly. (don’t write “I am going to write about…”—this takes the fun out of reading the work!)
• Let the essay reflect your own voice (Is your voice serious? Humorous? Matter-of-fact?)
• Avoid telling just what happens by making sure your essay reflects on why this experience is significant.

If you developed your prewriting by hand on paper, scan or take a picture of your prewriting, load the image onto your computer, and then insert the image on a separate page after your draft.

Contributors and Attributions

• Authored by : Daryl Smith O' Hare and Susan C. Hines. Provided by : Chadron State College. Project : Kaleidoscope Open Course Initiative. License : CC BY: Attribution

Narrative Essays

Narrative: The spoken or written account of connected events; a story

Narrative Introductions

The introduction of a narrative essay sets the scene for the story that follows. Interesting introductions—for any kind of writing—engage and draw readers in because they want to know more.

Since narratives tell a story and involve events, the introduction of a narrative quite often starts in the middle of the action in order to bring the reader into the story immediately, as shown in examples 1, 3, and 5 below. Other effective introductions briefly provide background for the point of the story—often the lesson learned—as in 4 below and the first example on the reverse side.

Below are some strategies for writing effective openings. Remember your introduction should be interesting and draw your reader in. It should make your audience want to read more. If it's a person , begin with a description of the person and then say why that person mattered. If it's an event , begin with the action or begin by reflecting back on why the event mattered, then go into the narrative.

• "Potter...take off!" my coach yelled as I was cracking yet another joke during practice.
• Why do such a small percentage of high school athletes play Division One sports?
• It was a cold, rainy night, under the lights on the field. I lined up the ball on the penalty line under the wet grass. After glancing up at the tied score, I stared into the goalkeeper's eyes.
• My heart pounds in my chest. My stomach full of nervous butterflies. I hear the crowd talking and names being cheered.
• Slipping the red and white uniform over my head for the first time is a feeling I will never forget.
• "No football." Those words rang in my head for hours as I thought about what a stupid decision I had made three nights before.
• "SNAP!" I heard the startling sound of my left knee before I ever felt the pain.
• According to the NCAA, there are over 400,000 student-athletes in the United States.

Narrative Story

• Unified: Ensure all actions in your story develop a central idea or argument.
• Interesting: Draw your readers into your scene(s), making them feel as if they're experiencing them first-hand.
• Coherent: Indicate changes in time, location, and characters clearly (even if your story is not chronological).
• Climactic: Include a moment (the climax) when your ending is revealed or the importance of events is made clear.
• Remember the 5 W's : Who? What? When? Where? Why?
• Write vividly : Include significant sensory information in the scene (sight, sound, touch, smell, taste) to make readers feel they are there
• Develop " Thick Descriptions "

Clifford Geertz describes thick descriptions as accounts that include not only facts but also commentary and interpretation . The goal is to vividly describe an action or scene, often through the use of metaphors, analogies, and other forms of interpretation that can emote strong feelings and images in your readers' minds.

"The flatness of the Delta made the shack, the quarters, and the railroad tracks nearby seem like some tabletop model train set. Like many Mississippi shacks, this one looked as if no one had lived there since the birth of the blues. Four sunflowers leaned alongside a sagging porch. When the front door creaked open, cockroaches bigger than pecans scurried for cover [...] walls wept with mildew."

—from Bruce Watson's Freedom Summer

Narrative Checklist

• Does the story have a clear and unifying idea? If not, what could that idea be?
• If the story doesn't include a thesis sentence, is the unifying idea of the story clear without it?
• Is the story unified, with all the details contributing to the central idea?
• Is the story arranged chronologically? If not, is the organization of ideas and events still effective and clear?
• Do the transitions show the movement from idea to idea and scene to scene?
• Are there enough details?
• Is there dialogue at important moments?
• Is there a climax to the story—moment at which the action is resolved or a key idea is revealed?

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Transcript: Ezra Klein Interviews Ari Shavit

Every Tuesday and Friday, Ezra Klein invites you into a conversation about something that matters, like today’s episode with Ari Shavit. Listen wherever you get your podcasts .

Transcripts of our episodes are made available as soon as possible. They are not fully edited for grammar or spelling.

Watching the Protests From Israel

The israeli writer ari shavit discusses the tensions between the demands of campus activists and how israelis see the war..

[MUSIC PLAYING]

From New York Times Opinion, this is “The Ezra Klein Show.”

I’ve been watching, as I imagine so many of you have, as the campus protests over Israel over what’s happening in Gaza have exploded across the news.

Clashes and arrests at colleges across the country. Demonstrations are now coming to a head.

Tonight, at University of Texas, Austin, police, one by one, detaining pro-Palestinian protesters.

In Oregon at Portland State University—

Atlanta’s Emory University—

University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill—

The Fordham University’s Manhattan campus—

Texas State University and the University of Washington—

And on Long Island, students and police clashed at a protest at Stony Brook University today. An encampment was set up—

I’ve been watching police go in and clear encampments in the place I went to college at UCLA.

I’m here in New York. What is happening at Columbia has been all over the news.

More than 100 people were arrested after the school asked police to remove student protesters.

And I found it hard myself to know what to think. One reason is that protests of this size are never one thing. On the one hand, you really do hear at them people just shouting antisemitic poison.

Go back to Poland!

And on the other hand, you can go to one of them and attend a beautiful Passover seder inside the Columbian encampment.

[SINGING IN HEBREW]

And trying to think about what to make of it, whether this is a thing to cover, whether it is a distraction from the thing to cover, and I think the place I came to is that I wanted to keep an eye on power here. Who has the power to change the reality in Israel and in Gaza right now? I think there’s an implicit default in people’s thinking to some deus ex machina, some outside player, maybe America or the U.N., who can come impose some new reality.

That’s not how this works, though. Really, it’s Israel and it’s Hamas. Hamas could release the hostages. Israel could end its war or change its policies. And I think if you are listening to the protesters, the students, the idea that they really have is they’re going to influence Israel.

They want their universities to divest from Israel. They’re using media coverage to try to push Joe Biden to change his policies towards Israel. But what that means, then, is that the effectiveness of these protests in the end relies on some engagement, some sense of Israeli politics and culture.

And so I wondered, how are these campus protests being received in Israel? What are Israelis seeing? What do they make of it? When I think about Israel, I always think about this book written in 2013 by Ari Shavit, who’s a longtime political reporter there, called “My Promised Land.”

And I recommend this book to everybody. I think it is the single best book on what Israel is because it is a book that is better able than any other to hold both the idealism and violence at its heart, to take seriously both the way it was a miracle for some and a tragedy for others, to make you feel the work that went into it— this was not just given to the Israelis— and on the other hand, the dispossession that was required by it.

It’s a book that does something that not that much on this subject does, which is hold contradiction without trying to resolve it. And so I wanted to talk to Shavit, as somebody who understands Israel very deeply, about the protest movement, about the increasing tensions with Jews in the diaspora and Jews in Israel, and about Israeli politics itself, and where it goes from here, and what happens if it actually doesn’t really go anywhere from here. As always, my email, [email protected].

Ari Shavit, welcome to the show.

So good to be with you. Thank you.

So when you look at the campus protests sweeping America about Israel, what do you see?

I am deeply saddened. I’ll tell you what I don’t see. I don’t see Gandhi-like marches. I don’t see Martin Luther King kind of demonstrations. I don’t see an understanding of the profound tragedy that we are trapped in.

So if people were there marching, talking about the hostages, and talking about the 1,200 people who were slaughtered on Oct. 7, then I would deeply, deeply respect their anger, but when you see that it’s all one-sided, and when you see that it goes from legitimate criticism of Israel to a kind of obsession with hating it, then I wonder. It makes me — beyond the sadness, it scares me.

I think there is justified criticism. There is understandable criticism. And then there is vicious criticism bordering on anti-Semitism. When America was in Vietnam, there were justified anti-war marches all over. They never doubted the legitimacy of America, of the United States of America. When France was in Algeria, in Indochina, there was criticism of the entire global left. No one said that the French Republic is illegitimate.

In a way, I’m glad you brought up the Vietnam marches because I think the thing you just said there is flatly wrong. The Vietnam marches, which were right in their moral direction, were full of people who questioned the fundamental legitimacy of America, full of people who were calling for victory over and the deaths of our soldiers, full of people who did not march with love, who were not Gandhi, who were not Martin Luther King Jr. Of course, they also had marches where there literally was Martin Luther King Jr.

One of the difficult things about reading a mass protest movement is that it is never one thing. It is never, or very rarely, perfectly on message, perfectly respectable, perfectly managed. If it were, it often would not get very much coverage. And so let me agree with you that there are things at these marches that are repugnant.

And I, frankly, have very little patience myself for the way this conversation ends up endlessly circling this question of, does Israel have the right to exist? Israel exists, but many of the people at these marches do not hate Israel for being Israel. They certainly do not hate Jewish people for being Jewish. These Jewish students, as I understand them— and I’ve spoken to some of them— they feel they have to choose between their political values and any kind of solidarity with the state of Israel. What do you say to them?

I would ask them, and ask even you, to make a distinction between the Israeli government, between the Israeli prime minister, and between the Israeli people and the Israeli project. I am as angry at Prime Minister Netanyahu as you are or as the young demonstrators are because Mr. Netanyahu is endangering the lives of my children.

I’m angry at the Israeli extreme right, just as you are or the young demonstrators are, because they are tainting and threatening the dream that my grand-grandparents dreamt and my grandparents and parents fulfilled in the most miraculous way.

But there is a distinction between that and the Israeli project, the Israeli state, because at the end, look, when I listened to some of this discourse, people are talking that Israel is a colonizing nation. We have been the ultimate other of white Europe for 1,500 years. We never knew where we’ll sleep next year. We will never know what will happen to us. And then we became white Europe’s ultimate victim.

So we ran away from white Europe. We were not sent by white Europe. How can you totally attack the right of a homeless people to have a home? We are not part of imperialism. We are a small persecuted people that somehow saved itself at the last moment.

And in order to prevent the death of a people, they transferred them from one continent and several continents. They revived the language. They built a society, created a state, a nation. It’s an incredible, incredible human endeavor. You don’t have to be Jewish or pro-Israeli to see that.

And when I look around, where are we compared to Australia, Canada, New Zealand — or you folks? When I see that distortion, I find it difficult to deal with, difficult, because the distortion is so extreme.

So, true— and I wrote about it, and I’m willing to talk about it— we have sinned. We made mistakes. We are in a tragedy. But to totally overlook the justice at the heart of this project and to just see the flaws and the problems, I find that a distortion.

It was interesting to me that you kept coming back to the word “distortion” here, because the word you used in your book is “contradiction.” I was looking at my notes from “My Promised Land.” I have— and you should take this as a compliment— 188 highlights in that book. It’s a lot of highlights.

Thank you very much.

I want to read you one of them, and I want to hear how it sounds to you right now. You write, “Zionism skated on thin ice. On the one hand, it was a national liberation movement, but on the other, it was a colonialist enterprise. It intended to save the lives of one people by the dispossession of another. In its first 50 years, Zionism was aware of this complexity and acted accordingly.

It was very careful not to be associated with colonialism and tried not to cause unnecessary hardship. It made sure it was a democratic, progressive, and enlightened movement, collaborating with the world’s forces of progress. With great sophistication, Zionism handled the contradiction at its core.”

I’m curious how that paragraph that you wrote sounds to you now because the thing that people are picking up on, what you’re calling the distortion, is they’re seeing one side of it has now taken over. And maybe they’re right.

It’s a wonderful question. When my great-grandparents came to Palestine, to Eretz Yisrael, they understood that we have to make it clear to ourselves and to others that we are not another colonial project, that we are not like others. And they understood that while they have a particular mission, saving the Jewish people from death, not just oppression, they have a universal mission.

The idea of the kibbutz, for example, was this combination, that on the one hand, you want to settle the land. You want to build a national project, but simultaneously, you want to contribute to the world. You have a message. By the way, that’s my understanding of Judaism. It’s not just about national entity and national existence and definitely not about power. You need the inspirational part. You need the moral dimension.

David Ben-Gurion and these people understood that. Now, we had the right to try to throw a nuclear bomb over Germany. We did exactly opposite. We signed agreements with Germany in 1952 to help us build the country. They were so much into this balance that we experienced what we experienced, but we will build. Our revenge will be to live, to bring children, to bring life. We came to death, we are surrounded by death, but we choose life. That’s the Israel I love and admire.

Sadly, decades later, we surrendered to the victimhood ethos, and we used the Holocaust, which is a horrible event, and we became more and more— we lost that balance of fighting for ourselves while seeing the others. And then we find ourselves in a place where extreme right-wing Israelis help extreme left people in America lead us all into this kind of distortion.

There is a separation that gets made there in your answer, but here, constantly, when I heard Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer’s speech about Israel, he was making the separation between the government and the people.

And I wonder about this, because Netanyahu has won again and again and again and again. If you are 18 and you are in college right now, he has been prime minister of Israel for almost your entire life, the vast majority of it. He has been chosen. His coalitions have been chosen. The movement right has been chosen.

And so I wonder whether there is this separation. Because when I even think of Donald Trump, he represents something. He did not just take over in a hostile boardroom maneuver. He appealed to people, and they wanted him, and they want him again, many of them.

And there is something in Netanyahu that is wanted. Now, maybe he is seen as incompetent. Maybe he is seen as a failure. But it is not clear that what has turned Israelis against him is the right-wing project so much and the callousness of it, so much as the fact that he did a terrible job managing security. Defend this cut to me.

So let’s make a distinction here, if I may, between previous years and Oct. 7 and afterwards. So if you look at the last few years or the Netanyahu decade, what you’ve seen is a terrible failure of the center left— and by the way, of the international community as well.

Because basically what happened, we asked our people— I as an active in the peace movement at the time, we asked our people to accept the two-state solution idea, the peace idea. Time after time, they voted for it. They voted for Rabin. They voted for Barack. We went to the Camp David Peace Summit in 2000— it failed. We went to the Annapolis summit in 2007— it failed. We even had a process under President Barack and John Kerry in 2014, and it failed.

We never came back to our people, saying, true, the old peace process failed. We’ve learned from the mistakes, and therefore, we offer something new and realistic that addresses the harsh realities of the Middle East. I’ll say here in brackets, my life has been— my public life— has been about the struggle between liberal and moral values and the brutality of the historic reality I live in.

So the center-left and the international community have not delivered anything to deal with the legitimate fears and concerns of Israelis, who tried the two-state solution so many times, and it failed. It caused terrible suffering for the Palestinians, it caused terrible suffering for Israelis. And then comes Netanyahu and uses these fears. So historically, in a sense, I would say, Netanyahu is not only the sin, he’s the punishment, for the failure of the center-left to bring a realistic vision.

Israelis have not become evil and crazy and racist. We have that minority in us, but it’s not the majority. The main problem is fear that was not addressed and the failure of the old peace process.

Now let’s talk about after Oct. 7. I want you to understand— and I think it’s so important— Israelis are seeing a different war than the one that Americans see. You see one war film, horror film, and we see, at home, another war film, horror film. Israelis are stuck in Oct. 7 while the world has forgot Oct. 7, nearly forgot Oct. 7.

So Israelis are totally traumatized, are totally traumatized. Each one of us knows someone who was murdered, who was kidnapped, who was terribly wounded. My wife sees terrorists coming into our garden, and it’s all over. We experienced real fear.

Now, it’s not just Jewish neurosis. It’s not just in our minds. I want to compare it to 9/11. What we experienced, number wise, it’s like 10 times or 15 times worse than 9/11. But it’s an ongoing 9/11. Imagine a 9/11 where, afterwards, Al Qaeda keeps 133— 250 at the beginning— hostages, a bit combined the Iran hostage crisis of ‘79 with Al Qaeda of 2001.

And think of the fact that the ongoing 9/11, you would have had Al Qaeda in Mexico and Iran in Canada. It’s a nightmare. It’s surreal. So if you want Israelis to replace Netanyahu, to move away from the extreme right, you have to address their fears and their legitimate fears. Once we address this, we can demand of Israelis to have much more empathy and generosity and really try peace in a new way, in a realistic way, to stop this terrible tragedy.

Let me say first that I agree with everything you just said about both the psychology and the geography of this. I often try to say to people who see it as obvious that Israel’s response has gone way too far, which I do believe, by the way, it has gone way too far, I do say, look, imagine that 9/11 was conducted by an Al Qaeda that ruled Canada and what we would have done in response. I said this over and over and over again in the podcast I did after 10/7— there is no country that would permit that kind of incursion and massacre and not respond with overwhelming force.

At the same time, I want to connect this back to what you were just saying about the peace process because one thing that I think Israelis completely disregard now is that in the background, long before 10/7, they had let themselves become the villains.

When you say that Israelis feel we tried peace, and it was not responded to, I think there’s a lot of truth to that. How much everybody tried, that there are contested narratives of these peace processes, that’s all true as well. But I do think that there were honest attempts to try to find some equilibrium that was not this. I would say that went until about 2008.

And then what happened— and I think this is the much more dominant narrative for people who have followed this and are younger here— is peace was abandoned, and the settlements kept getting built. And so it wasn’t just that the peace process failed, and then went into a state of dormancy— it was that the peace process failed, and then it was made more and more impossible year by year, that there was an active effort, the laying down of concrete, the paving of roads, the erection of buildings, to make it impossible to imagine that trade of land.

And so there’s both the genuine problem you are pointing to, the question of how can anyone in Israel feel safe if Hamas exists in Gaza, but there’s also this other question, which is, how can Israel be safe? How can it exist? How can people here support it if it allows itself to settle into this role as the occupier?

So first of all, the short answer is, if you want the Israelis to change— and I think they should— or we should— the first thing is not to hold maps of the entire land between the river and the sea, all Palestinian, and basically say that I and my daughter and my wife and my two sons have to leave and go back to Poland because this is right now what is said in campuses.

So if you want Israelis to take the risk again— and I think we must and I’ll get into that— the international community, led by America, has to hug and support democratic Israel. Beyond that, I agree. I wouldn’t use the word “villain” the way you use. But with everything else you said, I agree. So I wouldn’t say Israel is a villain, but obviously, there are Israeli villains. Just like there are American villains and European villains, there are Israeli villains.

I think it is too complex— I just want to say that I think this is a way too complex to say anybody is a villain. I’m saying that for many people, Israel came to appear the villain.

They were the stronger player.

Oh, well. The strong, we’ll get into the strong. So you know what? Let’s get to the stronger. First of all, talking of distortions, one of the great distortions here that it’s not only about Israel, is that you assume that the weak is just, and the strong is wrong.

That’s a profoundly morally flawed statement because if I’ll parachute to you into Europe of 1944 and early 1945, the Germans were very weak, and the Allies were bombing them in Dresden and other places. So if you follow that logic, that distorted logic, you’ll be pro-Nazi. So I ask everybody to get out of this. This is something that happened in our intellectual world in the last 20, 30 years. And it’s a distortion not only regarding Israel.

Point number two, Israel is not that strong. The flaw of Israel itself, they became arrogant and cocky. People did not understand how vulnerable Israel is. Regarding the Palestinians, we are stronger. But there is a larger context here. What is threatened now is the entire free world and world order. You have a Chinese, Russian, Iranian axis attacking everything we believe in, everything we believe in. We have to see the larger context. We cannot be blind.

Ezra, this is the most intimidating Jewish moment in our lifetime. It’s one of the most painful Palestinian moments in our lifetime. And it’s one of the most dangerous global moments in our lifetime. We have to wake up. This is a mega, mega, mega event. What happened on Oct. 7 was an attack on the Jewish state and the democratic state, on the Jewish people, and in many ways, on the postwar world order.

There is much, I think, that people outside Israel do not see clearly about Israel. There are things people inside Israel, I think, do not see clearly about Israel, and one of them is strength. And so one of the things that I see again and again is this effort to, then, create a much larger set of enemies to justify a deep and very understandable— I come from Jewish history, too— a deep and understandable feeling of vulnerability, of weakness, of always being on the precipice.

But I’m in America, and so what I understand, I think, better than Israelis do is what the American politics are at least right now. Iran was never going to be a threat to Israel in this war, because as soon as it began, America moved battleships into place to make very clear that if Iran joined, it would be annihilated.

When there was an attack that led to the killing of a major Iranian commander, Iran launched a drone strike that it understood— everybody understood— back and forth, this was well calibrated to be shot down. Israel did a calibrated response. Israel and Iran have been in a very calibrated series of just enough in a way to maintain their domestic politics on both sides.

The danger for Israel, which is much stronger than I think you give it credit for, in part because it is backed by the strongest military the world has ever known— it is using American bombs now. It is backed by American warships now.

And when you say that the world needs to hug Israel, it is true that protesters on college campuses are unfurling maps in which Israel does not exist. It is also true the actual president of the United States of America has wrapped Israel in a very, very, very tight hug. He has then been spat on again and again and again by Benjamin Netanyahu, which I think we probably share a view on how that’s gone.

But what would make Israel weak is the loss of that support. What would make Israel actually vulnerable is if the politics that is emerging now among young Americans becomes a dominant politics of America when they move into power, which is how things typically work.

There is this paradoxical way in which the insistence upon vulnerability and what vulnerability makes possible practical or necessary is, in the long run, it seems to me, the thing that could create real vulnerability, a sort of unwillingness to recognize how much support for Israel in the long run and the strength will depend on whether it is seen as a moral nation by the generation that is going to take power here, and that when they look at it, do not see that anymore and also do not see anybody trying to prove that to them.

So you’re preaching to the converted, but let me try to explain. First of all, let’s begin with President Biden because not enough Israelis express enough gratitude to the United States generally and specifically to President Biden.

So let me try to do my bit. I think that what President Biden did in the first three days, in the first three weeks, in the first three months of this war, was incredible. It was a heroic, realistic act of leadership, not in spite of his age, but because of his age, because he has the World War II at his background and he has the Cold War in his bones.

Now, I totally agree. And look, Ezra, I’ve been reading you. You’ve been reading me, I’ve been reading you. What you write about the three generations and their attitude to Israel is totally, totally true. I was speaking to some, in some lecture I gave in Cambridge, to some young students who were confused about Israel and the conflict.

And the older one among them came to me, and she said to me, Ari, listen, I had Rabin. I had the Oslo process. I had an Israel I could identify with and look up to. What the younger Jewish kids in the diaspora have been experiencing in the last 20 years that they are asked to defend a nation with whose values they cannot identify.

I’m not one who’s using the external threats, the Chinese, Russian and Iranian dimension, in order to run away from the Palestinian issue, not at all. Israel has to deal in a much more courageous and generous way with the Palestinian issue. And Israel is guilty of the fact that in the last 15 years, we ignored it, and it became like the elephant in the room. And then we saw what happened.

But while our commitment, our responsibility, our mission is to deal with the Palestinian issue, you have to remember that Israel is not France, not America, and not China. Israel is a small, intimidated nation. So I ask all people of good faith and decency to look at the larger picture. I’m not asking it as an excuse to ignore the Palestinian issue, in no way.

There’s this language you hear that you’re using— I’m certain I’ve used it. It’s not a criticism of the Palestinian issue. But I want to make this more direct. Palestinians, right? I mean, we talk about a battle for Israel’s soul, but the battle happening right now is in Gaza. The question right now is whether or not Israel will enter Rafah.

And one of the things that makes it hard to support what Israel is doing for me, is, I don’t believe the war aims. If you could prove to me that if you went into Rafah, this place where more than half of Gazans are now huddled, you would somehow, with the same intelligence community that could not predict 10/7, figure out exactly who is a Hamas fighter and who is a Hamas commander, and remove them, kill them, imprison them, whatever it is. And as such, then, Hamas or something like it could not reconstitute itself, and some other more moderate leadership would emerge, and negotiations for some kind of stabilization could begin— fine.

But I genuinely do not understand what the theory of this is. You talked about how traumatized Israelis are. And they are. And every single person here who forgets that or does not take it seriously has walled themselves off from understanding the issue. Everything you say about that is right, and it actually infuriates me.

But do Palestinians not feel this grief? Are they not being traumatized right now? Not just the loss of life and the loss of children in particular, but the loss of homes of livelihoods. How do Israelis imagine a people as traumatized now as the Palestinians are, not them as an issue, but them as people? What security emerges from this?

So, again, whether it’s good or bad, I actually agree with you. Mr. Sinwar is an evil genius. And Israel walked right into his trap.

The head of Hamas.

Exactly. What’s the Sinwar genius? He put Israel in a kind of lose-lose situation. Mr. Sinwar is not only willing, but he wants to sacrifice the civilian population of Gaza in order to change the minds of the hearts of the civilian population of the United States of America and turn it against Israel. And he’s using the hostages in order to break the spirit of Israeli society.

So Mr. Sinwar understands what, sadly, our generals did not understand, which is war is not only a military operation, it’s not only about tanks and planes, that if you win the war in Khan Younis, but you lose it in Harvard Square, you lost the war. You lost the war. This is exactly what Sinwar wanted.

And sadly, the way the war was waged on our side— and I think we had to do it, and we had to defend ourselves, and we had the right to defend ourselves. But we should have been much more sophisticated. It should have been clear to any person watching television or TikTok or whatever in the United States that we are fighting Hamas, we are not fighting the Palestinians. And right now, the opposite has happened.

So definitely, I oppose the Rafah. Going into Rafah is exactly what Sinwar wants. If Israel will make that mistake, it will be a decisive, tragic mistake. Mr. Netanyahu, all his life, was a Churchill wannabe. He wanted to be Churchill. Here, he has an amazing tragic opportunity to be Churchill.

But what did Churchill do? Basically, two things. One, national unity, and two, he went to America. He went to Washington. He talked to F.D.R. He convinced F.D.R. to stand by Britain. This is what we should have done.

So I’m totally with you. We should not go into Rafah. We should find a way to end the Gaza war once all the hostages are back. We have to prevent a regional war, and we have to understand what kind of danger we all face.

Here, I’m going to ask you not to speak as you, but as a reporter and as somebody who knows the Israeli political and military establishments, because this is a place where putting it all on Netanyahu is simply not true. Benny Gantz, who is the likeliest next leader of Israel, he agrees that somehow, this war is going to achieve the goals. He agrees that they should go into Rafah.

If you look at the interview that Yair Lapid, the opposition leader, just gave to one of my colleagues, he agrees this war needs to be continued. Benny Morris, the revisionist historian who has done so much to increase our understanding of the expulsion of Arabs during Israel’s war that created the state, he agrees they need to go into Rafah.

So there is a wide agreement over anything you might call, from the right to the center-left, that they need to go in Rafah, that somehow this will make Israel safer, that Hamas can be sufficiently degraded. Why do they think something so many of us seem to think is not true, which is that what Hamas is, is not an idea, not an expression of rage that will find its way out, but a military unit?

So the good news is that quite a number of leading Israeli strategists, ex-generals, serious people have been saying in the last week or two what I just told you. They said going into Rafah would be to walk into a Sinwar trap. It’s a strategic trap, and we should not go into it. So on this issue, I’m not totally lonely. I think there are other people who think— look, don’t get me wrong. I think that eventually, Hamas has to be crushed.

Look, Hamas is threatening the lives of Israelis and the liberty of Palestinians. And we all have to unite in eradicating Hamas and liberate the Palestinians. I want Gaza to be Dubai by 2040, 2050. That’s the future of Gaza. We need to bring in a coalition of moderate Arabs and moderate Palestinians. We need a Marshall Plan for Gaza.

We need to turn it to something that every young person in Gaza who is suffering so much today will have a future, will have hope, definitely food and water. But much more than that, Gaza has to be an amazing project of the international community led by the moderate and rich Arabs, who have the resources, the capability, and who know how to deal with radical religious sentiments.

So we have to do that. But we’ll have to defeat Hamas. But I’m saying right now, this thing went so wrong. There is so much suffering. There is no hope. There is no breakthrough. We have to find a way to stop the fighting, again, once all the hostages are back. All the hostages have to be back. I want every Palestinian to feel that he has more freedom, more prosperity, more hope every year while Israel’s security is not in danger.

But this gets to something that you said a few minutes ago, which is the world cannot understand what Israel will or will not do. It cannot influence what Israel will or will not do until the trauma and the fear and the grief of Israelis is taken seriously, and that if you want to be a protest movement, if you want to be a politician, if you want to be a stakeholder that is somehow influencing Israel, you have to start there. And I believe you are right, but that is also true for Palestinians.

And what I hear is this sort of jumping, right, to this sort of world where there’s nothing like Hamas. There’s an international coalition. Somehow, so much money has been poured into Gaza that maybe Israel allowed this, which seems unlikely to me, but that it now looks like Dubai.

But before you get to any of that, you have somehow done something to take seriously the trauma, the grief, the anger, the fury, the loss of Palestinians. I mean, one thing your book does very well, is, I think force people to reckon, not with 1967 and the Six-Day War, but 1948 and the violence and the loss and the expulsions of that war, how they still shape the region, how they still shape how everybody sees each other. This one is fresher, right? This is happening right now.

You are right to demand the world take your grief seriously. You are right to demand they take your fear seriously. But what does it mean to take the grief and fear of Palestinians seriously? Because that is not something not just something I don’t see Israelis doing, but I don’t see anybody even discussing that it needs to happen. And if it doesn’t happen, then I don’t understand how you think you will ever live in peace or even live in security.

Once again, I totally agree. And I really— sorry for using psychological terms or emotional terms—

No, I think we need those here.

I think the conflict, this conflict, is about history, identity, and soul and feelings and humiliation and anger and fear. This is about if you— and again, part of the failure of previous peace processes, that they had an economic dimension, strategic dimension— they never dealt with the deeper identity issues, and you have to deal with them.

Look, I understand why Palestinians would hate me because of the conflict, the tragedy of the conflict. But Palestinian leadership, Yasir Arafat, and such people, the moderates, did not care enough about Palestinians. There was the old, almost ancient stink song, I hope the Russians love their children, too. And the Russians did love their children, too. And that’s why the first Cold War ended the way it ended.

But the problem that we don’t have enough constructive forces in the Palestinian leadership who would care about their own people. There are two terrible metaphors in the tragedy of the conflict in recent years. One was suicide bombing. What was suicide bombing, which were horrible 20 years ago, 25 years ago? Suicide bombing is when your hate for your enemy is stronger than your love for yourself.

And now we have the tunnels. Now we have the tunnels. Rather than build skyscrapers of hope in Gaza, everything went into these dark, evil tunnels. Each one of us has to cure his own society from the poison and all the toxic materials of the conflict that had poisoned all of us. We’re all poisoned, OK? We’re all poisoned. We need now a process of detox that helps both Israelis and Palestinians at the same time to move forward to something that is more constructive, which you now see in the Middle East, which was not the case before.

My Palestinian hero is Salam Fayyad. Salam Fayyad is the one Palestinian leader who really tried to do nation building. So, obviously, had his grievances regarding us, and I understand it, but he tried to build something. We need out of this chaos and mess and tragedy. We need Salam Fayyad attitude combined with an MBZ attitude.

Look, the good news in the Middle East is that the first time in a century, we have Arab modernity that works and is successful. And the Emirates are like the symbol and the example for that. Because what the United Emirates are all about, it’s about moving forward, solution, not going back to the past, not getting into victimhood, but building things. So if we will have M.B.Z.-like forces, supporting Salam Fayyad-like Palestinians, I think we can begin to move forward from the agony and suffering into something that is more promising.

You say if there was something like Salam Fayyad, who was a former prime minister of the Palestinian Authority, you would see a willing Israeli partner, but I had Salam Fayyad on this show a couple of months back, and people should go listen to it. And here was somebody who was doing everything you’re saying should be done, and frankly, at a better time in Israeli politics than this one.

And he had built up a lot more economic capacity within the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, where he was governing. He had built up profound security cooperation. He had exiled and expelled much of Hamas. He had made the West Bank far safer. And what he says happened is he could not get the Israelis to work with him, that they would not stop their incursions. They would not loosen the restrictions. They would not make it easier for him to build.

Salam Fayyad had all kinds of problems, but he will tell you— he told me— that, really, his biggest one was that Israel wouldn’t hold up its end of the bargain. And so there is this truth that at many points, Israel has not had a partner who could deliver peace or even maybe wanted to deliver peace.

It is also true that there have been points when the Palestinians, or at least some Palestinians, have not had an Israeli partner to deliver peace because some Israelis don’t want it. Because they want the West Bank. Because they want control. Because they want Hamas and the Palestinian Authority split because they don’t want international support shifting to the Palestinians. So there is this tension between the call for someone like Salam Fayyad and then the actual historical experience of the actual living Salam Fayyad.

So after expressing my admiration for Salam Fayyad, I don’t want to do polemics regarding him. I really admire him, and I really want him back. I really think that he and people like him are an essential part of the solution, but I’ll say two things. One, Salam Fayyad had terrible problems with corruption in the Palestinian Authority, including by Mr. Abbas, who’s leading it. They wanted him out.

The second element that I want to remind you that while Salam Fayyad was in power, we had the prime minister in Israel by the name of Ehud Olmert, who went to the Annapolis Peace Summit with George W. Bush and Condoleezza Rice and offered 100% of the territory back with some territorial exchange. Ehud Olmert made the most generous, some Israelis feel, reckless offer to the Palestinians, and it was rejected.

So after it was rejected, Netanyahu was elected. Israelis became— again, they are not profoundly more right-wing, but they are more skeptical, more fearful, more— it’s more difficult to bring them. We need to find a way to get out of this vicious circle. And again, don’t get me wrong— in the last 10 years, extreme right-wing Israeli governments and with a lot of influence of the settler parties and the extreme right, Israel was not there. But the reason they were elected was the failure of over 15 years, we tried the old peace, and it failed.

One thing threaded through your book is an appreciation of tragedy and a willingness to cede your own story, Israel’s story, the story of the Palestinians is a story of tragedy. And part of tragedy is timing, that there are moments where an opening exists for something else, and they’re missed. And then there’s a moment on the other side, and it’s missed.

And something I think that that history should teach us, or force us to reckon with, is that there’s not going to be perfection here. There are not going to be perfect leaders on either side. There’s not a Palestinian Authority free of corruption. Frankly, there’s not even right now a Palestinian Authority with legitimacy. There is not going to be an Israeli polity that moves from where it is now all the way to where you are or farther than that.

And so there is this question to me of what happens if this is where we are, if the Palestinians hate Israelis even more than ever after this, whenever the after this is, if Israelis are even more terrified of the security risk of what would happen to them if you had a Palestinian state that had sufficient self-determination to become strong, because a stronger and richer and freer such a state became, the more could one day exact revenge. I think that is how a lot of people think. So what if we don’t get perfect leaders? What if we don’t even get very good leaders, which is, I think, the recent history of this conflict? What then?

Look, we are all fearful now. The worst can happen. Ezra, remember my words. The worst may happen. What Oct. 7 and whatever happened since taught us is that it’s a make or break moment. If we will let things just deteriorated, horrible, horrible, horrible things might happen in the Middle East within a few years. So it’s a moral responsibility upon all of us to get to work and to create a different path and find a different path, so we can prevent catastrophe and actually bring back some hope.

Look, human life is a tragedy. We all die. We all die. We forget that some of the time, but we all die. And you make the most of the path of the road that you have on this good Earth. So we have to take this tragedy and act in a sensible, rational, pragmatic manner in order to bring it to a better place.

There’s this 1948 essay by the philosopher Hannah Arendt called “To Save the Jewish Homeland.” And the thing she’s describing — I’ve been thinking about this essay, which people can and should read online. And there’s a lot in here. But the thing she’s discussing is that there had been a cacophony of views about Israel, about Zionism, in the Jewish community. And then came the war, the fighting, the founding. And that collapsed into unanimity.

And she thought that the unanimity was very dangerous because what was needed at the founding of Israel was to take seriously the insights of the people who thought this could go very, very badly. And she says later in that essay that if you get the Israel of pure Zionism, the Israel pure confidence, that what you will end up getting is an Israel that ends up diverging from the interests of the Jewish diaspora.

The Jewish diaspora is deeply liberal. The Jewish diaspora is exilic Judaism, as people say it. It is the Judaism of being the stranger, the Judaism of being a refugee. My friend, Spencer Ackerman, the national security reporter, said at the beginning of this war something that I keep thinking about, that he cannot think of a less Jewish thing than to make another person a refugee.

And then there is what Israel is as a state, which it has made many people refugees, but it also has the interests of a state, and states change everybody, not just Jewish people. They make you very quickly forget the lessons of being a refugee. And that wedge of values, that is the thing that I think people are beginning to recognize and people in Israel are underemphasizing how dangerous it is for them.

I couldn’t agree more. So if I may, I’ll tell you, when I wrote “My Promised Land,” the chapter I loved writing most was the chapter about the 1950s because what Israel did in its first decade of existence is the most heroic and breathtaking enterprise one can imagine. 650,000 Jews absorbed one million refugees— no, one million immigrants, of which half were, or many of them were, Holocaust survivors and other refugees from the Arab world. It’s as if America today would absorb 500 million immigrants. I understand you have a slight problem with 7 million.

So it was an incredible, incredible achievement, but what’s so impressive about it that those people who came out of Auschwitz with numbers on their arms, with nightmares at night, they never surrendered to victimhood. They never saw themselves as victims. They didn’t hate. And for me, the beauty of being Jewish, of the Jewish tradition— I’m a non-observant Jew, but I’m a very passionate Jew. The beauty is that we are a universal tribe. We are a tribe, but with a universal mission and universal commitment.

And what happened in recent decades that Israel went into the tribal, the particular, while diaspora Jews, non-orthodox, went into the universal. And again, I think we should meet again at this universal tribalism, at this beauty of a tribe being proud of our heritage, of who we are. We have rights like any others, and we should not be ashamed of ourselves. We should be proud of ourselves, but at the same time, having universal values at the core of our existence, whether in Israel or in the diaspora.

But do people in the other political movements in Israel— I understand that they think that outside Israel, we’re naive; that outside Israel, we don’t understand— and this is probably true— what it feels like to live inside this kind of danger.

But do they actually understand that if they demand that the price of supporting Israel is to give up on universalism, to give up on all these other commitments that are core to the values of at least most Western Jews— I mean, you can see what our politics are. Some people will choose Israel. I mean, there is some evidence in fact. Post 10/7— and I understand this myself— like, it has forced me to deeply reengage with Israel. There is some people who will choose Israel.

They will say, push comes to shove, the particularism is dominant in me. There are many who won’t. And you can say a lot about what is happening on campuses, and you can say a lot about what is happening at the protests.

I got an email the other day from a grad student at Columbia, and he said something to me that I’ve been hearing from a lot of students, which is that he doesn’t feel the protests are antisemitic, though they do attract anti-Semites. What he does feel is that he is being asked to choose between a kind of thoroughgoing anti-Zionism, right? A Zionism that believes Israel to be a stain that must be erased, and being a sort of social progressive on his campus in good standing. And I don’t know what choice he’ll make. I don’t know what choice a lot of people make. But do people in Israel— this is my question as a Jew living in America. Do people in Israel, the kind of people in leadership in Israel, the Benny Gantz’s of the world, do they understand that if that is the choice ultimately, that a lot of people are going to choose their politics over a country they don’t live in?

That they don’t have this memory of it as a refuge or a miracle— they have a memory of it as something that makes their day-to-day defense of who they are difficult. Because that seems to me to be what’s happening to a lot of college students right now. I don’t know what they will choose, but it appears to me to be a more significant threat to the relationship between the diaspora and Israel than people in Israel really seem to realize.

I said before, and I’ll repeat it for once, you have justified criticism of Israel because there is wrongdoing. You have understandable criticism of Israel because some things that are actually justified, but it’s difficult to understand when you don’t get the complexity. There is the vicious criticism of Israel, and there’s anti-Semitism.

And I’ll tell you where I see the line crossed. When people deny the Jewish people’s right for self-determination and when people deny the Jewish people’s right for self-defense, that’s when vicious criticism becomes anti-Semitism. That’s the new anti-Semitism. Just the way that my great, great, great grandfather was treated in his shtetl in Eastern Europe as the odd person, as the other, as the one who is not like the others, this is the way the Jewish people is treated now by many— not all, but was treated by many.

And I say no. When you come to judge Israel, you should criticize many things, but take a universal standard. You want to criticize the way we wage war? Compare it to the way America waged war in Iraq and Afghanistan and in other places.

Look, I want to say I agree with you. I agree with you. And I think this point is fair. But the wedge being driven, the thing I want to push you to answer to, or at least think about here, the wedge being driven between Jewish students in Israel is not should Israel exist, do the Jewish people have a right to self-determination, but if Israel exists like this, if it is this Israel, if it keeps going down this path, is it really consistent with who you believe yourself to be to support it?

That there could be a self-determining Israel that you could support, yes, absolutely, but for a lot of us, frankly, for me, that’s not been around for 15 years. It’s easy to rebut the anti-Semite, but that’s not the thing that is going to wedge these Jews, these young Jews from Israel. The thing that is going to wedge them from Israel is actual things happening in Israel, the things that Smotrich and Ben-Gvir, and, frankly, Netanyahu actually say.

And so I don’t know. I worry sometimes people are— they have managed to convince themselves that if they can argue down the anti-Semites, they have solved the problem. But I think they are distracting themselves from the problem with the anti-Semites.

I don’t want this situation where it seems that Israel is in conflict with liberal America. This is unbearable for me. This is unbearable. So I think that the extreme right in Israel that speaks in the names of nationalism is destroying the nation state of the Jewish people. I think that some in the extreme right who speak in the name of Zionism endanger the Zionist project. And some in the extreme right who speak in the name of Judaism are betraying half the Jewish people.

How can extreme right and extreme Orthodox people speak in the name of Judaism and actually send away half or more than half of the Jewish people? We live in a free world, thank God. Still, I cannot expect any Jewish youngster, any young man or young girl, to stick to their Judaism and stick to their commitment to a Jewish state when that state turns its back on their values altogether. That doesn’t fly. It doesn’t work.

And I say it’s not only non-democratic and non-liberal— it’s non-Jewish. Look, talking about the Jewish mission of this time, we need to build a non-extremist Jewish coalition in the diaspora and Israel to fight the dark forces. Look, we are having a fight for— it’s a battle for Israel’s soul. It’s a real battle for Israel’s soul. We have dark forces. They are not the majority. They took over the government. They are not the majority, but they are there.

And in order to fight them, we all have to be much better than we were. We have to be much more courageous and smart politically. But we need a kind of great Jewish coalition for that. So let’s take this grave danger that we are now all aware of and deal with it.

Again, in my admiration to the Herzls and the Weizmanns and the Ben-Gurions, is, when they thought a terrible threat, they rose to the challenge. And they changed reality in an amazing way. Chaim Weizmann, one of the Zionist leaders, used to say, you don’t have to be crazy to be a Zionist, but it helps. They were a bunch of dreamers. They dealt with an impossible reality.

Today, there is so much more that we have in Israel, and you have in the diaspora. We still have more resources, more power, more energy. But we have to address this danger. And it’s a double danger. It’s a danger from without, the attacks of the anti-Semites in America and Europe and elsewhere, and the dangers of the radicals in the Middle East, and the danger from within, of losing our soul. We must not lose our soul. We have to win the battle for Israel’s soul.

I think that’s the place to end. Always our final question— what are three books you would recommend to the audience?

One of the things we need today is not only victims, but heroes, democratic heroes. So the three books about heroes that I appreciate, one is about Rosalind Franklin. And Rosalind Franklin was a scientist, happened to be a Jewish British scientist. She contributed dramatically to the discovery of the D.N.A. code. And she was intellectually dispossessed. They took away her life’s work, and she died brokenhearted at the age of 38.

And what I see in her is scientific heroism, feminist heroism. She is also family. She was my mother’s second cousin. And then a book, a biography, actually brought her resurrection, in a way. And today, she is so appreciated. So I find an element of hope in that.

The second book that I really have been reading in the year before Oct. 7 when we had all this internal struggle in Israel was Taylor Branch’s “Parting the Waters” about Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights movement. The book is beautifully written and very comprehensive, but what Martin Luther King brings us is the best of what happened in the postwar era. I think that all oppressed people in the Middle East or elsewhere, I think it’s an inspiration to fight for their rights, but within the context of universal values and the peaceful struggle.

And my third one is Truman. Truman is so dear to my heart because first of all, he was like the unlikely hero, the surprising hero. The fact that you come from the people and you serve the people, and you don’t forget that you are one of them, I find endearing.

He enabled the world of Rosalind Franklin and the world of Martin Luther King because he created the postwar, World War II order, that gave humanity its best 70, 80 years. And I really, really hope we will find the Harry Truman of our time who will deal with the amazing challenges we will face and lead us to a hopeful future.

Ari Shavit, thank you very much.

This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Claire Gordon and Rollin Hu. Fact-checking by Kate Sinclair, Mary Marge Locker and Kristin Lin. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Efim Shapiro and Aman Sahota. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon.

The show’s production team also includes Annie Galvin. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. And special thanks to Sonia Herrero.

EZRA KLEIN: From New York Times Opinion, this is “The Ezra Klein Show.”

^ARCHIVED RECORDING 1^: Clashes and arrests at colleges across the country. Demonstrations are now coming to a head.

^ARCHIVED RECORDING 2^: Tonight, at University of Texas, Austin, police, one by one, detaining pro-Palestinian protesters.

^ARCHIVED RECORDING 3^: In Oregon at Portland State University—

^ARCHIVED RECORDING 4^: Atlanta’s Emory University—

^ARCHIVED RECORDING 5^: University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill—

^ARCHIVED RECORDING 6^: The Fordham University’s Manhattan campus—

^ARCHIVED RECORDING 7^: Texas State University and the University of Washington—

^ARCHIVED RECORDING 8^: And on Long Island, students and police clashed at a protest at Stony Brook University today. An encampment was set up—

EZRA KLEIN: I’ve been watching police go in and clear encampments in the place I went to college at UCLA.

^ARCHIVED RECORDING 9^: More than 100 people were arrested after the school asked police to remove student protesters.

EZRA KLEIN: And I found it hard myself to know what to think. One reason is that protests of this size are never one thing. On the one hand, you really do hear at them people just shouting antisemitic poison.

^ARCHIVED RECORDING 10^: Go back to Poland!

EZRA KLEIN: And on the other hand, you can go to one of them and attend a beautiful Passover seder inside the Columbian encampment.

^ARCHIVED RECORDING 11^: [SINGING IN HEBREW]

EZRA KLEIN: And trying to think about what to make of it, whether this is a thing to cover, whether it is a distraction from the thing to cover, and I think the place I came to is that I wanted to keep an eye on power here. Who has the power to change the reality in Israel and in Gaza right now? I think there’s an implicit default in people’s thinking to some deus ex machina, some outside player, maybe America or the U.N., who can come impose some new reality.

ARI SHAVIT: So good to be with you. Thank you.

EZRA KLEIN: So when you look at the campus protests sweeping America about Israel, what do you see?

ARI SHAVIT: I am deeply saddened. I’ll tell you what I don’t see. I don’t see Gandhi-like marches. I don’t see Martin Luther King kind of demonstrations. I don’t see an understanding of the profound tragedy that we are trapped in.

EZRA KLEIN: In a way, I’m glad you brought up the Vietnam marches because I think the thing you just said there is flatly wrong. The Vietnam marches, which were right in their moral direction, were full of people who questioned the fundamental legitimacy of America, full of people who were calling for victory over and the deaths of our soldiers, full of people who did not march with love, who were not Gandhi, who were not Martin Luther King Jr. Of course, they also had marches where there literally was Martin Luther King Jr.

ARI SHAVIT: I would ask them, and ask even you, to make a distinction between the Israeli government, between the Israeli prime minister, and between the Israeli people and the Israeli project. I am as angry at Prime Minister Netanyahu as you are or as the young demonstrators are because Mr. Netanyahu is endangering the lives of my children.

EZRA KLEIN: It was interesting to me that you kept coming back to the word “distortion” here, because the word you used in your book is “contradiction.” I was looking at my notes from “My Promised Land.” I have— and you should take this as a compliment— 188 highlights in that book. It’s a lot of highlights.

ARI SHAVIT: Thank you very much.

EZRA KLEIN: I want to read you one of them, and I want to hear how it sounds to you right now. You write, “Zionism skated on thin ice. On the one hand, it was a national liberation movement, but on the other, it was a colonialist enterprise. It intended to save the lives of one people by the dispossession of another. In its first 50 years, Zionism was aware of this complexity and acted accordingly.

ARI SHAVIT: It’s a wonderful question. When my great-grandparents came to Palestine, to Eretz Yisrael, they understood that we have to make it clear to ourselves and to others that we are not another colonial project, that we are not like others. And they understood that while they have a particular mission, saving the Jewish people from death, not just oppression, they have a universal mission.

EZRA KLEIN: There is a separation that gets made there in your answer, but here, constantly, when I heard Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer’s speech about Israel, he was making the separation between the government and the people.

ARI SHAVIT: So let’s make a distinction here, if I may, between previous years and Oct. 7 and afterwards. So if you look at the last few years or the Netanyahu decade, what you’ve seen is a terrible failure of the center left— and by the way, of the international community as well.

Now, it’s not just Jewish neurosis. It’s not just in our minds. I want to compare it to 9/11. What we experienced, number wise, it’s like 10 times or 15 times worse than 9/11. But it’s an ongoing 9/11. Imagine a 9/11 where, afterwards, Al Qaeda keeps 133— 250 at the beginning— hostages, a bit combined the Iran hostage crisis of ’79 with Al Qaeda of 2001.

EZRA KLEIN: Let me say first that I agree with everything you just said about both the psychology and the geography of this. I often try to say to people who see it as obvious that Israel’s response has gone way too far, which I do believe, by the way, it has gone way too far, I do say, look, imagine that 9/11 was conducted by an Al Qaeda that ruled Canada and what we would have done in response. I said this over and over and over again in the podcast I did after 10/7— there is no country that would permit that kind of incursion and massacre and not respond with overwhelming force.

ARI SHAVIT: So first of all, the short answer is, if you want the Israelis to change— and I think they should— or we should— the first thing is not to hold maps of the entire land between the river and the sea, all Palestinian, and basically say that I and my daughter and my wife and my two sons have to leave and go back to Poland because this is right now what is said in campuses.

EZRA KLEIN: I think it is too complex— I just want to say that I think this is a way too complex to say anybody is a villain. I’m saying that for many people, Israel came to appear the villain.

ARI SHAVIT: Oh, OK.

EZRA KLEIN: They were the stronger player.

ARI SHAVIT: Oh, well. The strong, we’ll get into the strong. So you know what? Let’s get to the stronger. First of all, talking of distortions, one of the great distortions here that it’s not only about Israel, is that you assume that the weak is just, and the strong is wrong.

EZRA KLEIN: There is much, I think, that people outside Israel do not see clearly about Israel. There are things people inside Israel, I think, do not see clearly about Israel, and one of them is strength. And so one of the things that I see again and again is this effort to, then, create a much larger set of enemies to justify a deep and very understandable— I come from Jewish history, too— a deep and understandable feeling of vulnerability, of weakness, of always being on the precipice.

ARI SHAVIT: So you’re preaching to the converted, but let me try to explain. First of all, let’s begin with President Biden because not enough Israelis express enough gratitude to the United States generally and specifically to President Biden.

EZRA KLEIN: There’s this language you hear that you’re using— I’m certain I’ve used it. It’s not a criticism of the Palestinian issue. But I want to make this more direct. Palestinians, right? I mean, we talk about a battle for Israel’s soul, but the battle happening right now is in Gaza. The question right now is whether or not Israel will enter Rafah.

ARI SHAVIT: So, again, whether it’s good or bad, I actually agree with you. Mr. Sinwar is an evil genius. And Israel walked right into his trap.

EZRA KLEIN: The head of Hamas.

ARI SHAVIT: Exactly. What’s the Sinwar genius? He put Israel in a kind of lose-lose situation. Mr. Sinwar is not only willing, but he wants to sacrifice the civilian population of Gaza in order to change the minds of the hearts of the civilian population of the United States of America and turn it against Israel. And he’s using the hostages in order to break the spirit of Israeli society.

EZRA KLEIN: Here, I’m going to ask you not to speak as you, but as a reporter and as somebody who knows the Israeli political and military establishments, because this is a place where putting it all on Netanyahu is simply not true. Benny Gantz, who is the likeliest next leader of Israel, he agrees that somehow, this war is going to achieve the goals. He agrees that they should go into Rafah.

ARI SHAVIT: So the good news is that quite a number of leading Israeli strategists, ex-generals, serious people have been saying in the last week or two what I just told you. They said going into Rafah would be to walk into a Sinwar trap. It’s a strategic trap, and we should not go into it. So on this issue, I’m not totally lonely. I think there are other people who think— look, don’t get me wrong. I think that eventually, Hamas has to be crushed.

EZRA KLEIN: But this gets to something that you said a few minutes ago, which is the world cannot understand what Israel will or will not do. It cannot influence what Israel will or will not do until the trauma and the fear and the grief of Israelis is taken seriously, and that if you want to be a protest movement, if you want to be a politician, if you want to be a stakeholder that is somehow influencing Israel, you have to start there. And I believe you are right, but that is also true for Palestinians.

ARI SHAVIT: Once again, I totally agree. And I really— sorry for using psychological terms or emotional terms—

EZRA KLEIN: No, I think we need those here.

ARI SHAVIT: I think the conflict, this conflict, is about history, identity, and soul and feelings and humiliation and anger and fear. This is about if you— and again, part of the failure of previous peace processes, that they had an economic dimension, strategic dimension— they never dealt with the deeper identity issues, and you have to deal with them.

EZRA KLEIN: You say if there was something like Salam Fayyad, who was a former prime minister of the Palestinian Authority, you would see a willing Israeli partner, but I had Salam Fayyad on this show a couple of months back, and people should go listen to it. And here was somebody who was doing everything you’re saying should be done, and frankly, at a better time in Israeli politics than this one.

ARI SHAVIT: So after expressing my admiration for Salam Fayyad, I don’t want to do polemics regarding him. I really admire him, and I really want him back. I really think that he and people like him are an essential part of the solution, but I’ll say two things. One, Salam Fayyad had terrible problems with corruption in the Palestinian Authority, including by Mr. Abbas, who’s leading it. They wanted him out.

EZRA KLEIN: One thing threaded through your book is an appreciation of tragedy and a willingness to cede your own story, Israel’s story, the story of the Palestinians is a story of tragedy. And part of tragedy is timing, that there are moments where an opening exists for something else, and they’re missed. And then there’s a moment on the other side, and it’s missed.

ARI SHAVIT: Look, we are all fearful now. The worst can happen. Ezra, remember my words. The worst may happen. What Oct. 7 and whatever happened since taught us is that it’s a make or break moment. If we will let things just deteriorated, horrible, horrible, horrible things might happen in the Middle East within a few years. So it’s a moral responsibility upon all of us to get to work and to create a different path and find a different path, so we can prevent catastrophe and actually bring back some hope.

EZRA KLEIN: There’s this 1948 essay by the philosopher Hannah Arendt called “To Save the Jewish Homeland.” And the thing she’s describing — I’ve been thinking about this essay, which people can and should read online. And there’s a lot in here. But the thing she’s discussing is that there had been a cacophony of views about Israel, about Zionism, in the Jewish community. And then came the war, the fighting, the founding. And that collapsed into unanimity.

ARI SHAVIT: I couldn’t agree more. So if I may, I’ll tell you, when I wrote “My Promised Land,” the chapter I loved writing most was the chapter about the 1950s because what Israel did in its first decade of existence is the most heroic and breathtaking enterprise one can imagine. 650,000 Jews absorbed one million refugees— no, one million immigrants, of which half were, or many of them were, Holocaust survivors and other refugees from the Arab world. It’s as if America today would absorb 500 million immigrants. I understand you have a slight problem with 7 million.

EZRA KLEIN: But do people in the other political movements in Israel— I understand that they think that outside Israel, we’re naive; that outside Israel, we don’t understand— and this is probably true— what it feels like to live inside this kind of danger.

I got an email the other day from a grad student at Columbia, and he said something to me that I’ve been hearing from a lot of students, which is that he doesn’t feel the protests are antisemitic, though they do attract anti-Semites. What he does feel is that he is being asked to choose between a kind of thoroughgoing anti-Zionism, right? A Zionism that believes Israel to be a stain that must be erased, and being a sort of social progressive on his campus in good standing.

And I don’t know what choice he’ll make. I don’t know what choice a lot of people make. But do people in Israel— this is my question as a Jew living in America. Do people in Israel, the kind of people in leadership in Israel, the Benny Gantz’s of the world, do they understand that if that is the choice ultimately, that a lot of people are going to choose their politics over a country they don’t live in?

ARI SHAVIT: I said before, and I’ll repeat it for once, you have justified criticism of Israel because there is wrongdoing. You have understandable criticism of Israel because some things that are actually justified, but it’s difficult to understand when you don’t get the complexity. There is the vicious criticism of Israel, and there’s anti-Semitism.

EZRA KLEIN: Look, I want to say I agree with you. I agree with you. And I think this point is fair. But the wedge being driven, the thing I want to push you to answer to, or at least think about here, the wedge being driven between Jewish students in Israel is not should Israel exist, do the Jewish people have a right to self-determination, but if Israel exists like this, if it is this Israel, if it keeps going down this path, is it really consistent with who you believe yourself to be to support it?

ARI SHAVIT: I don’t want this situation where it seems that Israel is in conflict with liberal America. This is unbearable for me. This is unbearable. So I think that the extreme right in Israel that speaks in the names of nationalism is destroying the nation state of the Jewish people. I think that some in the extreme right who speak in the name of Zionism endanger the Zionist project. And some in the extreme right who speak in the name of Judaism are betraying half the Jewish people.

EZRA KLEIN: I think that’s the place to end. Always our final question— what are three books you would recommend to the audience?

ARI SHAVIT: One of the things we need today is not only victims, but heroes, democratic heroes. So the three books about heroes that I appreciate, one is about Rosalind Franklin. And Rosalind Franklin was a scientist, happened to be a Jewish British scientist. She contributed dramatically to the discovery of the D.N.A. code. And she was intellectually dispossessed. They took away her life’s work, and she died brokenhearted at the age of 38.

EZRA KLEIN: Ari Shavit, thank you very much.

ARI SHAVIT: Thank you.

EZRA KLEIN: This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Claire Gordon and Rollin Hu. Fact-checking by Kate Sinclair, Mary Marge Locker and Kristin Lin. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Efim Shapiro and Aman Sahota. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Annie Galvin. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. And special thanks to Sonia Herrero.

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